Oral Literature of the Maasai

Naomi Kipury's Oral Literature of the Maasai, published by Heinemann Educational Books in 1983, is a primary collection of Maasai oral literature, proverbs, stories and songs, gathered and presented by a Maasai scholar working within her own community's oral tradition. Its strength is that it is compiled by an author from within the culture she documents, giving the collection an insider's access and framing that outside ethnographic collections of the same period often lacked. Its limit is that as a collection made and translated by one compiler at one point in time, it necessarily represents a selection and a rendering into English of material whose full performative and ritual context, tone, occasion, audience, is difficult to fully carry into print, so a claim about the specific religious function of a given piece should be checked against the collection's own contextual notes rather than the text alone.