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A few months ago, there was a discussion about the Ik, in which an anthropologist wrote how they lived on the edge of starvation, abandoned all morality and social structure and took the "every man for himself" mentality to the extreme.

Another perspective is found on http://home1.gte.net/hoffmanr/

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')overty-stricken "dogs", or the head of a great migration from ancient Egypt, land of the Pharaohs? Skillful cultivators from time immemorial, or vagabond hunter-gatherers? Wanton adulterers and wife-beaters, or a society with exemplary marriages, remaining faithful for life? Heartless survivalists who turn children out to fend for themselves at three years of age and routinely abandon the elderly to starve, or orderly, cooperative people who treat elders with respect and make sure that they are fed before younger people? Incorrigible thieves, or honest farmers and faithful taxpayers? Wheeling-dealing manipulators of neighboring tribes, or plundered victims in nearly every dispute between those same tribes? A collection of people devoid of any kind of social behavior and common ritual, or a rich culture with a variety of cultural beliefs and practices?



It all depends on whom you listen to and what you set out to find. When the late Colin M. Turnbull ventured among the Ik (pronounced "EEK") people of northeastern Uganda in the mid-1960s, he frankly admitted that "if I brought any attitudes with me, enthusiasm was not one of them" (Turnbull 1972:16). Regarding the Ik as a "last-ditch stand not to lose an opportunity to get into the field" (Turnbull 1972:15-16), the British-born anthropologist set out expecting the worst and decided he had found exactly that, reporting it all in 1972 in what would become a best-seller even outside his field, The Mountain People. Since that time, the book has gone through a number of printings and has been used as collateral reading in numerous anthropology courses. Unfortunately, it has also been taken at face value by every reference work I have read which has any entry on the Ik (admittedly there are few), for all of them repeat in one manner or another the observations which Turnbull first made in The Mountain People. Consequently, it seems as though Turnbull and his viewpoint have become as firmly associated with the Ik as has Margaret Mead (whose praise of the book was quoted on the cover of the 1987 Touchstone edition) with the Samoans. I have even found Ugandans who live far from the Ik and have never themselves met a member of this culture to be less than tolerant of them and their supposedly tarnished reputation; for instance, a security guard at Entebbe International Airport, upon learning that I was doing research among the Ik, smirked and replied, "Oh, so you went to visit the naked savages, eh?"