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... -