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Morality and the Ik

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Christine Battersby
Christine Battersby
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Extract

Colin Turnbull's book The Mountain People has aroused much non-academic as well as much academic interest. The success of The Ik, Peter Brook's recent stage adaptation of the book, shows how widespread this interest is. The interest centres on Turnbull's anthropological descriptions of his life with the Ik people. The Ik society is one in which the weak, the old and the children are left to fend for themselves and die. Help proffered to the needy is frowned upon. Food is snatched from the mouths of the old, medicine stolen from the sick, and children left to feed and house themselves at about the age of three. Sexual codes no longer exist, cruelty is thought amusing, and the weak and dying are exploited. Turnbull believes that he has discovered a people without morality; a society that previously possessed a moral code, but which lost it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 204 , April 1978 , pp. 201 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1978

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References

1 The following abbreviations are used in this paper: M.P.: Turnbull, Colin, The Mountain People (London: Picador, Pan Books, 1974)Google Scholar; W.W.: The Definition of Morality, Wallace, G. and Walker, A. D. M. (eds) (London: Methuen, 1970)Google Scholar. This volume contains both the articles by Neil Cooper that I refer to: ‘Two Concepts of Morality’ and ‘Morality and Importance’.