|
REVIEW:
'Being Maasai is probably the most accomplished and certainly the most comprehensive volume produced thus far among the many recent historical studies of ethnicity in Africa. It is an unusually well-integrated and tightly organized collection, with consistently high quality in its many chapters; there is no stray or weak paper among them. It works, in effect, as a hybrid textbook...The study will likely become a benchmark for future studies of African ethnicities in general and East African pastoralists in particular. The book contains a formidable body of scholarship...' - Bill Bravman in Journal of African History 'This is an outstanding book. The editors have achieved a superb feat of structure and integration, so that the volume reads as a close-knit whole...Anyone working in, or on, East Africa should read this book, and anyone interested in interdisciplinary work will find here a model of interdisciplinary scholarship of the highest standard.' - Katherine Homewood in History '... at once the most important historical study of the Maasai yet published and a significant contribution to the growing volume of literature on ethnicity and identity in Africa. Spear and Waller have made admirable efforts to make this work accessible. The chapters based on archaeological and linguistic research are free of jargon and clearly reveal their methodology. Moreover, in the era of the African book famine, complicated publication arrangements ensure that this volume will be available not only to European and North American scholars and students but to readers in East Africa as well.' - Charles Ambler in American Historical Review '...the book is a triumphant unity. Prehistory, linguistics, history and social anthropology are used to complement each other and produce that rarity, a real interdisciplinary study written in accessible prose.' - Paul Baxter in the Bulletin of Tanzanian Affairs 'In all, the result is a thoughtful and highly stimulating collection of papers, representing the most complete statement on Maasai history yet published. There is not a weak essay here - a rare accomplishment in any multi-authored work - and several pieces are substantive summaries of previously scattered inaccessible literatures. The more obvious topics are all covered - language, landscape, territoriality, dress, agricultural production, cultural expansions and absorption, and the determination and fluidity of boundaries. Among the most surprising of the contributions is Donna Klumpp and Corinne Kratz's chapter on personal ornamentation among Maasai and Okiek. Dress is, of course, one of the more obvious ways in which statements can be made about identity, and the intricate way in which beading is used as ornamentation in all Maa-speaking communities has long been recognized as one of the popular cultural markers of "Being Maasai".' - David Anderson in African Affairs
|
