Working and writing as an anthropologist in South-western Ethiopia always was, and will always be, a difficult enterprise. I guess it is even more complicated if the anthropologist is a female and working on gender issues in a male-centred pastoral society. It was 2003 when Shauna LaTosky first began her anthropological research among the Mursi, a small-scale agro-pastoral community living in South Ethiopia close to the Sudan–Kenyan borderland. Her main research interests were how Mursi women use rhetoric to negotiate their social position in a patriarchal society; how Mursi women find ways to make their influence felt, and how Mursi women are the agency of culture change in today's rapidly shifting social climate. Shauna's interpretive theoretical framework is rhetoric or ‘rhetoric culture’, a quite broad perspective that explores the creative role of rhetoric in everyday human acts and artifacts. Rhetoric, not solely referring to oratory and verbal art, but also to cultural displays, body movements or even to the role of silence.

Explaining social decisions, cultural responses and identity through the role of ritual rhetoric in the lower Omo area is nothing new and LaTosky's book fits well into the previous ethnographic scholarship on the area. David Turton's pioneering Mursi studies, especially in his early years of research, strongly concentrated on oratory as the agency of political influence among the Mursi. In the neighbouring groups, notably among the Hamar, Jean Lydall and Ivo Strecker's decades of ethnography on Hamar rhetoric culture contributed to the establishment of the rhetoric turn in anthropology. Shauna LaTosky's book aligns with this perspective and broadens this scholarship with the brilliant description and analysis of Mursi women's everyday predicaments which they try to solve through ritualising everyday rhetoric.

LaTosky spent considerable time among the people, learned the language, conducted classical anthropological research, collected life histories and tried to understand how women live their lives. After the usual introductory chapters (i.e. introduction, methodology, literature review), Chapter 4 delves into the life histories of four Mursi women in different stages of life. Performing these stories Mursi women construct a social reality for themselves and for their audience, among others for the author itself, who interprets each of these tales at the end of the chapter. These tales reveal that Mursi women follow a wide range of ritual activities throughout their life, ranging from minor everyday rituals to socially more significant performances, but all are productive forces of social reality and individual positions in this realism. In the following chapter she describes some of these most important female rituals that are used as tools to build up, maintain and protect Mursi identity. Here we can read about the ula (the competitive ceremonial fight between girls to influence their social reputation); the dhebiya tugony (the lip-plate Mursi girls wear in their lower lip which distinguishes them from neighbouring ethnic groups and acts as a ritual protective device); and the joni chibin (a ceremony of newly married girls). As the author argues women's well-being is grounded in these rhetorically charged rituals as they allow women to be ‘strong’, ‘winner’, ‘attractive’ or a ‘good wife’. However, these images of the female character in the Mursi society are under heavy scrutiny both from inside and from the outside world. In the following chapter LaTosky discusses how the Mursi female rhetoric of style, dress and aesthetic constantly reconstructs female identity in the changing society. This understanding of the Mursi ‘rhetorics of display’ leads her to the final chapter which deals with the problem of delivering rhetoric and the predicament of effective delivery of Mursi female narratives to new audiences (tourists, development workers, government officials, missionaries, photographers, researchers etc.). Here LaTosky follows, literally, Mursi women to meetings with outsiders and documents the difficulties these women face when they want to convince their audiences. This often difficult task certainly has an impact upon the general well-being (health, education) of these Mursi girls and women. The closing pages of the book describes how this tension could be addressed and resolved involving Mursi actors in political decision making.

This is a deep ethnography, full of details, narratives and local knowledge. I had an impression that the book could be even better with a longer and deeper concluding chapter where the author would bring together all the issues she discussed throughout the book and lace them together. However the book, as it stands now, is the first monograph about Mursi women and one of the most important contributions of the South-Ethiopian scholarship ever written.