my participation in the daily life of her family. I was touched and became excited at the prospect. Not only would the rituals take place that I wanted to understand for so long, but I would also be an integral part of the celebrations for at least one of the families participating.
This personal invitation was followed by a second letter, from a Kuria academic.7 His letter, too, was galvanizing. In describing the reasons why it was essential for me to attend the ceremonies, he entreated: “Kuria people of Kenya have maintained a distinct culture and traditions despite constant encounter with Western culture. However, there has been no proper way in which these have been preserved. As regards circumcision ceremonies they are being eroded by modernity but [have] maintained resilience over past years.” The closing sentence convinced me to go: “The next circumcision ceremonies will take place in [three years]” (B. K. C., pers. comm.). I certainly did not want to wait any longer, as I finally felt ready to open my mind to this ritual in ways I could not a decade before. So I began to prepare to participate in the initiation season, which nowadays begins in late November when schools close for the end of the school year and concludes in the beginning of January.8
The initiation season I witnessed from beginning to end in 1998 is the core of the account offered in this narrative, and many of the descriptions of people and events stem from that time. But since then, and through multiple visits, I have spent a total of nearly three more years in the field and have witnessed two more genital cutting seasons. Those events, along with scores of conversations, interviews, discussions, and debates, inspire the content of this account, as they form the basis of my understanding of the changing meanings initiation holds for the various participants who play a role in the ceremonies. Since 1988, when I first witnessed genital cutting in initiation ceremonies, the controversy has continued to grow. Genital cutting—most often labeled in the West and increasingly in Kenya as female genital mutilation, or simply FGM—has become a hotly debated topic on the international scene, decried by feminists, policymakers, immigration officers, human rights watch groups, and health-care providers, to mention only some of the most prominent opponents. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines female genital mutilation as all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for nonmedical reasons (Oloo, Wanjiru, and Newell-Jones 2011, 4). This debate, along with initiatives by various NGOs, has informed the understandings and practices around genital cutting in Kuria communities. As the “tradition” has become increasingly contested and reshaped by pressures from numerous directions, it seems appropriate to document these pivotal cultural moments.
In this ethnography, I describe initiation rituals of Kuria people as they were taking place around the turn of the millennium. I represent an outsider’s growing understanding of emic, or insider, conceptions of genital operations and their roles within society, as a counterbalance or an addition to the ongoing furor over this custom in practicing and nonpracticing societies. This account documents the rituals and highlights the transformations taking place—in both indigenous conceptions and social practices—in an environment where genital cutting has become increasingly scrutinized. I aim to create a cultural record of an old practice that has been challenged for about a century, and that may eventually be stopped. But for now, it persists.
This ethnography describes genital cutting as a set of grounded practices, occurring within a particular sociotemporal location. Though the location might be seen as remote, this genital cutting ties rural Kuria society into a truly global discourse. This parallels the ways in which the socioeconomic and political lives of the people are carried out locally, yet shaped by the current and historical realities of their connection with the colonial and postcolonial world within which East Africa developed over the past century. Though genital cutting persists in Kuria society, the custom is not a primordial throwback but rather a practice responsive to individual and family concerns arising in response to sensitization campaigns and efforts to eradicate the practice. Genital cutting has not fallen into desuetude. It continues to be meaningful even though people realize the validities of the criticisms. Genital cutting still embodies and enacts useful, even powerful elements guiding everyday life. More than two camps (those who adhere to the practice and those who oppose it) exist in Kuria communities, and the direction people align with is shaped by local circumstances and alternatives that combine endogenous and exogenous elements for consideration. So, rather than being simply prescriptive, culture offers a range of options for defining acceptable and unacceptable courses of action. Cultural practices change as innovation and borrowing expand the acceptable options and eliminate or discard other variations that become outmoded or impracticable.
Politics of Writing
Studying genital cutting—in its multiple dimensions as a social, cultural, political, ritual, and individual-altering experience and institution—places the anthropologist at the nexus of intersecting discourses. An investigation of arguments and meanings that various parties articulate vis-à-vis this practice reveals a contrast between outsider and insider perspectives, and also a diversity of positions within each camp. In Kuria, as in other societies that practice genital cutting, the attitudes of individuals and groups reflect the variety of cultural contexts, responses to socioeconomic and political change, and the ideas people hold about identity as mediated by descent, gender, ethnicity, and, increasingly, class. These attitudes also reflect the influence of outsider positions on local practices. Drawing on participant observation in four initiation seasons in rural Kuria District of Kenya, and extensive correspondence via mail and e-mail over the decades, this account highlights the multiple realms where negotiation takes place, both for the participants and the observers; it also explores the anthropologist’s relationship to respondents, to activism, and to a commitment to human rights.
Western interest in genital operations has come and gone in waves. The most recent wave rolled in during the mid-1990s, when the practice of genital cutting in Africa gained prominence in the eyes of the world through the efforts of medical practitioners, human rights proponents, and the general public. Western media became thoroughly engaged by the legal cases of African women seeking asylum in order to forestall deportation from France and the United States, doing so by appealing to Western abhorrence of female genital cutting.9 In Western discourse, the altering of female genitalia is usually deemed barbaric and harmful to the women involved, and the term “female genital mutilation” (or the well-known acronym FGM) is routinely employed by the media and various influential Western observers and organizations. In the associated discussion of medical and psychosexual complications, FGM tends to be used indiscriminately to refer to many different forms of operations, though each carries different potential complications and outcomes. Moreover, the term FGM is rarely used in discussions that include the viewpoints of African women who have undergone any of a variety of genital cutting procedures, and in turn acculturate their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters to the practice in their communities. These discussions tend to lose the sociocultural context of genital cutting, and many Africans feel that the negative attention directed at their customs is both insensitive and intrusive. Even those who welcome change maintain that the best solutions would be proposed by Africans, not by Western critics.
Two seminal articles on the topic of genital cutting published in the 1990s (Parker 1995; Walley 1997) address questions similar to those I had as I participated in and observed initiation rituals. Both authors focused on how people of the West regard and talk about female circumcision practices. And both made it clear that, regardless of whether it was scientists, social scientists, members of the media, or members of the legal profession who were expressing their views, none of the discourse was objective or scientific in the way that is valued by our science-based worldview.
Having witnessed female genital cutting operations in northern Sudan, Melissa Parker was struck by the intense emotion that underlay her Western colleagues’ and friends’ interests and concerns about the practice. She concludes that unless greater attention is paid to understanding the source of the emotions and the ways in which they influence fieldwork and data analyses, our understandings of female genital cutting will remain partial (Parker 1995, 506), while researchers would run the risk of lending credence to fierce moral judgments and campaigns aimed at remaking other cultures in our own image. This runs counter to the avowed aims of anthropological academic research, which seeks to conduct investigations from a scientific, neutral,