Tragic death

[mona amon]

I agree with Paul, and I cannot understand this anthropology excuse.

Mona, that's what you want to happen-- the world not to care so the image of romanticized India will be intact. Complacency!

You have a very wrong idea of what I've been saying here - so wrong that I can't help feeling that you need to have a romanticizer out here so you can have fun ranting and telling them off and displaying the (unfortunately simplistic) knowledge that you've picked up. There's no one romanticizing India here, so you've picked on me. Here's the relevant part of my post -

it strikes me as reductive, half-baked, partial knowledge and simplistic conclusions. At the root of most of India's problems are the extreme poverty of most of the people, the huge differences in power/wealth, and of course corruption. You've got to understand that, before suggesting simplistic solutions.

Which part of it strikes you as romanticizing? And where did you get the idea that people out here do not protest or are not ashamed of the things that happen? You must be doing a very selective reading of the news if you think that.

I know I'm being much more on the defensive than I usually am, but that is because you've been flat out insulting. You've seen children bite, scratch and kick their siblings, but if an outsider attacks them, they immediately spring to their defence. Same sort of psychology in operation here.

I'm perfectly open to well researched, knowledgeable, genuine criticisms of my country from outsiders, however negative they may be, but your comments did not sound genuine to me. They were just insults flung out to try and make you look good.

[miyako73]

That would imply that there's

1) some objective characteristic that can be applied to categorise all practices as either (a) 'outside cultural context' or (b) 'contextual to the prevailing culture'
and
2) some objective morality that can be applied to categorise the 'outside cultural context' practices as either 'good' or 'bad'

Rape, you say, can be categorised as 'outside cultural context' and 'bad'. Altruism, for instance, might be categorised as 'outside cultural context' and 'good'.

The problem with that, I think, is that your logic suggests that categorisation (2) can only be applied to category (1a), because - as you have said - 'good' and 'bad' doesn't apply to category (1b).

But most people would suggest that (2) can be applied to any any practice, regardless of (1).

However, if you're right, it does beg the question of where we get the criteria for (2), if not from our own cultural context.

You are complicating things. I still have to find a culture that sanctions rape. Even honor killing is a criminal offence in places that practice it, but it is so culturally entrenched that it is hard to eradicate totally.

It's a suspect why you throw in altruism beside rape... are you introducing the biological justification of rape? Let's not go there.

[miyako73]

I agree with Paul, and I cannot understand this anthropology excuse.



You have a very wrong idea of what I've been saying here - so wrong that I can't help feeling that you need to have a romanticizer out here so you can have fun ranting and telling them off and displaying the (unfortunately simplistic) knowledge that you've picked up. There's no one romanticizing India here, so you've picked on me. Here's the relevant part of my post -



Which part of it strikes you as romanticizing? And where did you get the idea that people out here do not protest or are not ashamed of the things that happen? You must be doing a very selective reading of the news if you think that.

I know I'm being much more on the defensive than I usually am, but that is because you've been flat out insulting. You've seen children bite, scratch and kick their siblings, but if an outsider attacks them, they immediately spring to their defence. Same sort of psychology in operation here.

I'm perfectly open to well researched, knowledgeable, genuine criticisms of my country from outsiders, however negative they may be, but your comments did not sound genuine to me. They were just insults flung out to try and make you look good.

Okay, Mona. Here's what the Canadian-born Indian wrote:

Afsun Qureshi: How India’s rape culture came to Canada

Afsun Qureshi, Special to National Post | Jan 3, 2013 12:01 AM ET | Last Updated: Jan 2, 2013 5:36 PM ET
More from Special to National Post



Weeks before a young medical student endured a fatal Dec. 16 gang rape in Delhi, my eight-year-old daughter announced that she wanted to visit India. She’d become intrigued by her own Indian heritage, and by my frequent visits there.

To which I replied: “Sure, but only if you are handcuffed to me or your father.”

She laughed. But I was serious. Last July, during my most recent trip to India, I endured getting rubbed up against, pinched and groped, whilst the offending perverts took shelter in the formidable crowds to camouflage their crimes.

I am Canadian-born to Indian parents, and grew up in Toronto, the heartland of the Trudeau-era Indo-Pak influx. I know that the attitudes that spawned India’s recent gang-rape tragedy don’t just flourish in South Asia. Sadly enough, there are common threads of cultural-based misogyny wherever the Indo-Pak, and now Afghani, communities settle.

In their 50-odd years as Canadians, my parents rarely ventured out of that community. Growing up in their household, I came to know this world intimately. What I write isn’t conjecture: It is personal experience.

The first rule in this deeply flawed patriarchal society: men rule. Getting a first-born son is like striking gold. And in most cases, that child and any boys that follow are spoiled to an extreme degree. What “needs” they have are met — even if that means casting a blind eye to the law.

A few years back, one of the members of my community, a girl out of her teens, endured the ordeal of an arranged marriage to a stranger in India. Although Canadian-born, she was sent to live with her in-laws in a small Indian town. India being what it is, various members of the extended family, i.e., brothers, sisters, grandparents, uncles, etc., lived communally under one roof. Within weeks of her arriving, a brother-in-law attempted to rape her.

The attitude from the rest of the household? A shoulder shrug and a “Get over it. Boys will be boys.” Her persistent protests finally spelled divorce — ironically, instigated from the groom’s family, who never denied the brother-in-law’s crime, but felt dishonoured by the fact that this Canadian harlot had the cheek to protest it. (It was assumed that the attempted rape was all her fault. She must have batted her eyelids; she must have showed an ankle.)


Within my own extended family, there was a “funny uncle” who took turns on everyone, regardless of gender and age. Although he committed crimes in the nature of Jimmy Saville (no exaggeration), today he is a free man living with his family in a Toronto suburb. God help his children and the neighbourhood kids.

The community simply shut their eyes to his twisted crimes, and ignored his victims, many of whom later suffered PTSD as adults. Calling the police then was never an option. Why? Because whatever happens in the hermetically-sealed Indo-Pak community stays in the Indo-Pak community, where the “honour” code has a chokehold. Growing up, I always wondered (and still do) what would happen if the police or social workers ever knew what actually goes on behind our closed doors.

The patriarchal elements of such societies not only serve to protect criminals, but also isolate their female victims. Consider the young woman in India who committed suicide a few months back because the police refused to act on her allegations that she’d been raped during the Hindu festival of Diwali. They believed the story, oh yes, but they just didn’t care, and couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it.

Look at Shafilea Ahmed, the British-Pakistani girl suffocated to death by her father in 2009 for being too “Westernized.” In Canada, there are the Shafia crimes, and of course the infamous case of Aqsa Parvez. I am deeply shamed to say that when reading Christie Blatchford’s reportage on the Shafias, so much of it made me feel “right at home” — despite the fact that I escaped that world decades ago (both by geography, and by marriage). It resonated to the point where my heart ached.

The protests witnessed in India in recent days show that the country is engaged in a rare moment of introspection. We need that introspection here in Canada as well. Many of the South Asian immigrants who’ve settled in Canada since the 1970s have been so afraid of losing their culture that they have ferociously clung to some of their worst customs. Each time I visit India, I notice that it progresses ever so slightly with each passing year. But when I visit Toronto, as I regularly do, I sometimes feel like I have walked through a time machine, sending me back to rural India, a village in Pakistan, or an Afghan mountain cave.

As I write this now, I fear recrimination from that community — and certain members of my own family. But I am also hoping to tap into a spirit of solidarity. Perhaps a new generation will help push for change.

National Post

Afsun Qureshi is a Canadian-born writer living in London, England.

[miyako73]

Here's another one, Mona, by an Indian writer (Firstpost). If you keep on denying and hiding the truth, you're not helping your country. Are you an RSS supporter? It seems to me nationalist Hindus do not acknowledge that rape is a big problem in the whole of India. I hope you're not like them who blame rape victims why they are raped.


Firstpost India

A rape every 22 mins: What makes us so complacent?
by Akshaya Mishra Oct 12, 2012


One woman gets raped every 22 minutes in India. One child gets raped in every 76 minutes. Only one in every four accused in the crime gets convicted. Between 1971 and 2011 cases of rape registered a 873 percent jump. That is the biggest among all categories of crime. This is the information provided by the National Crime Records Bureau data. Add to the dismal numbers the fact that most such cases go unreported due to social and other reasons.

We have a problem, a serious one. Only we won’t acknowledge it. That’s the reason we will reduce the recent rape cases in Haryana to media entertainment. Entertainment, yes, because what we don’t have, after a month these cases started surfacing, is a serious debate on the issue. The focus has consistently been on the peripherals – khaps finding a bizarre solution to the problem, loose remarks from politicians and political visits to the victims.


There’s enough sarcasm going around for the solutions or perceived solutions offered by different sections. The khaps believe reducing the marriageable age of children will bring down cases of rape. This solution has backing of many in the political class. Others would call it solely a law and order problem and suggest heavy crackdown on the culprits as a remedy. Some would ask the girls to dress appropriately, conduct themselves in an acceptable manner and even stop using mobile phones.

All this nowhere come close to a solution but let’s face it, these are only expected responses from people with a limited worldview shaped by the reality of their existence. You cannot expect a khap panchayat to manufacture an enlightened opinion that is acceptable to the modern, liberal class. It’s possible they simply know of no other solution. The local politicians emerge out of the same stock, so their views are not likely to be too different either.

Let’s be clear that all rapes don’t happen in the social environment dominated by the khap panchayats. The menace is far too widespread. The Delhi-NCR region is called the rape capital of India. There is high incidence of rape in states like Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh too. People involved are not always uneducated people with little knowledge of the law. It’s possible that there is more awareness now and that’s why more and more victims are coming out to lodge complaints but the escalating numbers offer no confidence.

It’s a recorded fact that in a significantly high number of cases the rapists are usually friends or relatives. According to statistics nine out of 10 alleged culprits were known to the victim. No complaint was lodged as the victims’ families were worried about social shame. The cases that makes the flood of derision at a Hisar Congressman’s recent comment on rape of women is a bit misplaced.

“The girl gets into an affair with a boy and she goes with him without knowing that he is of criminal mindset. It’s not the state government which is responsible for rapes, in fact in most of the cases its consensual sex… In 90 percent cases, the girls and women initially accompany boys on their own and are later trapped in gang-rape by criminals,” he said. He is wrong in saying that rape is consensual – simply because if it is rape it cannot be consensual. But the other part of his observation is not too out of place. If so many rapes are taking place because of the proximity of the culprits and the victims, it’s only logical that a great degree of our attention towards addressing the problem should be directed here.

Unfortunately, we have no discussion on that. Worse, we have no solution at all coming from the chattering classes. Rape cases have several dimensions, social, criminal, psychological and gender discrimination. Can it be treated as a law and order problem alone? Certainly not. Even if it is, do we have enough sensitivity and expertise in our police mechanism to deal with such cases in a proper manner?

Much of our discourse on the subject is focussed on the policing aspect only. We need to have a more comprehensive approach. And it calls for an intelligent debate. The situation is surely going beyond control. It’s time we got serious.

[Paulclem]

Neck lengthening among kayan people is a body modification related to beauty. Do you think liposuction or liposculpture not a body modification related to beauty? You really need to read surveys why Americans undergo plastic surgeries. three things always come out: job, marriage, self-esteem.

In my country, if you abandon your old parents even in an eldercare facility, you are considered irresponsible, ungrateful, cruel, abusive son or daughter your neighbors will not respect. See, if I don't think in an anthropological way, I can't understand the practice in America in which ageing parents are left by their children in the eldercare facilities.

When I say anthropological way, I don't mean this is equal to that. It means cultural relativity--what is bad or ugly for some is good or beautiful for others. Cultural relativity is not applicable to rape. Rape is bad and ugly for all except for rapists.

I know nothing about Kayan people.

I know that body sculpting is related to beauty, but this is a world away from female circumcision. For some it is a pressure, for others an aspiration. The difference being that no-one is forced in the same way. I know about the pressures, but this is different to mutilation.

You call it elderly abandonment, but it cvould easily be called 24 hour care. it depends upon the institution and circumstances of the family. it doesn't involve physical cruelty unless the carers are criminal.

I know what you mean by cultural relativity. Things that cause suffering like female circumcision and all the other negative cultural practices that involve pain and suffering don't qualify to be considered as culturally relative. they are simply inhumane. The difference between that and beauty surgery and placing the elderly in homes is that the examples you gave are not inherently cruel. it depends upon the person and other factors such as family and pressures - if there is any cruelty at all - whereas female circumcision and rape are inherently cruel.

[miyako73]

I won't be answering from now on. I'll just post articles.


November 30, 2007, 6:49 am

A New Debate on Female Circumcision
By JOHN TIERNEY

Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital mutilation, justified in trying to outlaw it, or are they guilty of ignorance and cultural imperialism?

Those questions will be debated Saturday morning in Washington at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. Representatives of international groups opposed to this procedure will be debating anthropologists with somewhat different views, including African anthropologists who have undergone the procedure themselves. As the organizers of the AAA panel note:

The panel includes for the first time, the critical “third wave” or multicultural feminist perspectives of circumcised African women scholars Wairimu Njambi, a Kenyan, and Fuambai Ahmadu, a Sierra Leonean. Both women hail from cultures where female and male initiation rituals are the norm and have written about their largely positive and contextualized experiences, creating an emergent discursive space for a hitherto “muted group” in global debates about FGC [female genital cutting].
Dr. Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, was raised in America and then went back to Sierra Leone as an adult to undergo the procedure along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group. She has argued that the critics of the procedure exaggerate the medical dangers, misunderstand the effect on sexual pleasure, and mistakenly view the removal of parts of the clitoris as a practice that oppresses women. She has lamented that her Westernized “feminist sisters insist on denying us this critical aspect of becoming a woman in accordance with our unique and powerful cultural heritage.” In another essay, she writes:

It is difficult for me — considering the number of ceremonies I have observed, including my own — to accept that what appears to be expressions of joy and ecstatic celebrations of womanhood in actuality disguise hidden experiences of coercion and subjugation. Indeed, I offer that the bulk of Kono women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.

You can read more about this in Dr. Ahmadu’s essays or in this critique of the global campaign against female genital mutilation, written by another participant in Saturday’s discussion, Richard Shweder of the University of Chicago.

Dr. Shweder says that many Westerners trying to impose a “zero tolerance” policy don’t realize that these initiation rites are generally controlled not by men but by women who believe it is a cosmetic procedure with aesthetic benefits. He criticizes Americans and Europeans for outlawing it at the same they endorse their own forms of genital modification, like the circumcision of boys or the cosmetic surgery for women called “vaginal rejuvenation.” After surveying studies of female circumcision and comparing the data with the rhetoric about its harmfulness, Dr. Shweder concludes that “‘First World’ feminist issues and political correctness and activism have triumphed over the critical assessment of evidence.”

If I were asked to make a decision about my own daughter, I wouldn’t choose circumcision for her. But what about the question raised by these anthropologists: Should outsiders be telling African women what initiation practices are acceptable?

[miyako73]

This is what Carlos Londono Sulkin, an anthropologist, said about female Circumcision.


"Anthropological and other social scientific empirical research on the nitty-gritty of everyday talk and other aspects of social life – like Fuambai Ahmadu’s studies of understandings and practices of excision – are particularly well suited to make edifying contributions to liberal causes. Many anthropologists, reacting against collectivist social theories and some of the less felicitous entailments of cultural relativism, have joined in the condemnation of female circumcision without first taking counsel from our discipline’s methodological requirement actually to pay attention to what the people we write about say and do about this or that, over an extended period. Listening to Ahmadu, I can no longer condemn the practices of genital cutting in general, nor would I be willing to sign a zerotolerance petition."

Anthropology, Liberalism and Female Genital Cutting (2009)

[Paulclem]

Someone who actually saw FGM wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...sion-indonesia

A quote from the next article:

The provisional constitution, (of Somalia) states: "Circumcision of girls is a cruel and degrading customary practice, and is tantamount to torture. The circumcision of girls is prohibited."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-dev...banned-somalia

There is an account in this article by a woman who had FGM done.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/20...tal-mutilation

It seems that we could continue with the anthropologists v reporters/ women who have had it done/ people who think it is an abhorrent practice battle. What is clear in the articles, and in the accounts I had heard on TV from women who were campaigning against it, (and who had had the procedure), is that the micro-society they come from may endorse it, which is where your cultural relativism comes in, but that it is an unnecessary and barbaric pracice.

[miyako73]

This whipping ritual where women are whipped and wounded by men is also barbaric, cruel, and violent. Will I condemn it? Nope. We have bloody practices in my country worse than this like self-flagelation and crucifying humans. Are they crimes? Nope. Are they traditions? Yes.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26cH8c0dnv0

[MarkBastable]

You are complicating things. I still have to find a culture that does not sanction rape. Even honor killing is a criminal offence in places that practice it, but it is so culturally entrenched that it is hard to eradicate totally.

It's a suspect why you throw in altruism beside rape... are you introducing the biological justification of rape? Let's not go there.

No. I'm analysing things.

Let's try it again, then - without the exemplar of altruism, and without the specific of rape.

You imply that there's

1) some objective characteristic that can be applied to categorise all practices as either (a) 'outside cultural context' or (b) 'contextual to the prevailing culture'
and
2) some objective morality that can be applied to categorise the 'outside cultural context' practices as either 'good' or 'bad'

The problem with that, I think, is that your logic suggests that categorisation (2) can only be applied to category (1a), because - as you have said - 'good' and 'bad' doesn't apply to category (1b).

But most people would suggest that (2) can be applied to any any practice, regardless of (1).

However, if you're right, it does beg the question of where we get the criteria for (2), if not from our own cultural context.

[miyako73]

I think you committed a falacy here. I don't suggest anything that resembles to the notion that the outsider's view of a culture (etic) is either good or bad. In anthropology, we value the insider's view of a culture more (emic). Anthropologists--those who strictly adhere to relativity of cultural practices--don't judge if something is bad or good. Rape is not a cultural practice so it is beyond the dichotomy between etic and emic. It is a phenomenon that is sanctioned across cultures and societies. So generally it is bad and ugly a sociocultural transgression. You cannot really say it is good and beautiful to some communities because there are no communities that do not sanction it.

When I said what is bad to some is good to others, I'm just showing you the simplest explanation of cultural relativity if we look at a culture with an outside point of view and our own subjective lens. Eating worms is yucky to you because you don't belong to a food culture that finds worms yummy.

[mona amon]

I'm confused here - the five year old girl who has her external genitalia cut off with a rusty blade, and if she survives the torture and infection, suffers pain, urinary tract problems and complete loss of sexual feeling for the rest of her life - does she belong to the culture that finds it yummy or the culture that finds it yucky?

I won't be answering from now on. I'll just post articles. - Miyako

Great. And I'll play the world's tiniest little violin for you.

[miyako73]

I'm confused here - the five year old girl who has her external genitalia cut off with a rusty blade, and if she survives the torture and infection, suffers pain, urinary tract problems and complete loss of sexual feeling for the rest of her life - does she belong to the culture that finds it yummy or the culture that finds it yucky?



Great. And I'll play the world's tiniest little violin for you.

It's obvious you haven't read the female circumcision articles I posted. There are intellectuals from the communities that practice female circumcision who defend the practice as part of their cultural self-determination. You see it as violent and cruel; well, they don't. Here's another article for you.



March 19, 2008, 11:50 am
A Compromise on Female “Circumcision”
By JOHN TIERNEY
Since I invited researchers to debate female initiation rites in Africa, we’ve heard from social scientists based in Chicago, Italy, England, Nigeria and Sweden. I’ve saved the last word in this round of essays for the anthropologist with the most direct knowledge of this topic: Fuambai Ahmadu, a native of Sierra Leone, who grew up in America and then went back to her homeland as an adult to undergo the rite along with fellow members of the Kono ethnic group.

Dr. Ahmadu, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Chicago, has previously published essays on the practice she calls female circumcision. In this essay, she reviews the debate here on the Lab and suggests a compromise that would protect girls and women from undergoing procedures without their consent, but she is critical of those who advocate “zero tolerance” and who refer to these surgeries as female genital mutilation:

I found some of the commentaries quite interesting and most of them unsurprising, given much of the media sensationalizing and vilification of female circumcision practices over the past thirty years. Much of the horror expressed seems to be based on erroneous presumptions about the clitoris and female sexuality. The fact is, as Dr. Catania has courageously come forward with in the publication of her research findings, that many women who have undergone varying forms and degrees of genital modification can and do experience sexual enjoyment and orgasms. Of course, some don’t. The same holds for uncircumcised women; many experience orgasms and a good number don’t. What this suggests is that (female) sexuality is as much a cultural construct as ideas about sex and gender and we need to revisit some of the received wisdom of western folk models of (female) sexual pleasure.

I also take note of readers’ concerns about consent. While I have serious issues with the concept of consent and how it is applied asymmetrically to African practices of female genital cutting, I do agree with Rick Shweder that a possible way forward would be to consider limiting certain types of genital cutting to an age of majority, for instance, the age at which a girl can consent to marriage, abortion or to cosmetic surgery. A minor procedure can be allowed for girls under the age of consent, as is the case with infant male circumcision. Defining what such a minor procedure would entail and what might be the appropriate ages of consent is an important step that must include the voices of the “silent majority” of women who are affected.

What western audiences rarely see and anti-FGM activists would prefer them not to see is the fact that many circumcised women who support their tradition are healthy (conditions of dire economic poverty, notwithstanding), lead sexually fulfilling lives and they as well their partners quite like their circumcised bodies. Then, there are some who (like some circumcised men) feel emotionally, psychologically and physically traumatized by their experiences. As Dr. Catania has pointed out and my own research among African immigrant women in Washington, D.C. confirms, it is usually the younger generation of circumcised girls and women who report experiences of sexual anxieties or dysfunction. This is due to what Catania refers to as “mental infibulation,” a provocative metaphor, as Shweder noted, which describes the feelings and experiences of shame, disfigurement and inferiority that these young women are made to endure as a result of the dehumanizing media representations and western social criticisms of their bodies and cultural practices.

The way forward is to look for solutions that would empower women (and men) to choose what to do with their own bodies. So, I will end here with a summary of some of the points I made at the 2007 public policy forum on FGC at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

My position is “pro-choice” on any form of female and male genital modifications (with the exception of minor cuts, such as circumcisions of male and female prepuce discussed above) and a complete rejection of the motto “zero-tolerance of FGM”. I am concerned that current U.S. and global polices on African forms of female genital surgeries discriminate against the bulk of circumcised women because of their social, ethnic, cultural and gender identity. This is made possible because of the high levels of illiteracy and low socio-economic status of circumcised women in sub-Saharan Africa as well as the sociopolitical disenfranchisement they face as immigrants in western countries. In particular, I am concerned about the official and exclusive reservation of the term “mutilation” to describe circumcised African women. Not only is this institutionalized discrimination but it is personally offensive to the majority of circumcised African women and to the cultures which practice female (and male) initiation.

It is possible to imagine alternative approaches, which would: 1/ validate the positive experiences of the majority of circumcised African women; 2/ recognize the rights of circumcised African women to self-determination; 3/ promote the equality of circumcised women in “underdeveloped” countries of sub-Sahara Africa with uncircumcised women in “developed” western countries; 4/ modify laws, policies and terminologies such as FGM that prejudice circumcised African women because of their social, ethnic and cultural identity, their general lack of formal western education and low socio-economic status (although, as Rick Shweder and others have pointed out, this is not the case for many infibulated women in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia who are well-educated, wealthy and hail from elite families) or in short, because of their difference and inequality vis-à-vis western women. I am referring here especially to western women’s cosmetic vaginal surgeries, the so-called designer vaginas and vaginal rejuvenations – some of which include cutting, trimming, reducing, reshaping the clitoris, labia minorae, surgical tightening of the vagina and even restoration of the hymen!

I also call for the protection of the rights of uncircumcised women in countries where female circumcision is the norm as well as the rights of circumcised women who choose to not circumcise their daughters, to abandon or even advocate against female circumcision. Although the vast majority of circumcised African women, like myself, take great cultural pride in our initiation there are clearly those among us who, for whatever reasons and there could be a number of reasons, do not share these positive experiences. So, I give my unequivocal support to such women working collectively for change that would protect them or their choice to opt out of this cultural practice. We can and must listen to women on all sides of this issue and promote policies that ensure equality, dignity, and justice for all women whatever our differences.
What do you think of Dr. Ahmadu’s ideas? Many readers have reacted to previous essays with blanket denunciations of these initation rites, often accompanied by assertions that reveal they haven’t even bothered to read the evidence from physicians and anthropologists presented in these essays. I hope we can get beyond angry generalizations and expressions of personal revulsion. Dr. Ahmadu has suggested a policy that would protect girls without banning these practices altogether. Is this a sensible compromise?

[mona amon]

It's obvious you haven't read the female circumcision articles I posted. There are intellectuals from the communities that practice female circumcision who defend the practice as part of their cultural self-determination. You see it as violent and cruel; well, they don't. Here's another article for you.

Now who's romanticizing? What an amazing ability you have to see only what you want to see, and turn a blind eye to everything else! The five year old I mentioned is not an example invented by me. She's no longer five, and she did survive and tell her story to the world. You can read it here http://www.fgmnetwork.org/articles/Waris.php

[miyako73]

How can I romanticize when I don't judge a culture or a cultural practice. Really? I'm posting these articles to show you how an objective mind of an anthropologist works. That's why I said beforehand that I would rather talk about rape than female circumcision--which I abhor personally but cannot criticize anthropologically. Now you're calling me a "romanticizer"? also as a trained anthropologist I want to see the change in the issue of female circumcision to come from inside (emic) rather than outside (etic).

You choose to side with those who want female circumcision banned totally. Anthropologists who stick to the sound practice of their discipline cannot choose the same stand you have because there are those who want female circumcision. Othering should not be the aim of anthropologists. What anthropologists do is connect the two opposing groups or views and find a compromise or let the change happen within.