Conclusion

Understood in its cultural context, excision among the Jola in southern Senegal is about much more than girls’ clitorises. The practice is carried out so that a girl can pray and be part of the women’s secret society, to acquire the practical, theoretical,

A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Circumcision

and corporeally ‘magical’ knowledge that essentially transforms the girl into a real person, into a human being of female gender. In a way, the very same implications that the clitoris has come to have in the West, the absence of the clitoris seems to have among the Muslim Jola, particularly the older men and women.

It is interesting to note that, contrary to common Western assumptions, sex­uality is not emically perceived as a cultural reason to excise women, but in the last ten years it has become a reason for younger men to react against excision.[70] In fact, sexuality and excision were only mentioned together in relation to men’s critique of the excision. It is obvious that the local context of power relations is complex and involves many social actors, discourses, and agendas. Far from be­ing consistent, views on the meaning of female circumcision are contested and in a constant process of negotiation and re-negotiation. Standing out most clearly in the struggle for authority is the older women’s defence of the practice using a dis­course on religion, ritual purity, and female education, and the younger and mid­dle-aged men’s critique on the practice using a Western discourse on sexual and reproductive health.

Contributing to the complex political context are the relations between Africa and the Northern hemisphere, and between the Jola and the Senegalese state. Ac­cordingly, anti-excision campaigns have generally been interpreted as imperialis­tic strategies to counteract local culture. The reaction remains especially strong among married and older women. Since excision in the context of a female secret society provides a certain authority in society in general, Jola women commonly meet male actions against excision with suspicion of a hidden agenda. Without knowledge and understanding of the complex cultural and historical context, women’s agency and struggle for what they perceive as a right to be excised and initiated becomes unintelligible (cf. Gruenbaum 1994).

From this, one can draw certain theoretical conclusions that will neutralise common stereotypes concerning those who practise female circumcision, espe­cially women who have gone through a circumcision.

Interventions would most likely become more efficacious if consideration was taken of both the Western (etic) and the local socio-cultural (emic) meanings of female circumcision and its generally contested and multivocal character. While men should certainly be involved in anti-excision campaigns (as they commonly are nowadays), my experiences from Casamance suggest that it is also very impor­tant to consider why and how various categories of women interpret male resist­ance to excision in the manner in which they do.

During my time in Casamance, I came to realise that the deep moral indigna­tion with which female genital mutilation, or sexual mutilation as it also has sig­nificantly been labelled, is met with in the West, is an expression of our emotions and not necessarily those of the circumcised women. Until we understand the source of these emotions and the way they influence fieldwork and data analysis, our understanding of female circumcision will remain inadequate and misleading