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In Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debates over Female Genital Operations, Walley discusses the social issues concerning female genital operations as perceived by “westerners”, as well as discusses her ethnographic account of female circumcision. Her main purpose of doing this was to lay the groundwork for “a more productive feminist and anthropological debate” capable of going beyond the binary terms in which female circumcisions are usually discussed. Since female circumcisions are known by a variety of names, such as female genital mutilation and female genital torture, and with her understanding of the negative connotation often associated with those varieties of names, Walley makes the decision to adopt the term female genital operations instead. In 1988, Walley went in the village of KiKhome, in western Kenya as an English teacher and immersed herself in the lives of the people living around the village to better understand the practice of female genital operations as an outsider. One day, some of her students invited her to assist at a female genital operation ceremony. She found out that the participants see circumcision as a rite of passage into adulthood. However, she truly wanted to know the participants’ personal views on the topic rather than the imposed views of their parents and their culture. The four women she interviewed told her that “their custom was good,” and it was something that a person needs to accept with her whole being not to feel the pain. Nevertheless, some of the women told her that they would not want their daughters to undergo circumcision, and that they themselves regretted having done the procedure. Walley finally gave up “searching for real voices,” because what t...

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...en she acknowledges that she made a wrong argument back in 1974.
Both Brodkin and Blackwood talk about the way women are perceived by society in their article. Black wood talk about how in Indonesia, women are primarily responsible for their children and their family’s health, care and education while Brodkin discusses how women were less reliable, and more exploitable, which caused them to become lower ranking to and dependent on men. After reading Tombois in West Sumatra: Constructing Masculinity and erotic desire and Searching for “Voices”: Feminism, Anthropology, and the Global Debates over Female Genital Operations, all I could think about was cultural relativism and the quote by Franz Boas that I read in my sociology course “civilization is not something absolute, but…is relative, and…our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilizations goes.”

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