Perception and the BaMbuti

Perception is the organization, identification and interpretention of sensory information in order to understand the environment. Factors that are effecting our perception of things include attention, expectations and prior knowledge. It is obvious that you have to pay attention to something in order to get a picture of what it is and to understand it, but what kind of expectations we have is also important. So is our prior knowledge. When we see or hear something new we automatically try to identify it as something we already know, and if we don't know it we try to categorize it with something similar that we do know. But if we have no prior experience with anything like it, we might not understand it at all at first.

Colin Turnbull was a British anthropologist who during the late 1950s and early 1960s, spent a lot of time in the Ituri Forest in Congo, Africa studying the BaMbuti Pygmies. While he stayed there he lived with a 22 year old native called Kenge. Kenge had always lived in the dense forest so when he went with Colin to towards the mountains and they came across a clearing on the top of a little hill, Kenge saw a view over a bigger area for the first time. When Kenge saw the distant mountains he could not decide if they were hills or clouds. So Colin offered to drive there so that Kenge could get a closer look at them. When they got to the mountains and Kenge saw the snow covered tops he couldn't understand what it was. To Colin it was obvious because he had seen and touched snow before so he could get a clear picture what exactly was up there, but for Kenge this was all new. Then on the drive back they saw a herd of buffalo far away and Kenge asked what kind of insects they were. Colin tried to explain that they were much bigger but because they were far away they looked small. But for Kenge that was impossible to grasp because he had never seen anything from far away and could not understand why anything would look smaller than it actually was. So they drove closer to the buffalo and they got bigger just as Colin had said. Kenge still didn't understand and he thought that it was some kind of magic going on.

These are both very good examples because they show the importance that prior knowledge has to someones perception. If two people have different prior knowledge, then there perceptions will be different even if they are looking at the exact same thing. Your'e expectations are also important because since Kenge didn't expect the buffalo to become bigger he couldn't accept it at once and explain it as magic, something that he already knew about. And by paying attention he learned new things that he would now remember for the rest of his life.