which constitutes the transition from childhood to adulthood, marking the changed status of an individual and his or her family with concomitant changes in roles, responsibilities, control, and power. Genital cutting marks the identity of an individual as a member of the community and defines a person in relation to extended family, lineage, descent group, and ethnic group. As much as genital cutting unites people, it also divides them. It identifies those who belong to the group and those who do not, and by extension, those who control the ritual event and its outcomes and those who do not.
In the cycle of Kuria individual and social life, the highest position within the society—elderhood—is open to all by virtue of reaching the requisite age and reproductive history. The council of elders convened by the chief’s baraza serves as the body of decision making most approachable by ordinary citizens of the community. A second council, inchaama, is the secret conclave responsible for ensuring the ritual well-being of the community. Membership in the conclave and knowledge of its meeting places are known only by its members. Their communication with the general public consists usually of swiftly moving rumors, and the presence of the inchaama is felt rather than witnessed. To declare the start of initiation season, the elders of the secret council must study a number of physical and metaphysical signs to determine whether a particular year is propitious for a round of initiation. If it is determined to be so, hundreds of adolescent boys and girls undergo a series of culturally prescribed rituals, including genital cutting. The rituals are carried out separately by each clan (ikiaro)—the maximal unit of the descent structure—and adjacent clans generally avoid carrying out rites of passage during the same years. The interval between initiations also varies among the clans. In Bwirege, initiation takes place about every three years. Years ending in seven are usually passed over, since the number is considered extremely unfavorable.
Tradition and Innovation in Kuria Genital Cutting
Kuria youths say that an uncircumcised child is “despised.”19 Initiates look forward to gaining respect more than any other aspect of the ritual event. They become adult members of the society (albeit still low-ranking at that point) and they can look down on the uncircumcised. Initiates know that by undergoing the ritual, they earn their spot on the lowest rung of the ladder of the ritual cycle, which is the backbone of the status hierarchy in this rural area. Age and gender continue to be primary criteria of social hierarchy, although stratification in postcolonial Kuria society stems from additional criteria, such as education, employment, and wealth. Both gender and age are combined to secure an individual’s appropriate place in a social system still organized on the basis of age-grades and generation classes.
Immediately upon being circumcised, the individual gains the status of omosaamba (initiate). After ending seclusion the female initiate becomes umuiseke, a young woman eligible for marriage. The male initiate becomes umumura, a young man who can be held responsible for protecting the family herd or providing future opportunities for the family by devoting himself to his studies, thus building his skills for gaining access to potential employment and the much esteemed and needed off-farm income.
In customary practice, ritual mechanisms create both an egalitarian ethos among members of an age-set and a way to identify leaders within it. It is an oft-repeated truth that if a youth cries during the operation, he or she will be taken less seriously thereafter than a youth who was stoic. At a baraza or any other convocation, his or her word carries less weight as a result of not having shown bravery at that crucial time. Otherwise, all the members of an age-set (but divided according to gender) are seen as equal, an egalitarianism underscored by the fact that they pass from then on through the major stages of life and the ritual cycle together. During the time of seclusion, leaders emerge from the localized bands in which the abasaamba wander about the countryside, seeking diversion while they are restricted from productive work. And upon becoming heads of households, some prosper more than others, but the ritual recognition of fundamental equality remains. Young women become members of their husband’s circumcision set at marriage, and their status within the set is equal to that of all others.
There are, however, other initiates who, by their structural position, are leaders at another level. These are the amanaanai, the first eight persons to be circumcised during any circumcision season. The amanaanai represent each of the eight named generation classes (amakora) of Kuria society. In this manner, the society is divided into moieties, the Abasaae and the Abachuma. Each moiety has four named generations. Men are coeval across the moieties, but stratified within them on the basis of age and birth order. Each generation class is said to give birth to the one following it, and to be born of the one preceding it. Kuria follow kinship norms of respect and joking associated with adjoining and alternating generations respectively. The generation class system is cyclical.
Drawing on my experiences beginning with the 1998 initiation season and continuing through the new millennium, this book highlights some of the various arenas of deliberation: between parents and their children; between initiates and circumcisers; between individuals as members of descent groups; between the traditional ritual authority of the inchaama (secret council) and the contemporary political authority of local administration; between the weight of tradition and the power of churches and missions; between the executive role of the police and the power of witchcraft; and, increasingly, between being modern and being backward.
Significantly, the 1998 season marked the beginning of a period of heightened innovation in initiation practice. Changes unfolded in a way that challenged communal norms and expectations. For the first time, medicalized genital cutting for girls became available. Many months before the initiation season got under way, Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi had dramatically increased his public opposition to female genital cutting. Many Kuria believed this was due to the pressure he faced from international donors, while others claimed that he came from a noncircumcising ethnic group and, therefore, opposition came easily to him.20 In response, national media—radio, newspapers, and television—amplified the anti–female genital cutting message daily across the country, sensationalizing the danger of HIV transmission through the assumed sharing of genital cutting implements. The president had opened public discussion on the topic of HIV/AIDS in 1997, after years of increasing infection and death nationwide.
In Bukuria, such fears did not stop circumcision, where each female initiate had for years already provided her own personal blade for cutting. But they made alternative forms of the practice acceptable. Most notably, people heeded the message of potential transmission of HIV/AIDS via traditional procedures. Local circumcisers were trained in government clinics on sterile procedures, and the option of being circumcised in a clinic rather than in the mainstream initiation process became available to girls in the local community. This option had been available to boys previously, but initiates who had been circumcised in clinics had been looked down upon prior to this season, treated by the community as if they had cried during the operation.
Undergoing genital surgery in a clinic became a vector for identity formation in an unaccustomed way. Parents who opted to forgo a traditional procedure associated their decision to do so with the preaching of the leaders—starting with the president of the nation and continuing through the self-defined “progressive” elements within the community: the government officials, church leaders, the educated, and the employed. The medicalization of the operation allowed the better-off members of the community to separate themselves from a practice that had been at the core of status ascription, thus redefining the criteria by which status could be attained. In a certain sense, what had been a more or less ascribed status became an achieved one; those who could afford it took their children to the clinics. The impetus for the change came from outside the community; however, when the procedure became available, those who could afford it chose to do so. They thereby separated themselves and their families from the shared experience of the community while still adhering to the basic core value of the rite of passage. The potential consequence was undermining or eroding the communitas achieved through rites of passage.21
Each new initiation season brought further changes. During my fieldwork in 2003, a local NGO had been formed in the hope of getting access to some of the funds coming into Kenya to eradicate female genital mutilation. Because the amount of money available was on an order unimaginable for many in the community, people were eager to get