Making the Mark
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Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition. In an ethnography twenty years in the making, Prazak weaves multiple Kuria perspectives—those of girls, boys, family members, circumcisers, political and religious leaders—into a riveting account. Though many books have been published on the topic of genital cutting, this is one of the few ethnographies to give voice to evolving perspectives of practitioners, especially through a period of intense anticutting campaigning on the part of international NGOs, local activists, and donor organizations. Prazak also examines the cultural challenges that complicate the human-rights anti-FGM stance. Set in the rolling hills of southwestern Kenya, Making the Mark examines the influences that shape and change female genital cutting over time, presenting a rich mosaic of the voices contributing to the debate over this life-altering ritual.
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Making the Mark
This series of publications on Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Global and Comparative Studies is designed to present significant research, translation, and opinion to area specialists and to a wide community of persons interested in world affairs. The series is distributed worldwide. For more information, consult the Ohio University Press website, ohioswallow.com.
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Opposition to Genital Cutting
Female genital cutting attracted missionaries’ attention early in the history of colonialism in Kenya, and led to the passage of resolutions as early as 1918 (Murray 1974, 101). Medical men, missionaries, and administrative officers were aware of the custom in many parts of the colony, but they each had different interests with regard to it. Administrative officers’ ethnographic interests led them to collect material and publish articles on the custom as early as 1904: “Their interest was detached and academic, and genital cutting had not yet arisen as an issue of contention between the missionaries and the Africans” (101 and footnote 4). Some of the earliest controversy, in 1911, was not actually about the physical operation, but about the rites surrounding it, especially the dancing. At heart were basic issues of individuals’ social acceptance in their community, of missionary versus “tribal” authority, and of parents’ rights over their offspring enrolled in a mission institution (103). In one form or another, these issues have remained at the core of controversy.
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