BOOK TALK: Compromised Bodies

The Home Office in the Home: A longitudinal look at mixed-citizenship families and deportability

Speaker | Sarah O'Neill  

Abstract

The Senegalese parliament decreed a national ban on Female Genital Mutilation in 1999. As only around a third of the Senegalese population practised female genital cutting (FGC) at the time, policy makers did not expect that the new law would cause commotion. Yet, in Fouta Toro - homeland to the Fulani and so-called “cradle of Islam” in West Africa - the response to the new law was full of anger and violence. More than a decade after the ban Fouta Toro was known as “the most difficult region” for governmental and non-governmental awareness raising activities. Tyres were burnt, international NGO delegates were threatened and kept inside a hotel, activists publicly speaking out against the practice were religiously condemned, people were afraid - not just of physical violence but also of the marabouts’ spiritual power. Today, animosity towards the law is still palpable in the region. The ban, many locals say, is nothing other than an act of cultural imperialism imposed by the West, and resisting the ban is paramount to maintaining the autonomy and integrity of lifeways within the region. From the outside, opposition to the law and NGOs seemed unified and strong. On the ground, however, things were far more complicated. 

This ethnography unravels the continued political tensions surrounding national and international interventions that place protection of the female body at the centre of their concerns. I show how some claim the female body to be a reproducer of cultural identities, with reference to duties through kin obligations; others refer to human rights and the state. By way of the many stories of women and men caught up in these debates, the book reveals the personal struggles and difficult decisions Fulani face, be they traditional cutters, religious leaders, mothers and husbands, divorced women, male or female activists.

Sarah O’Neill (ULB and Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren)

Sarah O’Neill is Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology and a FEDtWIN researcher between the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and the Royal Museum of Central Africa (Tervuren). She obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2013. The PhD research was concerned with local people’s opposition to the national ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Fouta Toro, northern Senegal and was awarded the Audrey Richards Prize of the African Studies Association of the UK.  She then went to Belgium for a postdoctoral position as a medical anthropologist at the Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp. She started working at the ULB as a lecturer in anthropology and postdoc in public health in 2018.