Female Genital Mutilation

I was intrigued to find this article, "Rights Versus Rites" on female genital mutilation linked to on this feminist website. Female genital mutilation raises the question of the relationship between individual rights and tradition. This article argues for working to guarantee individual rights without destroying or ignoring the tradition and culture of a people:

"Despite her stalwart rejection of harmful traditions, the last thing Pareyio wants is for the girls at Tasaru to end up alienated from Masai culture. Instead, she wants Masai culture to change to embrace strong, educated women. Female circumcision is the way girls have traditionally been initiated into Masai womanhood. Pareyio sees much of value in the initiation process, and she's trying to keep it alive without the cut. Each August groups of girls come to Tasaru for an alternative rite-of-passage ceremony. Slowly, Pareyio's community has started to see her as a leader rather than a threat.

Ahmadu's argument, that to decry circumcision is to decry her very culture, is a persuasive one. Liberals have many reasons to sympathize with people struggling to hold on to their ways of life in the face of the hegemonic steamroller of globalization. But they have even more reason to sympathize with people like Pareyio who are fighting for individual rights in societies that demand subsuming such rights to tradition and myths about sexual purity. After all, even if relativists like Shweder truss them up in fashionable thirdworldism, such demands are the very essence of reactionary conservatism.

No outsider could ever create the kind of change Pareyio has, but Pareyio couldn't have had such a profound impact without outside help. Ultimately, she offers a model for President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton as they try to expand women's rights around the world. Pareyio's work is possible because of the global system that pressured Kenya to change its laws, and because of the grass-roots funding that enables her to help the girls in her community. The United States needs to work on both levels -- at the macro-level of U.N. conferences and international law and at the hyper-local level where only people who are really part of the community can make a difference. To support people like Pareyio -- as well as those fighting to implement the Maputo Protocol or working against draconian abortion bans or the terrible iniquities of Sharia law -- is to reject relativism. It is to believe that other cultures, like our own, can change in necessary ways without being destroyed."