Its title is The Mountain People and it tells of Trumbull's time with the Ik, a formerly nomadic tribe of Africans who live on the border of Uganda and Tanzania.

The Ik once were hunter-gatherers, but encroaching "civilization" so reduced their movement that they were forced into stationary crude villages built of tree and thorn bush branches. They were also so devastated by what had happened to them that they had broken down into tiny groups. Hardly any tribal organization remained. They fenced off the approaches to their huts, kept to themselves, discouraged visits and competed with one another for the meager food available.

When someone got sick, no one seemed to care. When someone died there was little notice of the person's death. It just happened.

Trumbull was deeply affected by the Ik and their degeneration. Most anyone would be, but his despair came about because he had preceded his visit to the Ik with a stay with pygmies in the rain forest. He found them to be just the opposite--friendly, communal, helpful to one another, willing to share.

They make up the text of his other well known book, The Forest People.

Trumbull became so discouraged by his experience with the Ik that he had to leave Africa. He saw in the collapse of the Iks' life a warning for other societies, including our own.

I was reminded of him and the Ik when I saw the looters wading through the streets of New Orleans, their arms loaded with whatever they could carry from abandoned stores. They seemed to be taking it from somewhere to nowhere. Their homes were submerged in fetid water; the hurricane had destroyed all power, all telephones, all water supplies, pretty much all of what they had known before.

Instead most of New Orleans had descended into the same kind of chaos as that which afflicted the Ik. With almost all possessions gone, without food, clean water, sewage, electricity or shelter, the façade of civilization we have believed to be so permanent suddenly disappeared.

Irrational looting followed.

Looting of this kind often seems a consequence of great natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. As order disappears so does the respect for property, for sharing, for cooperation. Instead sheer survival takes its place and the refugees seem to need to acquire something, anything, to replace what were once the equipment of normal life.

It's not so much that they need what they are taking as they want what they no longer have.

It's frightening to watch because one wonders what one might do under the same circumstances.

Even though we have been seeing it daily on television, it's still hard to realize what's happening. In a single day and night all that is familiar and reassuring has disappeared. Everything has disappeared. The familiar possessions of the day before have been swept away by wind and water.

It's a nightmare of being stripped of almost everything. One reaches out for something, anything that will bring back what's been lost.

Thus it was for the Ik and so it will be for those who were dispossessed of everything except the clothes on their backs.

Unfortunately for New Orleans, no comparable kind of disaster has so devastated an American city since 1906 when the San Francisco earthquake and fire leveled most of the city by the Bay.

But it has happened elsewhere in the world, in the recent tsunami, in Berlin at the end of World War II, on Kauai, Hawaii, after Hurricane Iniki.

We don't like chaos. We need social order. No one really likes looting. My guess is even the looters aren't very fond of it and don't understand why they're doing it.

But they are, and both they and we have to face that fact.

That, of course, doesn't mean looting can or should continue. Somehow order has to return.

But however long or short the time may be until that happens, most of us will retain the images of New Orleans for as long as we live. We will wonder how we would behave under similar circumstances and whether Turnbull is right in believing that the collapse of a society ends in the dismal thorn huts of the Ik.

How thick is the veneer under which we live and what would it take to have it blown away?