APELC Class Notes
Objective: APELCers responded to their peers’ cause and effect drafts.
As the objective states boys and girls. I also mentioned briefly, unable to forget the discussion we had over relativism and cultural rights and wrongs, a piece I fortuitously came across earlier in the day about female circumcision or female genital cutting as it’s described by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The text, “A Cutting Tradition”, by Sara Cobett, appears with Stephanie Sinclair’s photo essay “Inside a female circumcision ceremony”, and below is one of the images of a 9-month-old girl after she experienced the procedure.
The photo reminded me of my daughter.
She’s ethnically Sidama, born in southern Ethiopia. Female circumcision is still practiced in this area which I find troubling (read more, “Turning the tide on female genital mutilation in Ethiopia”). The practice exists here too, as described in a 1995 The Atlantic piece: “Female Circumcision Comes to America”.
As an artifact of culture, I wonder how the practice fits into the framework described by Daniel Bell and the encyclopedia definition I asked you to note at the beginning of the year:
Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives. (qtd. in Daniel Yankelovich)
[Culture is] Behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements. (Encyclopædia Britannica)
Study more at the World Health Organization’s information page on female genital mutilation and read about the “Debates about FGM in Africa, the Middle East & Far East” at ReligiousTolerance.org.