The topic of ‘female genital mutilation’ (FGM) has received considerable scholarly attention. FGM as a concept is reified through transnational legal, activist and academic narratives in which a variety of diverse socio-cultural practices are unified under one label and classified in terms of physical alteration. However, FGM is not simply an umbrella term describing physical acts; instead, it is its own construct infused with meanings distinct from any particular practice the term is meant to represent. Anthropologists Miroslava Prazak and Saida Hodžić’s recent monographs use ethnographic research to insightfully approach FGM as a discursive concept from different perspectives.
In Making the Mark, Prazak aims to present a polyvocal emic view of Kenyan Kuria people's conceptions of genital cutting performed as part of a series of initiation rituals, called esaaro, undergone by female and male adolescents. Drawing on participant observation conducted over four initiation seasons and connections, and built through working with the same community in Kuria District since 1988, Prazak vividly describes transformations taking place around esaaro. Prazak's work is at its core an ethnography about esaaro, which has been profoundly transformed by national and international campaigns to end FGM. In contrast, Hodžić engagingly focuses on FGM as a discursive concept in her work The Twilight of Cutting, and on how this concept becomes constructed as a particular type of problem and object of intervention in Ghana. Hodžić’s multi-sited fieldwork centred primarily around two Ghanaian NGOs. Following the work of these NGOs, between 2002 and 2009 she spent one year traversing the Upper East Region and six months in Accra, as well as making trips to Washington DC and Geneva. Hodžić presents an innovative ethnography of contemporary activism against FGM, with local conceptions of specific genital cutting practices such as yabega ŋma comparatively peripheral in her work.
Prazak begins Making the Mark with a description of witchcraft rumours that brought a halt to the Abairege Kuria esaaro in 1998. This first chapter deftly explores how tensions between historical Kuria social structures and destabilizing socio-economic and political changes led a younger generation to challenge the authority of their elders. Chapters 2 and 3 centre around the initiation experiences of men and women, for whom the ritual cycle and age-set system form an important part of their ethnic identity and place within Kuria society. Initiation and seclusion continue to reinforce the importance of interdependent relationships between relatives, as Prazak discusses in Chapter 5. The controversy surrounding efforts to ‘end FGM’ runs throughout the book and is closely tied to ideas of modernity. The monograph covers both female and male genital cutting as part of initiation, but female genital cutting practices are internationally considered a problem in ways that male genital cutting practices are not. This disparity leads the ‘problem’ of FGM to dominate Prazak's analysis.
The remaining chapters deal directly with interactions between the local practice of esaaro and FGM as a transnational construct. In Chapter 4, Prazak demonstrates how the reconfiguring of esaaro as a problem in Kuria communities led a Christian mission to sponsor girls’ medicalized genital cutting from 1998 to 2002. Chapters 6 and 7 then trace the intensification of national and local efforts to eliminate FGM in Kenya and show how voices within the community have adopted transnational narratives. One female circumciser bluntly told Prazak that efforts to end female genital cutting would only succeed if male genital cutting also ended (p. 132, 189). Prazak shows that Kuria people historically considered female and male genital cutting as equivalent. Given this insight, the book could have gone further in more clearly considering how changes to these procedures are interconnected and/or how shifting perspectives have led the procedures to decreasingly be viewed as equivalent.
The physical form of female genital cutting discussed in both Prazak's and Hodžić’s works is clitoridectomy, but the social significance and prevalence of the practices described are quite dissimilar. During Prazak's fieldwork in Kenya, campaigns to end FGM were very active but these efforts had resulted in limited abandonment of girls’ esaaro at her fieldsite (p. 229). During Hodžić’s fieldwork, in contrast, female genital cutting practices in Ghana were already devalued and ending, with anti-FGM campaigns receiving little public opposition. In Bongo District, she found that an entire generation of young women were uncut and no cases were reported in the Bolgatanga District during her fieldwork. It was only outside her primary fieldsites in the Bawku District that she met several young women who had undergone genital cutting (p. 134, 145, 197). Hodžić found, however, that this gradual ending of the procedure was largely disavowed within Ghanaian public discourses. Instead, a discourse of hidden underground resistance was used to incite increased public health surveillance, harsh legislation, and shaming targeted towards politically marginalized populations in northern Ghana. Hodžić’s ethnography compellingly reveals the ways in which FGM as a discursive concept remains active in the wake of the ending of genital cutting practices.
The Twilight of Cutting begins by grounding the concept of FGM in colonial taxonomies. Hodžić argues that enduring residues of colonial sensibility inform contemporary governance against FGM (p. 53). Chapter 2 demonstrates how efforts to eliminate FGM in Ghana cast it as outside the nation, with governmental and NGO workers constructing northern Ghana as a place of non-citizenship and disorder. These campaigns mediate governance and present ‘harmful traditional practices’ as the main cause of the area's environmental degradation and malnutrition (p. 88, 121). Chapter 3 reveals how activists’ and researchers’ preference for quantitative data as evidence fuelled speculation that FGM was not ending because northern women's self-reporting was deemed untrustworthy and therefore inconclusive (p. 139). By 2009, conceptions of yabega ŋma were already decoupled from fertility for rural women in the Bongo District. In Chapter 5, Hodžić describes her realization that, once the practice lost its perceived value, potential blood loss became regarded as wasteful. Rather than adopt the language of haemorrhage risk from transnational campaigns, women located the ending of yabega ŋma within broader Ghanaian concerns over blood shortages, thus renegotiating their place within the nation state.
Hodžić argues in Chapter 4 that campaigns’ misrepresentations of local genital cutting practices do not necessarily indicate ignorance or misunderstanding; instead, ‘mistakes’ are at times strategic. She convincingly contends that NGOs have little interest in connecting complex cultural descriptions of practices such as yabega ŋma with biomedical and developmental representations of FGM because doing so would give such practices credibility. Community outreach in the form of performative events, such as public film screenings, aim to ‘remake yabega ŋma in the image of FGM’ (p. 179). Hodžić provides a richly detailed account of one such film screening in Bawku, but then describes its persuasiveness from the perspective of people in Bongo. She quotes a woman who already decided several years earlier not to undergo genital cutting and a man who volunteered at the NGO (pp. 196–9). They in no way viewed the film's cultural inaccuracies as detracting from its persuasiveness, but this discussion does not provide much insight into how the audience in Bawku may have perceived these inaccuracies. Reaffirming established opposition to FGM is rather different from persuading people to abandon yabega ŋma, and the issue of persuasiveness could be unpacked further.
These performances align the work of NGOs with state power and materialize their authority. NGOs also bring with them threats of arrest (p. 198). In Chapters 6 and 7, Hodžić investigates civil servants’ and NGO workers’ fetishization of the law, where increasingly harsh legislation was not seen as repressive but instead as producing discipline. In what Hodžić calls ‘governmentality against itself’, these civil servants and NGO workers came to contest enforcement of the law against FGM (p. 317). The same lawyer who was instrumental in one circumciser's imprisonment went on to help secure a presidential pardon for her. These two powerful chapters should be essential reading for anyone working on or interested in legislation against FGM.
Both works will be of interest to Africanists, anthropologists and those in development studies. Prazak's evocative and accessible text is well suited for undergraduate students, while Hodžić’s skilful, nuanced analysis may be more suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
