Читать книгу Introducing Anthropology - Laura Pountney - Страница 144

In my book The Twilight of Cutting (2016), I introduce you to the worlds of Ghanaian women and men who have been most engaged in and affected by anti-genital-cutting campaigns: cut women, healers who tended to their wounds, circumcisers, NGO workers who campaigned against cutting, nurses taught how to watch over cut women and their children, health volunteers who saved girls from bleeding, chiefs who banned cutting, government officials who sent circumcisers to jail, lawyers who liberated them from prison, and others. The Ghanaians’ transnational collaborators, including their donors, former colonial administrators (British) and missionaries (French), researchers, and activists from the global North, are the book’s secondary characters on purpose: I acknowledge their continued power but refuse to amplify it.

The Twilight challenges the intersections of racism and eurocentrism that drive policies and projects that treat cut girls and women as objects of concern or as prospective criminals, rather than as active agents in their own lives, political subjects and worthy recipients of supportive policies of care. Everything we know and feel about female genital cutting has been shaped by racism and eurocentrism. Media, government bodies, NGOs and activists misunderstand cutting as a solely injurious practice, misrecognizing the meanings and values claimed by many cut women and girls. Not just cutting itself, but entire cultures of people that have historically practised cutting are misconceived as barbaric, brutally patriarchal, violent (punitive) and unchanging. These misconceptions devalue entire peoples and, in turn, legitimize denying them humanity, dignity, equal worth and supportive care. When people who have historically practised female genital cutting receive attention, they are treated as potential criminals and are surveilled, which means that they are closely followed and watched over but not looked after by the government. They are treated with suspicion, disbelief and distrust: when they say that they have ended cutting or that they do not intend for their children to get cut, their words are neither heard nor trusted. They are seen as unwilling to change their ways and intent on keeping their traditions.

The Twilight of Cutting shows that African women and men who campaign against cutting are not exceptional warriors fighting against their communities; instead they are trying to work with those communities and change them from within. Anti-cutting campaigns are sites of collaboration and struggle. Ghanaians engaged and affected by them have ethical dilemmas and political concerns about the divergence between law and justice and healthcare and governmental care that are relevant globally.

Rather than treating cutting as an African problem to be debated by Westerns, I show how it became a particular kind of a problem for Ghanaians starting in colonialism. Ghanaians are not protagonists in someone else’s story, but drive the story, although I (a Bosnian-German-American feminist anthropologist, a former refugee and a perpetual non-citizen), as an observer and a writer, am embedded in the narrative and control what is said and how it said. Indeed, knowledge and anti-cutting policies go hand in hand; Chapter 1 of The Twilight shows how both anthropology and feminism have been entangled with anti-cutting political projects for over a century.

The reorientation of debates about female genital cutting so that it centres the perspectives of the various Ghanaians involved in its endings is the book’s primary contribution. It entails showing a radical plurality of perspectives. Many activist documentaries and texts about cutting present multiple voices, but devalue and vilify those they see as abhorrent, such as the grandmothers who insist on having her granddaughters cut, or the circumcisers who perform the procedure. The Twilight suspends judgement and foregrounds understanding, leading to unexpected insights, linkages and new ways of comprehending both the endings of cutting and the common worlds we inhabit. Here, I highlight two main reorientations it leads to: the book shifts the debate about cutting from individual rights to social justice, and from punitive law and ‘carceral feminism’ to a critique of criminalization.

From individual rights to social justice

The common women’s and reproductive rights frameworks highlight the individual body, as well as woman’s empowerment, autonomy, choice, freedom, control over her body. The question is not whether this framework is right, but whether it is sufficiently comprehensive; The Twilight shows that it is not. The rights framework treats cutting as an isolated phenomenon: it singles out genitals, neglecting women’s overall bodily health and well-being, and it separates the concern about cutting of girls and women from the broader conditions in their communities. Ghanaian women from whom I learned about the endings of cutting do not feel empowered. Rather, they teach us that women’s bodies and their abilities to determine the fate of their bodies are shaped by the conditions in their communities, such as systemic inequality and governmental neglect.

Ghanaian women who have ended cutting see it as unworthy of blood loss, saying that they can no longer afford to lose blood due to their lack of access to life-sustaining resources. The social realities of precarity in their lives are stark: they have little access to education and no living-wage jobs, they suffer from food shortages, drought and climate change, their livelihoods are always at risk. Their bodily survival and the survival of their children are imperilled by pervasive anaemia, lack of health and healthcare, and high maternal mortality and infant and child mortality rates. These social inequalities have local, national and transnational dimensions, and are rooted in histories of dispossession and labour exploitation. Thus, while Ghanaian women who have ended cutting do not regret the loss of this practice, they want more for their future, including ending inequality and improving conditions for their communities.

From punitive law and carceral feminism to a lived critique of criminalization The term ‘carceral feminism’ critically evaluates feminist advocacy for responding to women’s rights violations and gender-based violence with punitive law enforcement. In Ghana and elsewhere, feminist NGOs and legal activists criminalized female genital cutting and advocated for long prison sentences. The Twilight shows that NGO workers and civil servants tasked with enforcing the law were initially enthusiastic about it, but soon came to see the prison sentences given to circumcisers as unjust and as betraying the law’s purpose. As a result, they found themselves at an impasse: while some modified the application of the law to suit their purposes, others experienced it as an unresolved ethical conundrum. While in no way unaware of the difficult position these Ghanaians find themselves in or of the systemic issues that underlie it, The Twilight shows that something remarkable happens in Ghana but not in the global North (including countries such as the UK, Sweden, the US and Australia): Ghanaians are able to curb the excesses of criminalizing the most marginalized citizens and migrants.