Günther Schlee retired in 2019 as a director of the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology at Halle. Until 1999 he was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bielefeld. He received his doctorate at Hamburg university for research on the social and belief system of the Rendille, an ethnic group in northern Kenya, and his Habilitation from Bayreuth University for a thesis published as 'Identities on the Move: Clanship and pastoralism in northern Kenya and southern Ethiopia'.