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Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Rights and Rites of Defiance in Northern Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Anna Winterbottom ,
Jonneke Koomen  and
Gemma Burford
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Abstract:

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This article reviews campaigns against female genital cutting (FGC) directed at Maasai communities in northern Tanzania. The authors argue that campaigns against FGC using educational, health, legal, and human rights–based approaches are at times ineffective and counterproductive when they frame the practice as a “tradition” rooted in a “primitive” and unchanging culture. We suggest that development interventions that do not address local contexts of FGC, including the complex politics and history of interventions designed to eradicate it, can in fact reify and reinscribe the practice as central to Maasai cultural identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 47 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2009

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