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Anthropological Perspectives on Female Genital Cutting: Embodying Tradition, Violence, and Social Resilience

Anthropology grew out of a commitment to study and discuss humanity, in variation and sameness, across time and space. Given its disciplinary penchant for holism and historical context, anthropologists have produced millions of pages describing and debating who we humans are, and how and into whom we have changed over time. Female genital cutting (FGC) has been a topic of perennial anthropological interest because of the variablility of its forms; how those forms are represented; and how and why they are, quite often, targeted for eradication by activists in continental Europe, Britain, and the United States-the three major homes of academic anthropology and the constituents of the so-called West. While most commonly practiced in Africa, FGC became increasingly relevant in Western societies because of colonial entanglements, and it remains so as a corollary of migration and incorporation of populations with strikingly different cultural heritages. As such, it indexes a fascinating otherness for members of nonpracticing, Western communities. This special issue of Africa Today, an outgrowth of a panel at the American Anthropological Association meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2005, highlights how the topic of FGC engages anthropologists' peculiar position as sociocultural critics and potential collaborative reformers. A recent news item on BBC World News opened with the following: "Kenyan villagers have been shocked by the death of a girl who bled to death after trying to perform female genital mutilation on herself" (23 June 2006). The first line, and the events that led to the story, speak to the complexities of the FGC debates, and to the immediate tendency for the reader to separate "us" and "them." How can we understand why a 15-year-old would do this? Do we respond in terms of cultural relativism, or politically informed outrage (Walley 1997:406)? To anthropologists, the idea of girls circumcising themselves is not new (see, for example, Thomas 1996); nor is it new to the