Virtuous
Cuts
Female
Genital Circumcision in an African Ontology
by
Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellow
at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, Brown
University. Lecturer of Sociology and Anthropology, Tufts University
Excerpt
Is
circumcision a vicious act of mutilation and injury, or a virtuous
act of purity and rectitude? I have collected the personal narratives
of a group of African women in order to untangle the ideology that
lies beneath the persistence of this ritual. The ethnographic material
presented here was gathered in the Arabic-speaking, Muslim township
of Douroshab, Sudan, during two periods of fieldwork in 1996 and
1998. I have focused on this township because of the ubiquity of
infibulation, the most drastic type of genital surgery performed
on girls.
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