MGF/E: which spaces for a critical anthropology? Dialogues, resistances and new opportunities

This book is the product of the Seminar held in Rome on the 24 and 25 of November 2017, as part of the MAP-FGM project (https://mapfgm.eu). During the seminar the anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, leading exponent of the humanitarian field, medical doctors and jurists, coming from different parts of the world, exchanged their knowledge trying to : re-introducing the FGM issue inside a scientific anthropological framework, seeking to widen the theme to body modifiability, not only women’s bodies, and proceeding from historicization and the acknowledgment of subjectivities; criticising the approaches exclusively grounded on medicine, as with other forms of criminalization, examining the connection with the other disciplines and their knowledge potential; finally, opening the issue to uncommon geographical fields, both in Africa and Asia. In line with the proposal of a public anthropology, our main objective has been establishing the conditions for building a socio-ethno-anthropological gaze on the social gender constructions and on the biopolitics on/of the bodies, by making emerge the strengths but, most of all, the weaknesses, of the medical and regulatory gazes, which, on their part, call into question an anthropological vocabulary which does not pertain to them, and risk to produce effects opposed to the ones wished, that is the abandonment of these practices. With contributions of: Omar Abdulcadir, Jean-Loup Amselle, Esther Ayuk, Franca Bimbi, Lucrezia Catania, Giovanna Cavatorta, Gily Coene, Ricardo Falcão, Michela Fusaschi, Irwan Hidayana, Sara Johnsdotter, Bianca Pomeranzi, Ismail Guedi Sougeuh, Michela Villani.