Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro: African Storytellers of the Karamoja Plateau and the Plains of Turkana

‘In this excellent extended case study, readers learn how storytellers recount the past to address today’s most pressing concerns…. This text could be superb for an undergrad humanities class… Highly recommended.’

A.F. Roberts, Choice Magazine vol 52:04:2014

‘There is much here to praise and my own admiration is directed at Mirzeler’s sophisticated and insightful rendering of how storytelling works as performance, art form, and vital practice in the Jie and Turkana societies.’

Robert Cancel, Western Folklore vol 74:3/4:2015

‘I found this study to be thorough, engaging, and provocative…. I recommend this book for upper division and graduate level courses in anthropology, folklore, or African history.’

Lisa Gilman, Journal of American Folklore vol 130:517:2017

“Mirzeler brings together different elements and aspects of oral literature – traditions of origins, autobiography, invocations of landscape, dreamscape, and folk tales – to show how their interweaving in performance evokes the past in the present and continuously creates both self and community. The material presented here is very rich, and it is informed by an intuitive understanding of Jie story-tellers and their world. Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is a very convincing discussion of the ‘uses’ of tradition and of how the Jie construct and understand their past.” Richard Waller, Department of History, Bucknell University

“Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is a detailed and sophisticated ethnography of storytelling amongst the Jie and Turkana in Uganda. Mirzeler’s book is interesting and engaging, well written and based upon strong ethnographic experiences.”

Jonathan Skinner, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology, University of Roehampton

“Remembering Nayeche and the Gray Bull Engiro is a moving and masterful integration of ethnography and oral tradition that illuminates relationships between past and present not only in Jie society but among all of the pastoralist groups on the Karamoja Plateau. Mirzeler captures with striking eloquence the essence of ‘being Jie.’  In their stories he finds the poetry of life in this harshest of desert places – poetry molded out of hunger, scarcity, and above all, opportunism and creativity. This book thus will immediately assume a place of importance in the bibliography of the Karamoja Plateau.”

Sandra Gray, Department of Anthropology, University of Kansas