Precolonial African history came into its own with the acceptance of a methodology for the analysis of oral tradition as historical evidence in the 1970s and 1980s. Although these early historians may have overreached, they nevertheless established a field based on African sources and agency that has since addressed its early naiveté. However, the difficulties inherent to working with oral tradition have attracted few scholars in recent years. Thus it was a pleasure to read a book that focused on the performance and meaning of an oral tradition about the origins of pastoralist Turkana from a wandering Jie woman, Nayeche, who followed the Gray Bull Engiro on the dry Uganda-Kenya borderlands. Mustafa Mirzeler's ‘anthropology of storytelling’ reiterates the lesson that oral tradition is performed in new ways with new meaning in each new historical context, creating a dialogic relationship with the past. Though this is not a new insight, it becomes an indiscriminate dismissal of the historical use of oral tradition.

Mirzeler lived in Karamoja for two years and learned the language well enough to perform the stories himself, returning frequently over the next seventeen years. Perhaps most impressively he apprenticed with Lodoch, a master Jie storyteller, and sought out storytellers' performances within their cultural context. He follows the story of Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro as a ‘key cultural event’ or ‘master narrative’. His accounts of performance and audience interaction, focusing on the poetics of ‘pastness’ and his evocation of place and people are masterful. Mirzeler is interested in discourse analysis of memory and performance as they make meaning in the present. The Nayeche story is evoked in the context of interethnic peacemaking, dispute mediation, alliance network formation, personal identity construction, moral judgment, harvest and marriage rituals, and as a counter-narrative to modernization. Performers use the ‘double image of the hero’, who both embraces and rejects tradition, to comment on social responsibility and change in a variety of current contexts. For Mirzeler, there is no inherent or fixed meaning in historical tradition without the performance context. Local and personal experiences are filtered through oral tradition to legitimize present actions.

Landscape memory is critical to storytelling with the descent of Nayeche from the Jie agro-pastoralist Karamoja Plateau to the pastoralist Turkana Plain, passing specific named places along the way. In this difficult environment, vulnerability and the moral responsibility to share scarce resources permeate all stories. Mirzeler traces these same thematic images of rejection, separation, sharing, and a new society in ‘traditionalized’ biographies, autobiographies, folktales, and historical traditions. He contends that these ‘archetypical themes’ are similar in all regional societies with the same environment and are not particular to Jie/Turkana history. The stories’ characters become models for ideal human relations in the present where the rejected and powerless gain ‘redeeming power’. Mirzeler pays some attention to gender analysis, with women tending to narrate folktales and men historical traditions, but asserts that this boundary is fluid and takes it no further. His painstakingly careful transcription and translation of a story corpus, appearing in the last chapter, is significant. Yet the argument itself becomes fairly repetitive, making the same points in many chapters. The transcriptions and ethnographic descriptions are not presented in a consistent way within the main chapters, as some are set off while others are wrapped into the text. Mirzeler roots his theoretical approach in the work of other scholars, but the narrative is often clouded with too much name dropping and not enough new ideas.

All of this is critically important, but not new, for historians who work with oral tradition. The malleability of oral tradition and its relationship to the present, as well as interdisciplinary methods, are now assumed in the field. I was thus unprepared for the conclusion in which Mirzeler attacks J. Lamphear's 1976 history of the Jie for asserting the historical value of origin tradition. While he shows how the field has changed since then, Lamphear becomes a straw man for a blanket critique of historians who only reproduce Western academic, rather than African, historical understandings. Mirzeler asserts that oral tradition cannot be recalled past three generations and is not dateable. Yet, oddly enough, he accepts and uses Lamphear's historical reconstruction and cites other historians who incorporate performance analysis in their use of oral tradition. Mirzeler presents a wonderful case study but does not add anything new to this critique. Why is he so determined to undermine the integrity of the very scholars who could so usefully collaborate with him?