Colin Turnbull (1924-94) was a British-born anthropologist specialising in the people of Africa and their music. With the publication of The Forest People, a scientifically rigorous but nonetheless openly admiring portrait of a people who live in apparent harmony with their natural environment, he became one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and '70s. A decade later, he published a controversial companion study, The Mountain People, which portrayed a society displaced from its land who had become ruthless and selfish. In his later years, he did much work on 'death row' in the USA and argued strongly against capital punishment. He was ordained in India as a full Buddhist monk by the Dalai Lama in 1992.
