religious, and ritual authority decreased (Hamer 1983; Journet 1981, 1985; Linares 1992; Pelissier 1966; see also Weil 1976).
Before the introduction of peanut cultivation, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jola took part in the rubber and palm oil trade on a family basis. During the dry season, husband and wife migrated to the Gambia where they sold what they had produced and shared the incomes (Hamer 1983; Mark 1977). With peanut cultivation this migration pattern changed. Women had little to gain from assisting men in this trade and thereby lost their most important avenue for gaining cash. Women were, and still are, virtually excluded from peanut cultivation that by the 1930s already had become the principal rural cash mainstay. But young women soon found an alternative income, less lucrative, however, in working as domestic servants in the Gambia. Hamer (1983:280) points out that no matter how meagre their earnings “Without rural-urban migration as an option, women would be more victims of, as opposed to participants in, the new economic order”. In addition to a certain economic independence they won a new freedom of movement. In the Gambian cities the migrating Jola women were exposed to urban life styles and brought new ideas, behaviour, and bodily practices back to the village, such as gestures, walking-style, language, clothing, and female excision.
With the declining importance of indigenous religion, according to which women are ascribed a ritually central role as guardians of agricultural and human fertility (Linares 1992; Journet 1983, 1985), women had to find new strategies for ritual and religious authority. Circumcision as a way for women, as well as men, to become religious persons within the Mandinka form of Islam, and the ‘new’ form of female secret society associated with Islam, may have opened up empowering possibilities for unmarried young women and childless married women. Traditionally, it is through marriage and motherhood alone that women achieve social status. Motherhood per se constituted, and in many ways still does, a veritable initiation rite for Jola women (Journet 1983, 1985). But whereas only those women who have given birth to a child have the right to be initiated into the indigenous form of female secret societies, the prerequisite for initiation into the ‘new’, ‘Muslim’ form of female society is excision. In a sense, Muslim Jola women are no longer dependent on their relation to men (traditionally marriage is the precondition for motherhood) for ritual authority, and the risk of exclusion is not only under female control, but more importantly under a certain individual control practically as any woman is free to choose excision.[66]
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Paradoxically, the active role that women played in the introduction of and their current defence of excision, must be understood in the light of these radically changing gender relations. Women, both young and old, had to cope with economic, social, and religious changes at the turn of the last century. Understood in relation to that complex cultural and historical context, the female circumcision ritual might have been a strategy of empowerment for young women caught up
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A Reflection on the Cultural Meanings of Female Circumcision
in a changing social system that in many ways has led to a general social and economic lowering of women’s position in society.