In the late 1950s, anthropologist Colin Turnbull spent some time with the BaMbuti pygmies of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He published his observations in the book, The Forest People, which I haven’t read. However, I have repeatedly come across one of his anecdotes from the trip that I have some doubts about.
In summary, a 22 year old Mbuti man named Kenge accompanied Turnbull on a drive to the mountains. Kenge had supposedly never left the Ituri forest before. On seeing some buffalo in the distance, he mistook them for insects. As the car approached and their apparent size increased, Kenge became confused as to how they transformed into buffalo. He made the same mistake with a boat at some distance on a lake, thinking it was a small piece of wood.
Turnbull’s explanation was that, having spent his life in the forest, Kenge had not been exposed to large vistas and so had never acquired the ability to adjust his percpetion of size for distant objects. This explanation seems to be accepted without question; I’ve read it in a psychology textbook and, I think, in one of Oliver Sacks’ books.
I’m skeptical for two reasons. First, I doubt the BaMbuti could be so visually deprived. Unless the Ituri forest is utterly flat, distant views would be almost impossible to avoid. Second, there doesn’t appear to be any other corroborating cases, either in the Mbuti or elsewhere.
I get the impression that Turnbull was not the most thorough researcher. Perhaps Kenge was an isolated case rather than this being a common feature of the Mbuti.
Turnbull’s observations are what they are, and it’s gonna be hard to disprove the word of these two people, but they do sound preposterous.
Even the deepest Ituri is not solid, wall to wall trees. There are streams and rivers, which people of course use, and that gives you the opportunity to see things hundreds of yards away, since you just have to look up- or downstream to see trees and things that are quite far away with an unobstructed view.
I forgot to add this link to his article in the American Journal of Psychology. He does mention that the Mbuti might see people up to a quarter of a mile away, for example on a road, but claims this is rare.
I’ve been to Ituri (and been out net hunting with Mbuti). Kenge was still living in Epulu, the town I stayed in, but I missed meeting him.
Within the forest you do get some views, but they are limited. The terrain in that vicinity is quite flat. The rivers and streams don’t run very straight, and fields are not extensive. There may be views of a few hundred yards, but not views that extend for miles. Kenge himself was young at the time and might not have had much experience in making size comparisons at a considerable distance.
This was discussed previously in this thread. In that thread I said:
[QUOTE=Colibri]
That’s not quite how Turnbull tells the story, which is on pages 250-251 of my edition of The Forest People. He does describe taking Kenge, a young Mbuti pygmy who had worked with him, on a trip by car outside the forest. Kenge initially thought (according to Turnbull) that the buffalo he saw at a great distance across the grasslands were insects, and when Turnbull explained they were buffalo he thought they might be tiny buffalo. Turnbull thought that Kenge’s confusion was due to the fact that the pygmies never have to make size comparisons at such a great distance, and also because in the grassland Kenge had no other objects to compare them with. (Turnbull speculates that as they approached Kenge might be thinking that the insects were turning into buffalo, or the tiny buffalo were growing; but all Kenge himself said was that he didn’t think they were real buffalo.)
[/QUOTE]
Thanks Colibri. I should have searched the boards before I posted.
From your description of Ituri it sounds like it really is as visually prohibitive as Turnbull described. However, there is still only a single observer of a single subject and a highly speculative cause and effect.
Do you think there’s anything to Turnbull’s account? Did you have any evidence of this phenomenon while you were in Ituri?
I’m bothered that no-one has ever returned to see if it’s widespread in the Mbuti.
I have no idea about this particular case, but I can attest that going from one type of environment to another can indeed produce fairly extreme mismatches between perceptions and reality. Colorado history has several examples of newcomers wildly misjudging distances.
I think it’s quite plausible that a person given unusual (or insufficient) visual cues could make such a mistake. I understand, for example, that people flying over (or parachuting into) water have been known to grossly misjudge their own height above its surface.
Another anecdote (can’t find a reference to it online) I have heard involves an explorer in the arctic thinking he was being approached by a polar bear, but it turned out to be an arctic hare - the relatively featureless, flat terrain had distorted his perception of distance.
Many optical illusions work along similar lines - I see no reason why there wouldn’t be real-world situations that can trick our perception in the same way.
A similar example from modern American (and various other countries) society would be people who made wild over- or underestimates of the distance of a UFO.
Especially when the object they saw was the Moon, or Jupiter - I mean, if something of the size of either of those was hovering over your garden shed, your neighbours would probably have noticed it too.
According to some anthropologists, the susceptibility of an individual to a particular optical illusion (say, the Mueller-Lyer illusion) can be influenced by the culture in which the individual was raised. More right angles in a built environment, versus fewer in a wild environment, correlates with distortion of perceived lengths upon exposure to the appropriate cues. (from Pacific Standard Magazine, 1/3 of the way down the page)
I can certainly believe that experience plays a factor in judging size and distance, and perspective as an artistic concept is something that is taught and historically appears to be a developed technology.
Lots of experience hiking/skiing in glacial terrain and mountains has taught me that size and distance judgement can be very tricky and improve with experience. I’ve been completely out of the ballpark misjudging size of Hoodoos in the DinosaurParkbadlands, if scale cues are unavailable or unfamiliar the brain can make some ridiculous mistakes.
A lot of early medieval art demonstrates poor or non-existent consept of perspective. It can be hard to separate technique from purposes or religious symbolism, but early examples of secular topics also demonstrate this ignorance of perspective.
I remember the one time I did a (solo) parachute jump. As I aproached the ground, looking down, I realized I had no clue how high I was. (Fortunately, I had a radio so the instructor could tell me when to flare). I could make out individual blades of grass and dandelions, but looking straight down with no other cues, I could be 50 feet up, or 20, or 5. “Comparison objects” for visual cues is more necessary than we think.
Also, when I got my first pair fo glasses at age 30, I suddenly had infirmation overload; I realized I had been judging distances, especially in low-light indoor situations like malls, by how blurry things were. Suddenly everything was sharp, which my brain tried to tell me meant it was 10 feet away or less. It took a while to adapt.
So possibly the story is true, and pygmies in the forst never got to see large objects more than a few hundred feet away. Or maybe Bambuti was nearsighted and needed glasses and anything small-looking object more than 20 feet away looked like a blur - i.e. insect.
My Swahili is pretty deficient, as is the English and French of most Mbuti, so I wasn’t able to talk to them directly. It would not surprise me if a young pygmy like Kenge had trouble in evaluating the size of very distant objects (miles away, rather than a few hundred yards), especially in grassland or out on a lake where there were no familiar objects nearby to compare with. Whether this would be a general phenomenon among Mbuti I couldn’t say, but I would think with experience they would quickly learn to evaluate sizes of distant objects.
Even among people living in modern civilization, it can be very difficult to tell the size of a distant ship at sea or an unfamiliar aircraft. I don’t think Turnbull’s story is as preposterous as it might sound without the context.
This is also just a variation among people. I myself have a terrible time guessing even short distances. This came up when I was planning my move last week. I was on the phone with the estimater, and he asked how far it was from the parking spot to the door (how long is the “carry?”) I was standing on the walkway, but I couldn’t begin to tell him. Is it 50 feet? 90? 150? I really don’t know.
This is especially strange because I ran track in high school. One would think I could size up 50 or 100 yard lengths pretty easily, having run them so many times. Nope. So it’s not lack of experience with distance or measurement.
As for Kenge, I wonder if he might have had a vision problem? If he were, say particularly near-sighted in one eye, he might naturally have had very poor depth perception at long distances, as he’d only be perceiving them with one eye.
another example fwiw: When I got my first pair of glasses I had trouble walking in them for a few days. My mind had to adjust (or learn to stop adjusting) because suddenly both eyes were seeing in the same way.
So yeah, I’m having no problem believing the anecdote. It’s quite natural for uneducated people to invent a super-natural explanation for new perceptions. Insects transforming to buffalo, or “not real” buffalo would be a reasonable assumption from his standpoint.
Yes, I was initially incredulous of the anecdote but on reflection it’s quite plausible (and doesn’t indicate that Kenge didn’t have an intuitive idea of depth perception).
The difference in focusing on something “really far away” versus “even further away than that” is difficult to notice so we rely on a lot of contextual familiarity and other nearby distance cues.
Using the term insects to me seems odd but that could easily be a bad translation, or he thought they looked like giant insects or whatever.
Very young children also have perception inconsistencies.
Take a child from Kindergarten, show him to beakers with exactly one ounce of water each, and pour one beaker into a petri dish and the other into a test tube.
The child will insist there is more water in the test tube, because its higher.
I would think a member of an insular tribe separated from modern civilization would lack what we would call logical thinking…that physical reality is independent from what we perceive or choose to believe.
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