Circumcision, Death, and Strangers

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3933397
AutoresKaren Middleton (0000-0001-7892-2230, autor correspondente)
Ano1997
Volume27
Fascículo1-4
Páginas341-373
Data de publicação1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of Religion in Africa (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0022-4200 • E-ISSN: 1570-0666
EditoraWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/157006697x00199
OpenAlexW2020199245
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas19
Referências citadas24

In his book How Societies Remember, Connerton (1989) shows the importance of bodily performance and commemorative ceremonies in the conscious evocation of the past. 'For images of the past and recollected knowledge of the past,' he argues, 'are conveyed and sustained by (more or less ritual) performances' (p. 4). The Jewish practice of circumcision provides a very good example of what Connerton means by the 'theology of memory,' for through the re-enactment of the prototypical event in the making of God's people, the circumcision of each boy, and then the circumcised body itself, come to serve as a powerful mnemonic of Jewishness. In this essay, I draw upon Connerton's argument to move in a contrary if complementary direction by looking at a people who once practised circumcision but now no longer do. I shall show how the uncircumcised body, in evoking the memory of a ritual they no longer perform, can equally be a form of commemoration, a kind of bodily memory, of a people's history, culture, and identity. Let me begin at the beginning, however, with the issue as I first encountered it. I was working among the Karembola of southern Madagascar, and I had gone to a funeral at Marokipa with Iavimasy and Dany. There we had spent the day watching the ceremonial boasting of rival clans as they made gifts of cattle and money to our hosts. We had also enjoyed the dancing, the singing, the wrestling, and the cattle stampedes that bid the deceased farewell. Now in the late afternoon, the time had come to bury the corpse. With the coffin perched precariously over the newly dug grave, a man took a knife and scored a deep notch in the wood. 'The deceased was uncircumcised,' Iavimasy commented, 'ancestral custom had not been observed.' 'You see,' he continued by way of explanation, 'we Karembola have forgotten our ancestral customs. We lost them all when the strangers came.' 'We're a people broken in by foreigners,' Dany added, 'like oxen put to yoke. The path today is held by strangers, and we just follow where they lead

Aesthetics · Anthropology of religion · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Clan · Collective memory · Criminology · Evocation · History of religions · Identity (music · Mnemonic · Political science · Singing · Sociology · Theology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Issues · Genital Health and Disease · History · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies