Introduction

      “Circumcision is our tradition. It is our culture. Since the time of our ancient ancestors, the Kuria people have circumcised. When we were born we found our people circumcising. Since our ancestors did it, we must do it also.”

      —Klara Robi, female, nineteen-year-old Form IV graduate, employed in family business.

      My decision to write about genital cutting stems from a wish to share the understandings I have gained in observing and participating in initiation ritual cycles in Kuria communities of southwestern Kenya. After years of experience and deepened relationships with practicing members, I recognize that only through a holistic approach do these practices make sense—not only to me, but also to practitioners. As a spectator of genital cutting for the first time, I did not understand this; I was not adequately prepared intellectually or emotionally for what I witnessed. My responses were a mix of anxiousness and an attempt at cultural relativism. In sum, context matters, and I needed much more. So, I set out to learn the meanings—and significance—of initiation rituals as described by practitioners.

      Over time, I have come to acknowledge and appreciate how members of the community move through an initiation cycle replete with richly complex meanings. Even as I write this, I struggle with how best to represent the many ideas and forms of genital cutting as physical acts and deeply contextualized rituals; yet I hope to do so in a way that may bring the material to various audiences without apologizing for, defending, or condemning genital cutting. Through this book, I hope to reach those who practice genital cutting as a part of their cultural heritage, and those who are curious about traditions different from their own. I of course also hope to reach those who oppose genital cutting on principle, whether that perspective is based on ideals of what constitutes human rights, feminism, activism, or humanitarianism. My understanding may well remain partial, and although I am sometimes described as an authority on the topic, I prefer to consider myself a knowledgeable, critical observer.

      My role as a knowledgeable, critical observer derives from having listened to many voices, collected many stories, and watched, discussed, and participated in rituals of initiation for more than a decade. While I do exercise authority in deciding which perspectives are represented in this book, I have endeavored to include a range of voices—a mosaic composed of the voices of representatives from five groups. Each voice is individual, but also representative of others who share that social identity, selected to offer the polyvocality essential in treating this sensitive topic. Throughout the process of writing this book, which has spanned the better part of a decade, my ideas have been shaped through interaction with others who engage in some way with this topic of genital cutting. Some are Kuria, some are not. Some are circumcised, some are not. Some are academics, some missionaries, some feminists. Most are concerned with doing the right thing.

      My aim is to “reduce the puzzlement,” to borrow the words of Clifford Geertz (1973, 16–17). I have had countless conversations with friends, colleagues, and students grappling with the issues of genital cutting, especially female genital cutting. I have presented and debated the topic through professional talks at learned conferences, lectures at universities, and all manner of discussions in meetings, in work and nonwork settings, and even on vacation with my family. Most important, I have more than two dozen years of experience within a particular Kenyan community in which circumcision is a foregone conclusion for males, and clitoridectomy is still almost universally practiced among females. Through these many interactions, I have arrived at a form I think appropriate for this book. That truth and reality are contingent on the person experiencing or observing has become a given in the decades following the postmodern critique. But clearly, understanding the complexities surrounding genital cutting can only stem from an account of the variety of perspectives that pertain to the practice.

      The Voices

      The first perspective is mine.¹ I present it throughout the book, and my participation, responses, and understandings gained though ethnographic research are written in the first person. But this book is not a journey of self-discovery, and genital cutting was almost never the main focus of the longitudinal study I conducted in rural Kenya. As Julie Livingston describes in her book on the cancer epidemic in Botswana, “I keep myself in the scene because my presence in the situations described undoubtedly shaped what happened, and to write myself out of the text in the language of dispassionate science or journalistic voyeurism would be misleading” (2012, 26). I am a woman and consequently have only been able to witness female genital operations. I mention this as a caution, because throughout the book I describe both male and female genital cutting, practices that are seen as equivalent by self-identifying Kuria themselves, and are described in identical language for both males and females. Thus I make no categorical distinction between circumcision and clitoridectomy/FGM/FGC (female genital mutilation/female genital cutting)—terminological distinctions favored by analysts and activists with the intention of underscoring the differences inherent in the operations when performed on males and females.²

      In Kuria society, esaaro labels the series of rituals that includes genital cutting