include ,bibliography ,index

Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-316) and index.

PART I: INTRODUCTION / Thomas Spear -- PART II: BECOMING MAASAI : Introduction -- Dialects, sectiolects, or simply lects? The Maa language in time perspective / Gabriele Sommer & Rainer Vossen -- Becoming Maasailand / J.E.G. Sutton -- Maasai expansion and the new East African pastoralism / John G. Galaty -- Aspects of 'Becoming Turkana' : interactions and assimilation between Maa- and Ateker-speakers / John Lamphear -- Defeat and dispersal: the Laikipiak and their neighbors at the end of the Nineteenth Century / Neal Sobania -- Being 'Maasai' , but not 'People of Cattle': Arusha agricultural Maasai in the Nineteenth Century / Thomas Spear -- PART III: BEING MAASAI: Introduction -- Becoming Maasai, being in time / Paul Spencer -- The world of Telelia: reflections of a Maasai women in Matapato / Telelia Chieni & Paul Spencer -- 'The eye that wants a person, where can it not see?' : inclusion, exclusion, and boundary shifters in Maasai identity / John Galaty -- Aesthetics, expertise, and ethnicity: Okiek and Maasai perspectives on personal ornament / Donna Klumpp & Corinne Kratz -- PART IV: CONTESTATIONS AND REDEFINITIONS: Introduction -- Acceptees and aliens: Kikuyu settlement in Maasailand / Richard Waller -- Land as ours, land as mine: economic, political and ecological marginalization in Kajiado District / David J. Campbell -- Maa-speakers of the Northern Desert: recent developments in Ariaal and Rendille identity / Elliot Fratkin -- PART V: CONCLUSIONS / Richard Waller.

"Everyone 'knows' the Maasai as proud pastoralists who once dominated the Rift Valley from northern Kenya to central Tanzania." "But many people who identify themselves as Maasai, or who speak Maa, are not pastoralist at all, but farmers and hunters. Over time many different people have 'become' something else. And what it means to be Maasai has changed radically over the past several centuries and is still changing today." "This collection by historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists examines how Maasai identity has been created, evoked, contested, and transformed from the time of their earliest settlement in Kenya to the present, as well as raising questions about the nature of ethnicity generally."--BOOK JACKET.