Oromo Religion: Myths and Rites of the Western Oromo of Ethiopia, an Attempt to Understand

Lambert Bartels was a missionary and ethnographer who lived among the western Oromo of Ethiopia, and this Dietrich Reimer Verlag book is his ethnographic study of Oromo traditional religion, its myths and its rites, presented explicitly as an attempt to understand the tradition on its own terms rather than to judge it. Its strength is sustained direct fieldwork engagement with Oromo religious specialists and practice over an extended period, producing detailed documentation of a tradition that had received comparatively little prior scholarly attention. Its limit is that it documents western Oromo practice specifically as Bartels encountered it in his own era, so a claim about Oromo religion in other regions, or about how the tradition has changed since, needs a source addressing that different scope or more recent period.