and was connected to achieving a gendered adult status. Knight argues that the representation of female circumcision by Greeks “shifted the custom into the realm of physician‐surgeon” (329) and that it could have been connected to ensuring generation was possible because it was linked to marriage (336). This can only be a guess as there is no other information beyond this reference. Female circumcision, even if not clearly related to a definitive rite in this context, marked the child as female and in need of physical alteration in order to successfully negotiate marriage and in this gendered adulthood.
Ancient Egypt is one of the earliest sites for reference to the rite of circumcision, while the text of Genesis 17 in the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), dated to the Jewish exile in Babylon (597–38 BCE), registers infant male circumcision as a sacrificial rite to ensure relations between deity and humans, in this case Abraham and his family and descendants. Continuing in the texts of the Tanakh, Exodus, Joshua, and Leviticus all locate male circumcision as necessary in order to be in right relationship with the deity in the texts. Exodus 4: 24–6, also most likely from the exilic period, presents YHWH (sometimes spelled Yahweh in English) as seeking to kill Moses. Only the swift action of Tsipporah, his wife, circumcising their son and offering YHWH the bloody foreskin allowed her to ward off the deity’s murderous intent. In Joshua 5–6, dated to the seventh or eighth century BCE, to march with YHWH’s divine army the Jewish male warriors must be circumcised, while in Leviticus 12, dated to the sixth century BCE, circumcision of eight‐day old males is stated as a divine requirement. The interplay between deity and human male is established through the rite of circumcision, something not required of Jews marked as female. Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 40 CE) argued that female circumcision was unnecessary as she was inert matter and therefore did not shape the nature of the child, nor was the female/feminine subject to the same kind of excessive desires as the male/masculine (1993, QG: 47).
Circumcision, Identity, and Rites of Passage
Practiced in ancient worlds, circumcision continues to be performed in the modern world around the globe. Along with people who circumcise infant boys for religious or health reasons, peoples throughout the Middle East, Northern, Western and sub‐Saharan African countries, Polynesia, and Australia have practiced male circumcision as a rite of passage. Female circumcision as a rite of passage is less often encountered, turning up in North, West, East and sub‐Saharan Africa, and in modern Egypt.
Both female and male circumcision involve altering the genitals. The alteration of the genitals signifies in multiple ways, but one of the most meaningful is identity: identity that is constructed and performed in terms of age, gender, sexuality, kinship, and membership in the larger community. The cut establishes divisions between kinds, however kinds are determined.
For example, among the Kuria of Kenya the cut of the penis and vagina creates/marks/reinforces low social status from high social status, child from adult, female from male, non‐marriageable from marriageable, non‐traditionalists from traditionalists, inauthentic Kuria from authentic Kuria, urban from rural, the shameful from the prideful, and the cowardly from the brave (Prazak, 2016). Critically engaging the language of circumcision, Boke Joyce Wambura writes that:
The one who defecates in the cattle corral and the one with foul smell metaphors are used for the uncircumcised women. To defecate in the cattle corral is taboo among the Kuria people. It is believed that if you defecate in the corral you are a coward who is not brave enough to go out to the nearby bushes and relieve yourself. It therefore shows that an uncircumcised woman is a coward who cannot face the night in the same way she has not faced the knife/razor.
(2018: 166)
Identity, of course, is central to belonging to the group and to a sense of self within the context of the group. Among the Kuria, without circumcision one is marginal to the group. For Kuria boys transiting to manhood requires that they must not show fear before, during, or after their circumcision. Standing strong, shoulder to shoulder with their cohort they are cut with a knife, short sword, or razor, whatever sharp instrument the boys have brought with them, by the circumciser. Miroslava Prazak notes that the circumciser will test the blade of the boy and if found not sharp enough will use his own instrument, and that any kind of body gesture that suggests fear is read as marking the youth as a coward, a mark that he may well carry for his life (Prazak, 2016: 72–3).
Rites of circumcision do not stand alone and are enmeshed in a larger ritual process that began with the separation of children from their families and ended with the recognition of the adult gendered status of the initiates by their community. The process can take years in some locations and often is only completed when the initiate marries. Arnold van Gennep (1960) developed a structural model by which to understand rites of passage. Rites of passage, he demonstrated, have three separate parts: separation, or the preliminal segment/phase; the liminal segment/phase; and reintroduction or the postliminal segment/phase. All three segments/phases are interconnected and allow each segment/phase to make sense. Separation, for example, creates the conditions for the liminal segment/phase, while the liminal segment/phase creates the conditions for the reincorporation back into the social body with a new identity: in the case of circumcision a new gendered adult identity. Drawing on the Mende rite of circumcision as a preliminary rite to allow for the acquisition of knowledge and social power secured through the secret societies of the Sande and Poro, in the next section I speak to the three segments/phases of the rite using van Gennep’s model by which to think about the circumcision of the fleshy bits called/named genitals.
Circumcision and the Sande and Poro of the Mende of Sierra Leone
The Mende‐speaking people are located in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea and consist of a number of geographic branches across these countries. All three western African countries fell under colonial rule and all three emerged from this rule in the second half of the twentieth century. With the formal withdrawal of colonial powers, what was left in the wake was corruption and crumbling infrastructure. As Mariane Ferme wrote:
Like other parts of postcolonial Africa, the natural landscape of Sierra Leona was littered in the 1980s with relics – traces left behind by the colonial state and its modernizing project. These relics were being swallowed up by vegetation, which was reclaiming these sites at a time when the postcolonial state no longer provided services, or constituted much of a presence, in rural areas lacking significant mineral resources.
(2001: 23)
Emerging from colonialism, Sierra Leone fell foul of corrupt politics, civil war, and violence involving blood diamonds, which took the lives of 50,000 people or more in the period from 1992 to 2002, all of which conspired to push the country into economic and social despair. Although the political system was stabilized by 2002 and Sierra Leone began the long road to recovery, in 2014 an Ebola outbreak began that did not end until March 2016 and took the lives of over 3,000 Sierra Leoneans (Richards, 2016: 81).
An enduring social institution among the Mende are the closed sodalities of the Sande and the Poro. The Sande and Poro societies predate colonization and have continued after its more explicit forms have fallen by the wayside (Arewa and Hale, 1975: 81; Richards, 1973). The most common demogonic myth that speaks to the foundation of the Poro relates a story of murder and deception, the outcome of which is the founding of the Poro society.3 Entrance into the Poro, within which necessary and important knowledge was disseminated while significant ritual, social, political, and economic relations were forged, requires that boys become men. The rite that opened the way to the Poro Society was/is the cutting off of the foreskin of the penis (Kalous, 1995: 318; Pemunta and Tabenyang). Equally so with girls and the Sande Society, whose demogonic myth is not known: forged through the fire of ritual, the cutting off of the clitoris is seen to open the way to acquire knowledge, and gain access to social, political and economic positions (Pemunta
