Grillo Laura S. Grillo

Intimate Rebuke (eBook, PDF)

Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Throughout West African societies, at times of social crises, postmenopausal women-the Mothers-make a ritual appeal to their innate moral authority. The seat of this power is the female genitalia. Wielding branches or pestles, they strip naked and slap their genitals and bare breasts to curse and expel the forces of evil. In An Intimate Rebuke Laura S. Grillo draws on fieldwork in Cote d'Ivoire that spans three decades to illustrate how these rituals of Female Genital Power (FGP) constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. When deployed in secret, FGP operates as spiritual warfare against witchcraft; in public, it serves as a political activism. During Cote d'Ivoire's civil wars FGP challenged the immoral forces of both rebels and the state. Grillo shows how the ritual potency of the Mothers' nudity and the conjuration of their sex embodies a moral power that has been foundational to West African civilization. Highlighting the remarkable continuity of the practice across centuries while foregrounding the timeliness of FGP in contemporary political resistance, Grillo shifts perspectives on West African history, ethnography, comparative religious studies, and postcolonial studies.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 328
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Januar 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781478002635
• Artikelnr.: 55007339

Autorenporträt

Laura S. Grillo

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. Home and the Unhomely: The Foundational Nature of Female Genital
Power  19
1. Genies, Witches, and Women: Locating Female Powers  21
2. Matrifocal Morality: FGP and the Foundations of "Home"  54
3. Gender and Resistance: The "Strategic Essentialism" of FGP  81
Part II. Worldliness: FGP in the Making of Ethnicity, Alliance, and the War
in Côte D'Ivoire  117
4. Founding Knowledge/Binding Power: The Moral Foundations of Ethnicity and
Alliance  121
5. Women at the Checkpoint: Challenging the Forces of Civil War  152
Part III. Timeliness: Urgent Situations and Emergent Critiques  171
6. Violation and Deployment: FGP in Politics in Côte D'Ivoire  175
7. Memory, Memorialization, and Morality  198
Conclusion. An Intimate Rebuke: A Local Critique in the Global Postcolony 
228
Notes  239
References  255
Index  275