Feminism, Anthropology and the Politics of Excision in Mali: Global and Local Debates in a Postcolonial World

Abstract: This article examines the politics and discourses surrounding circumcision, and explores ethical approaches to its study for feminist anthropologists. First I present overview of the international on these operations, and review the literature on female genital mutilation. Unfortunately these writings that are meant to help empower African women can colonize them (after Mohanty, 1991). Second, the current debates around the practice in Mali are discussed. The issue has become a metonym for politically, ideologically and economically motivated discussions on gender, age, caste, Islam and Westernization. Resume: Cet article explore les discourset les relations de pouvoir qui entourent et sous-tendent les debats sur la circoncision feminine. L'auteure explore des approches ethiques qui pourraient etre adoptees par les anthropologues feministes. Tout d'abord, un survol historique des debats sur la scene internationale est presente, incluant une revue des publications sur les >. Malheureusement ces ecrits qui se veulent liberateurs pour les femmes africaines peuvent avoir comme consequence de les coloniser a nouveau (cf. Mohanty, 1991). Dans une deuxieme pattie l'auteure presente les resultats de ses recherches sur les debats actuels sur l'excision au Mali. Le debat sur l'excision fonctionne comme une metonymie a travers laquelle sont debattue d'autres grandes questions sociales et politiques sur les rapports sociaux entre les sexes et entre les jeunes et les aine-e-s, sur la stratification sociale par castes, et sur les merites compares de l'Islam et de l'occidentalisation.IntroductionFor a feminist anthropologist, there is no comfortable position from which to study circumcision. The very decision to write (or not) about the topic becomes a political statement, and so is one's choice of tone and terminology. The issue has become a highly sensitive nexus where converge some of the most difficult ethical debates in feminism and anthropology: the issues of cultural relativism, international human rights, difference, ethnocentrism and Western imperialism.This article examines the politics and the different discourses surrounding the issue of circumcision, and explores ethical approaches to their study for feminist anthropologists. The first part presents historical overview of the international on these operations, sketching the meanings that they have come to carry for feminists, anthropologists and human-rights activists. A review of the literature on female genital mutilation illustrates how most anti-circumcision activists dismiss tradition and try to inscribe new meanings onto the practices, categorizing them as violence against Yet writings which are meant to help free women from oppression unfortunately have often been seen to colonize (after Mohanty, 1991) African and Muslim women. This predicament suggests a role that anthropologists can play in this debate: helping to both contextualize these operations, discussing their local functions and cultural meanings and to understand why efforts to eradicate what are considered by Western feminists to be such offensive, patriarchal practices, are resisted by women themselves.The specific cultural meanings of circumcision, however, are multiple and changing. The research I recently completed in southern Mali(f.1) was based on understanding of culture as a complex network of perspectives, as an ongoing debate (Hannerz, 1992: 262). Malian society is one in which ethnicity has always been fluid and where cultural meanings, as well as individuals, have long and extensively crossed group boundaries (cf. Amselle, 1990), particularly in urban areas where I worked. The current debates and discourses on and around excision in Mali that I survey in the second part of this article reveal that this issue has become a metonym for politically, ideologically and economically motivated discussions on gender, age, caste, Islam, Westernization and the role of the state. …

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