The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs by Saida Hodžić

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs by Saida Hodžić Miriam Hird-Younger Saida Hodžić, The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 416 pp. Those reading The Twilight of Cutting seeking a delineated or straightforward overview of the meaning of cutting or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), its prevalence, and the rates of its decline in Ghana will be disappointed. Instead, what this detailed text offers is an intricate "ethnography of problematization," in which the purpose is to "examine how cutting becomes an object of intervention" (8). This ethnography provides a historicization and exploration of how cutting has been made into an immutable problem requiring anti-cutting campaigns and sensitization programs in Ghana. Hodžić's appoach introduces the central paradox of such problematization—cutting is waning in Ghana even as international and national discourses articulate its intractability. In her investigation, Hodžić focuses on the perspectives and histories of Ghanaian-led Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that work on anti-cutting. The rich ethnography and the skillful circumvention of the typical questions of prevalence and meaning relating to FGM provide the reader with an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how Ghanaian NGOs operate within global development discourses, social norms of relationality in Ghana, and their own ways of making sense of their efforts to regulate and to campaign for the end of cutting. Through ethnographic fieldwork with two NGOs in Accra and the Upper East Region of Ghana between 2002 and 2009, including research in rural communities of the Upper East, Hodžić "examines the genealogies of anti-cutting campaigns and the forms of rule, subjectivity, and positioning they instantiate" (9). The problematization of cutting has long historical [End Page 691] trails, Hodžić argues, as it has been bound up in efforts to govern the Northern regions of Ghana as well as modernization and development ideologies about the Ghanaian state. A central theme of the book is the continuity of moralizing projects from colonial to development interventions, which have constructed groups that practice cutting as "unruly and against whom [the state] defines itself as modern and governable" (15). The production of the "traditional" and "modern" binary is a mechanism of governing rural subjects, which Hodžić traces through the colonial period (Chapter 1) to global and national articulations of "harmful traditional practices" (Chapter 2) and to the ongoing surveillance of rural communities by articulating cutting as going "underground" (Chapter 3). The subsequent chapters subtly unpack and complicate such mechanisms of governance by demonstrating how NGOs work in their own ways beyond international discourses (Chapter 4), how waning practices of cutting can be understood through structural inequalities and scarcity (Chapter 5), and how the lifeworlds of NGO staff and activists are not wholly encompassed by governmental regulations and interventions (Chapters 6 and 7). The analysis begins in Chapter 1 with a history of how cutting has been made legible as a practice to be regulated and governed. In the 1920s, white British women in Parliament campaigned against cutting in British colonies, requesting administrators to report on the practice. Hodžić shows how male British colonial administrators took a more relativist perspective and prepared ethnographic accounts of the prevalence and practices of cutting, pushing back against legislation. Hodžić illustrates that these ethnographic accounts come back to the same questions on which anthropologists are still asked to comment: prevalence, age, meaning, geographic regions, etc. Arguing that colonial officials were interested in preserving "tradition" as a foundation for colonial rule, Hodžić's historical tracing offers a subtle critique of the limits of relativism. Northern Ghana was administered through indirect rule, which "remade the region as traditional" (77) in order to maintain a social order that served the British. While such colonial accounts were representations by and for British administrators and audiences, in the subsequent chapters, Hodžić focuses on the ways that Ghanaian NGOs have problematized, intervened in, and advocated against cutting, all while still being bound up in global discourses and meaning making. As the title of the chapter suggests, Chapter 2 outlines the attribution of poverty to "Harmful Traditional Practices" (the chapter title...