Piece of New ~

Hello classmates (: , today I am going to talk about a  tradition that, to me, it’s terrible. Annually, thousands of girls are subject of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Indonesia. This tradition consists in “cutting off part of the hood and/or tip of the clitoris with scissors, a blade or a piece of sharpened bamboo”. The Islamic institutions that perform the intervention explained that this is realized to control the women’s sexual urges. This proceeding involves physical and psychological risks to the girls that undergo this.  In a country like Indonesia, which is considered by geopolitical standards like a “superstar” in Asian region, the world’s fourth-largest country and most populous Muslim nation of 240 million people, it results weird that a tradition like FGM is legitimate, above all this is not an obligatory practice for the Islamism.  Today, most of Indonesian hospital offers a pack to the parents for newborn baby girl, which includes the costs of childbirth; the ear perforation and the genital mutilation.  If parents didn’t take this option, there are foundations that do the intervention in schools, disguising this like a party for the girls.

I choose these piece of new because, to us and for medicine’s eyes, the female genital mutilation it’s a barbaric tradition, but like the news says, to the Islamic people it must be perpetuated, so I think anthropology must try to understand the reasons why they try to preserve this and try to get a solution that conciliate both opinions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/18/female-genital-mutilation-circumcision-indonesia