Colin Turnbull, the Molimo and What Fieldwork Could and Could Not Show

Much of what is documented about Mbuti forest religion reaches wider readership through the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who lived among Mbuti communities in the Ituri in the 1950s and published his account as The Forest People in 1961. Turnbull's description of the molimo, the nighttime ceremony in which a long trumpet is sounded to wake the sleeping forest when death or serious misfortune has struck a camp, became the standard reference most later accounts of Mbuti religion draw from, both because of its detail and because few other ethnographers had lived as long inside a single Mbuti community.

That standing has not gone unquestioned. Later anthropologists revisiting the Ituri noted that Turnbull's Mbuti appear more isolated from their Bantu and Sudanic farming neighbors than fieldwork by others suggests they actually were, and that the exchange relationship between forest and village, trading meat and honey for cultivated food and sometimes sharing in each other's ritual life, ran deeper than Turnbull's forest centered narrative emphasized. The molimo itself is not disputed, but how self contained the religious world it belongs to actually is remains an open question in the scholarship that followed his work.