David Howe Turner is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow at Trinity College and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study.
At Toronto, his main area of focus is comparative religion and the role of music in the indigenous societies of Australia, North America, Africa, and India.
While conducting his Ph.D at the University of Western Australia, Turner began his fieldwork with the people of Groote Eylandt, in order to better understand Aboriginal social organization and symbolism.
[2] The indigenous Australians, far from being a primitive people, have a highly sophisticated society and worldview which, in Turner's view, is in many ways more advanced than those of modern Western civilization.
In Turner's view, rather than simply failing to develop modern technologies, economics, and ways of living, at some point in their history (upwards of 130,000 years), the Aborigines made a conscious decision to turn toward more socially and spiritually meaningful pursuits.