LA DIRECTORA GENERAL ADJUNTA DE CONTADURÍA DISPONE

controversial in anthropology. The characteristics of different social groups and their subjective sense of identity have been discussed in anthropology since the emergence of the discipline (for examples, see Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes 1945; Mitchell 1956; Goody 1956; Epstein 1958; Gluckman 1960). In many pioneering ethnographies, groups with a shared sense of social identity were referred to as ‘tribes’. Although this term was rejected by a number of authors, like Fortes (1945) and Goody (1956) for example, who held that ‘no “tribe” … can be circumscribed by a precise boundary – territorial, linguistic, cultural or political. Each merges with its neighbours in all these respects’ (Fortes 1940: 239–240). Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1940) tried to use more neutral terms like ‘peoples’ instead of ‘tribe’, but tended to refer to the unit under investigation using terms like ‘the Tallensi’, ‘the Kanuri’ and ‘the Nuer’ to refer to presumably homogeneous socio-cultural entities (Lentz 1995: 315). Southall (1970) was the first to suggest that what had often been referred to as ‘tribe’ was in fact an invention of anthropologists and of colonialism.

Another influential but also much critiqued thinker on ‘ethnicity’ and social identity was Fredrik Barth (1969). Barth (1969: 14–15) holds that ethnic groups essentially exist in the relationship between ‘us’ and ‘others’. Barth argued that ethnic groups:

designate a population which:

1. is largely biologically self-perpetuating

2. shares fundamental cultural values, realized in overt unity in cultural forms 3. makes up a field of communication and interaction

4. has a membership which identifies itself, and is identified by others as constituting a category distinguishable from other categories of the same order. (Barth 1998: 2–3)

For Barth (1969) it is not possible to define an ethnic group as a possessor of a particular culture, which makes it distinctive. Although cultural features like language, dress, lifestyle and moral values are not unimportant, it is the maintenance of the boundary between one group and another that is critical in defining ethnicity. ‘The critical focus of investigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff which it encloses’ (Barth 1969:15). Hence, the culture of a group may be ‘transformed’ and the cultural items which mark A as different from B may be changed. Nevertheless, distinct groups A and B persist (Fenton 2010: 91).

I found that locals in Fouta Toro, regardless of status group, referred to excision as a marker of boundary and that women of other ethnic groups who do not practise excision were perceived as less moral, less able to contain their sexual desires and less civilised. In this thesis I will explore these imagined boundaries further and contribute to a body of literature that explores women’s reproductive and sexual capacity and how boundaries of group identity and purity are constructed around women’s chastity (see for instance Pitt-Rivers 1965; Caplan 1987; Goddard 1987; Davis 1977; Abu- Lughod 1999, 2008; Gupta 2002; Yuval-Davis and Anthias 1989; Kandiyoti 1988, 1991, 1998; Hawley 1994; Moghadam 1994; Wilson and Frederiksen 1995; Das 1996, 2007; Okeley 1983; Mody 2009).

Since the 1980s, the trend concerning ethnicity in anthropology has been to portray conceptions of group identities in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts as not fixed, bounded and unchanging entities (Fardon 1996; Kopytoff 1987; Ekeh 1990; Sharpe 1986; Vail 1989; Comaroff 1995; Peel 1983, 1989); and it has been acknowledged that the effects of the ‘tribal politics’ of colonial administrations in many African countries, and the politics of difference it created, has a legacy in post- colonial Africa (see Malkki 1995; Mamdani 1996, 2012). In his recent work Mamdani

(2012) shows how social identities emerged from the ‘tribes’ that were created by colonial administration, and how claims to land and reference to customary law in the native territories persist among social groups who continue to identify with these colonial categorisations to varying degrees. Comaroff and Comaroff (2009) look at how what is called ‘ethnic’ identity is used as a brand by some, to sell a particular lifestyle or to make the business of a particular social group recognisable as belonging to them.

I am aware of the potential hazards when discussing, defining and generalising local conceptions of so-called ethnic identity. What some might consider a marker of identity may not comply with other social groups’ sense of identity, although they all belong to the same ‘ethnic’ category. To help us think about what ethnicity and identity are in this thesis I want to look some interesting and pertinent approaches to studying identity.

Comaroff (1995) argued that:

ethnic – indeed all – identities are not ‘things’ but relations … their content is wrought in the particularities of their ongoing historical construction. Which is why, I believe, the substance of ethnicity and nationality can never be defined or decided in the abstract. And why there cannot be a ‘theory’ of ethnicity or nationality per se, only a theory of history and consciousness capable of elucidating the empowered production of identities. (Comaroff 1995: 249)

Leve suggests that an anthropologist studying identity should not look ‘at individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience’ (2011: 514) and focus ‘on the conditions and means by which specific kinds of experience come into being’ (2011: 514).

I find both, Leve’s phenomenological approach and Comaroff’s emphasis on keeping in mind the historical construction of identities crucial to ethnographic fieldwork on the practices of a particular social group generally referred to as ‘the Futanke’ or ‘the Haalpulaar of Fouta Toro’.

In local discourses, notions of ethnic identity are often related to physical aspects of the body – and vice versa, the body is often ascribed traits that are perceived as markers of identity. Bourdieu argues that this process of enculturation and ‘deculturation’ happens in the following way:

If all societies … that seek to produce a new man through a process of ‘deculturation’ and ‘reculturation’ set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of culture. The principles em-bodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more inimitable, and, therefore, more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand’. (Bourdieu 1977: 94)

The relationship between the social world, the body and human experience has been explored in a growing body of literature since Mauss’s 1934 lecture on ‘techniques of the body’. Mauss explored how physical movement during activities like swimming, soldiers marching or digging, differed cross-culturally (Mauss 1973). Acquiring a skill is not merely a matter of learning a technique but this technique seems to be culturally embedded. For example Mauss, points out that: ‘There are techniques of giving birth, both on the mother’s part and on that of the helpers, of holding the baby, cutting and tying the umbilical cord, caring for the mother, caring for the child’ (1973: 79). The ways in which the body is ‘naturally’ employed in activities differ according to ‘habitus’, the ‘acquired ability’ and ‘faculty’ that varies ‘especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges’ (Mauss 1973: 73).

Merleau-Ponty suggested that:

It is false to place ourselves in society as an object among other objects, as it is to place society within ourselves as an object of thought, and in both cases the mistake lies in treating the social as an object. We must return to the social

with which we are in contact by the mere fact of existing, and which we carry about inseparably with us before any objectification. (1962: 362)

Since Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977), with some precursors such as Mauss (1935) and Merleau-Ponty (1962), Douglas (1966), Elias (1978) the body is no longer seen as only an object of ‘culture’ – it cannot be placed outside an analysis of social processes. These theoretical developments have since been reflected in anthropological and ethnographic work on the politics of health and medicine (see for instance Lock 1991; Lock and Scheper-Hughes 1990; Morsy 1980; Murphy 1987; Taussing 1987; Kleinman 1988; Lindenbaum and Lock 1993; Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1991), the politics of reproduction (see for instance Boddy 1989; Bordo 1993; Grosz 1994; Martin 1987, 1990, 1991; Rapp 1987, 1992); sexuality (e.g. Butler 1993), emotions (see Lutz 1986, 1988; Rosaldo, M. 1984; Rosaldo R. 1984), violence (see for instance Comaroff 1991; Ferrandiz 2004; Scheper-Hughes 1992), bodily inscriptions and memory (Connerton 1989, 2011) and phenomenological and epistemological approaches in anthropology (see for instance Csordas 1989, 1994, 1999; Farnell 1999, Lock 1993).

In accordance with this literature I suggest that bodily transformations (e.g. through excision) are simultaneously social transformations. Every change to the body that is justified as ‘tradition’ or ‘cultural practice’ is an act of reaffirmation of one’s social identity and an act of classification about how one’s own practices are different to those of others (Douglas 1966). Some alterations to the body or embodied practices can be seen as an act of approximation, the desire to resemble a particular social group, e.g. by dancing like or adorning oneself like, or imitating the bodily practices of those we desire, aspire to, find attractive or beautiful. Other bodily practices can be performed as an act of protection against cultural influences we want to keep away from. Throughout this thesis I shall explore the ways in which social identifications are achieved through the body and how excision as a practice changing the body is part of this process.