Colin Turnbull - Joseph Towles

Joseph Towles

Joseph Allen Towles was born in Senora, Virginia on August 17, 1937. In 1957 he moved to New York City to pursue a career as an actor and writer. He met Turnbull in 1959 and they exchanged marriage vows the following year.

Towles' initiation into anthropology occurred as a volunteer in the Anthropology Department at the American Museum of Natural History with Turnbull. From 1965 to 1967, he assisted with the creation of the "Man in Africa Hall", a permanent exhibit later called the "Hall of African Peoples." He also researched and constructed the "Slavery in the New World" subsection of the museum. In 1963, he entered Pace College to study history and anthropology, graduating in 1968. He received his Ph.D. from Makerere University in 1979.

From 1965 to 1967, Turnbull and Towles conducted fieldwork among the Ik of Northern Uganda in Africa. In the Congo in 1970, they conducted fieldwork on the Nkumbi circumcision initiation ritual for boys and the Asa myth of origin among the Mbo of the Ituri forest.

In 1979, they traveled the world studying the concept of tourism as pilgrimage. Towles next turned to biblical research and writing plays and novels. He reacted angrily to Turnbull's semi-autobiographical work The Human Cycle (1983), which omitted all references to their relationship. Towles' health declined slowly from that time. He died from complications of AIDS in 1988.

Turnbull arranged for Towles' research to be published posthumously. It appeared in 1993 as Nkumbi initiation ritual and structure among the Mbo of Zaïre and as Asa: Myth of Origin of the Blood Brotherhood Among the Mbo of the Ituri Forest, both in Annales of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium), vol. 137.