Three years ago, i thought that by working with one of the Kuliak/Robic languages of northeastern Karamoja, i was sailing into uncharted waters. At the very least i hoped the waters were uncharted, as i wasn’t entirely confident in my cartography, and i feared lest an older account demonstrate my analysis to be clearly wrong or inadequate or overly ambitious or any other brand of incompetent.
i was blissfully ignorant, then, of such important works as Eithne Carlin’s 1993 grammar ‘The So Language’, with which most of my work would prove to be redundant. Perhaps even more startling, though, i was even ignorant of The Mountain People, a 1973 ethnography of the Ik (a closely related cultural/linguistic group) by Colin Turnbull that prompted quite the fracas within the field of anthropology.
Turnbull’s account was devastating. The first words in the 1987 edition that i read were a dedication: ‘to the Ik, whom I learned not to hate.’
If Turnbull ever learned not to hate the Ik, it was some 10 years after he lived among them, through Les Iks, a theatrical adaptation of The Mountain People by Peter Brook. The book itself is an account of the emotional torments accompanying Turnbull’s unrequited quest for goodness, truth, and beauty among the Ik.
‘If Dr. Colin ever comes back, we’ll bury him alive,’ an Ik teacher has been quoted as saying.
i read Roy Richard Grinker’s biography of Turnbull this week (over a month ago by now), and clearly Turnbull’s life was a mess when he was with the Ik in the mid-1960s (really, it was a mess from late 1950s onward). In any case, though, there’s no way to see the things that he saw, to experience the things that he experienced, and not be traumatized. The conflict between the response of many members of the anthropological community and the type of thing that Turnbull experienced can be seen in Grinker’s words:
‘The Mountain People stunned the anthropological community. The book and Colin’s personal letters described the Ik in terms that went further than most ethnographers would ever go. By the end of his fieldwork, when the famine was lessening due to a decent crop, he would refer to the Ik as “sub-humans,” a statement almost unthinkable in the anthropological profession, where a primary rule, usually called cultural relativism, is to refrain from judging people on the basis of one’s own standards or norms.’ (174)
‘He [Turnbull] watched with horror as Ik men and women attacked each other, even within their own families, to induce vomiting and then eat the vomit.’ (4)
Or in Turnbull’s words:
‘Much to my regret, it is impossible to dislike the Ik because they have no concept of affection anyway. They are merely conscious, as far as I can see, of their stomachs, and of the need to fill them.
‘Another twist to the horror story is the fact that I can find no concept of goodness as expressed in action. Goodness only means a full stomach. Someone who gives food without getting as much or more in return is, I am told, merely stupid. I have been told not to give a dying man water, in front of his face, because he was so thirsty he would “drink like an elephant then there will be none for us, we’ll have to go and get more”…laughter is rarely heard, unless someone falls over or hurts themselves.’ (174, quoted from Turnbull 1973)
Turnbull describes the end of the life of Adupa, the only Ik in whom he saw goodness, truth or beauty. Adupa was in some way mentally handicapped. Due to her ‘handicap’, she seemed to rejoice in life and pleasant things. ‘She was a kind person because of her disability, almost always playful and smiling. But it was because she was kind that she was hungry. When she found food, she would look at it in her hand with delight before eating it, but other children caught on fast and attacked her for the food. “…As she raised her hand to her mouth, they set on her with cries of excitement, fun and laughter, beat her savagely over the head and left her. But that is not how she died. I took to feeding her, which is probably the cruelest thing I could have done, a gross selfishness on my part to try and salve and save, indeed, my own rapidly disappearing conscience. I had to protect her, physically, as I fed her. But the others would beat her anyway.”’
Adupa’s parents wouldn’t let her live with them. She cried incessantly for them to let her into the compound, until one day they let her in. Upon letting her in, they left, and sealed the compound door such that Adupa would never be able to leave, allowing her to starve to death inside. A week later, they returned to dispose of her body.
The anthropological response to Turnbull’s account raises a lot of criticisms—he often imputes thoughts to people that he can only have assumed that they had, he never spoke the language well, so his claims about interactions that never took place are perhaps unfounded, he was sufficiently dismayed by the traumatic events that he failed to even try to document the events that were indicative of culture (an economy involving reciprocal labor persisted at least seasonally, and a cave-centered religion still had some practitioners, for instance), and he probably didn’t represent the Ik as fairly as he could have. But when i read The Mountain People and In the Arms of Africa (the biography), i could almost always understand how he felt, and how he could write the things that he wrote.
Turnbull’s story is awful and complex and subjective.
This summer, though, i met the Ik.
i thought that they were probably about the most well-adjusted people i had contact with in Karamoja (although i certainly did not get to know them well). Karenga, where i spent most of my time, was significantly more adjusted to modernity than was Ik country, for what that’s worth. And, retrospectively, i’m not convinced that Ik country was characterized by any less a profound dependency on outside aid.
But one of Turnbull’s most profound condemnations of Ik culture was that the unit ‘family’ had no meaning in it. And i at least took this picture. It doesn’t look so incredibly different from a picture that i took of my own family this weekend.
