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Preface, Introduction, PART I: Of Niam-Niams, Troglodytes, and Unicorns, CHAPTER ONE - The "Nightmare Republic" and the "Problem of the Underclass", CHAPTER TWO - The Invention of the Three Human Races, CHAPTER THREE - Sexual Inhibition and the "Ethnographic Record", CHAPTER FOUR - "r/K Selection," Lombroso, and the Capitalist "Science" of Racism, PART II: Africa Unchained: Anthropology, Ideology, and Consciousness in Contemporary Praxis, CHAPTER FIVE - Funtionalism, Positivism, Bourgeois Science, Slavery, and Racism, CHAPTER SIX - Ideology and the Consolidation of Racial Prejudice in "Scientific" Racism, CHAPTER SEVEN - The Hegemony of Racist Ideology: Color, Status, and the Economic Basis of Racism, CHAPTER EIGHT - Racist Ideology Inventing History: The "Hamitic Myth" and Rwanda-Burundi, CHAPTER NINE - Hobbesian "Realism" and "Taking Responsibility", CHAPTER TEN - The Africanist "Heart of Darkness", CHAPTER ELEVEN - Male African Pastoralists as Failed Capitalists and as "Owners" of Women, PART III: Theoretical Coda, CHAPTER TWELVE - Marxism and Anthropology I: "Objectivity," Relativism, and the World Economic System, CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Marxism and Anthropology II: Fieldwork and Language in History and the Context of Knowledge Production, Appendix, Bibliography, Index

In a manner somewhat unusual in anthropological discourse, most writers on the Maa-speaking peoples of Tanzania and Kenya include an early section or chapter on what is often called "Maasai traditional history." For example, in his pioneering work, "An Administrative Survey of the Masai Social System," Henry Fosbrooke (1948) devotes a leading and major section to Maasai history and, in a later publication, he deals explicitly with what he calls a "tribal chronology" of the pastoral Maasai (Fosbrooke 1956a). Similarly, Thomas Beidelman, in an equally pioneering article, pays considerable attention to the historical connections of the Ilparakuyo (Baraguyu) section of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania (1960). It is among the Ilparakuyo that I have carried out most of my work in Maasai studies, and they are the primary focus of the present discussion (Rigby 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981).

The primary interest in this study is to make some contribution to the elaboration of a theoretical problem: What are the relations between certain forms of ideology and the social formations in which they are, or can be, realized? The consideration of ideology as a sociological category is of continual and growing concern (e.g., Moskvichov 1974; Bétaille 1978; Gellner 1978), despite the attempts of bourgeois social science to kill it off during the 1960s (cf. Lipset 1960; Bell 1960; Waxman 1968). But my present interest in it arises out of a particular historical question: Why did the Christian missions fail so signally in their efforts to evangelize and convert East African pastoralists, most conspicuously the various sections of the Maasai peoples of Tanzania and Kenya?