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go and see some of the primitive people he wrote azout so eloquently, Sir James replied, ’Heaven forbid!’ And yet Lévi-Strauss might have been writing of Turnbull when he refers to the sort of anthropologist of the younger generation who disdains study of source materials before going into the field ’in order not to spoil the wonderful intuition that will enable him to grasp eternal truths on on the nature and function of social institution through an abstract dialogue with his little trige ...’ I believe that many anthropologists today no longer think it necessary to go into the field at all. The data has been collected; the task now is to interpret it. Perhaps that view is encouraged by the fact that there are now more anthropologists than there are primitive societies to be studied. As about 80,000 people a day are dying of hunger, the fact that a few hundred Ik have gone the same way seems to me unimportant. But the Ik are special for one reason : they present an example of a hunting and gathering society that has been destroyed by our ’civilised’ passion for frontiers, passports, regulations and bureaucracy. Marshall Sahlins, professor of anthropology at Chicago University, has written in his book Stone Age Economics of the affluence yes, affluence, of hunting-gathering societies if they are left to themselves. ’Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty with a low standard of living ... A good case can be made that hunters and gather es work less that we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.’ A good example is the Australian bushmen studied by Lee. He found their work week was about 15 hours, or an average of 2 hours 9 minutes per day. This yielded them a daily food intake of 2,140 calories. ’The conclusion can be drawn that the Bushmen do not lead s substandard existence on the edge of starvation as has been commonly supposed. ’ Hunt er -gather es are among the best of conservationists. Among the Ik, before they were banished from their traditional territory, over-hunting was considered one of the major crimes, a sin against divine command. The extraordinary case of the Ik can be explained by anthropological theory . . . But that, I must admit, will not be of much comfort to them. Popper has observed that many of our so-called scientific theories are merely new myths. Let me give you an example of a piece of what would now be called old-fahioned anthropology. In 1926 Matiegka, a Czech, measured the skulls of 17th century Christians and Jews in a Prague cemetery. He found, among other things, that there was no significant difference in the sizes of the nasal apertures. Therefore we know that Jews, at least in the 17th century in the city of Prague, did not have bigger noses than Christians. More recent work by Wagenseil, Weissenberg, Dornfeldt, Field, Cabot-Briggs and Fishberg—who all spent a great deal of time measuring the noses of Jews

has confirmed that the Jewish nose is a myth. That was scientific anthropology it didn’t make a myth, it destroyed one. Did Turnbull measure the Ik? Did he weight them? Did he make comparisons between the skeletal dimensions or dentition of the living and the dead? Did he collect samples of their faeces and bring them back for analysis? Did he give the Ik the simplest psychological tests of the kind a biologist would apply to a frog or a mouse before he began to make even tentative deductions about their social arrangements? Don’t you think that certain other investigators, who measured nothing, were, in their day, rather good anthropologists : Flaubert, Dostoievsky, Zola, Dickens, Shakespeare, Gorky, Gogol, Maupassant ... ? By what I suppose you would call imagination and intuition? Plus observation, yes. I have here a book which includes a contribution by a man pretty strong on imagination and intuition. It is called Tradition and Change in African Tribal Life. World Publications, 1963. It was designed, I believe, for use in American schools, and includes a chapter called ’The Ik: Mountain Farmers. ’ It was written by Colin Turnbull some years before his best-seller; and his impressions then of the Ik were somewhat different. He writes, for example: ’The Ik are a great family people ...’ ’People help each other and work together, not bacause help is needed, but because they like to ...’ Their planting time in the fields is ’one of the gayest, happiest times of the year, with people singing and laughing, and stopping work in their own fields only to wander around and see if they can help anyone else.’ They are a people full of laughter and enthusiasm .., Well, you’ve tried to excuse Turnbull for not being scientific; but his imagination and intuition have led him into some pretty odd contradictions. Aren’t you forgetting that the Ik deliberately deceived Turnbull, and enjoyed doing it? Anthropologists, he says, have their own ways of worming out the truth. In those early days his methods failed him. He drew the wrong deductions from what he observed. He defends himself in an important footnote. ’My first account reads significantly differently from the conclusions I came to later, and makes me question the validity of much filed work, including my own. Admittedly, it was a purely descriptive account and an attempt to reconstruct the life of the Ik in an average year ; but had I not arrived when I did, had I arrived when the famine had truly set in, I might well never have known that this side of the Ik, which I described in that book, existed. I believe both accounts to be accurate.’ Accurate, if we accept that in the first few months the Ik made a total fool of him. Nothing Turnbull saw among the Ik will surprise anyone who knows what went on in concentration camps. I refer to The American Journal of Sociology for 1946-47. Bloch records an interview he had just after the liberation with a former concentration camp inmate. She was a’cultured and aristocratic British woman’, made French by marriage,