Читать книгу A Companion to Global Gender History - Группа авторов - Страница 40

In the world of the Mende of Sierra Leone, power moves through all creation, and that power is available to humans, but accessing it requires initiation into the Sande or Poro. To enter into either society required the first test of endurance, which then opened the way for proper gender knowledge acquisition. Without circumcision, the bush school was closed and without the bush school the power and protection of the spirits of the bush and the societies were cut off from them. Circumcision allowed one to access the proper gendered knowledge, which then allowed one to succeed in Mende society. Circumcision created and then separated these kinds into female and male creating, maintaining, and affirming Mende gender ideology.

The stakes are high when it comes to systems of belief and practice. In the modern world, governments, all of them, are shaped in and by the dominant system(s) of belief and practice either working alongside, ignoring, and/or suppressing them. Systems of belief and practices shape the parameters of existence and all within it. They shape our past and of course shape the conceptualization of the future. Ritual and myth are media by which we define ourselves and the world, and in so doing bear upon all aspects of our existence. Female and male circumcision practiced by the Mende is given credence and rationality via ritual and myth. Proper gender adults are made in accordance with Mende gender ideology wherein a ritual cut, the removal of the clitoris and the foreskin, was/is necessitated in order to remove the bisexual bit. Although the Mende themselves have not stated this, I suggest that the clitoris might be taken to be masculine, the foreskin taken to be feminine, in order to produce a properly gendered adult, who with the proper gendered knowledge – social, ontological, and metaphysical – will succeed in life. Pulled into the bush, children are circumcised and in this rite opened to their proper gender in order to be schooled. Once their gendered education is complete, they are pulled out of the bush and are ready to take up their roles with their families and in their communities.