Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, this paper explores how efforts to end 'FGM' practices in Maasai communities around the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania are entangled with various actors' assumptions and assertions about the desirability of women's virginity and sexual fidelity.

Paper long abstract:

In Tanzania's Kilimanjaro region, NGO employees campaigning for the abandonment of 'FGM' predominantly identify as Chagga and are based around urban Moshi, while the primary targets of their interventions are comparatively rural and less affluent Maasai people. Female genital cutting practices largely ended in Chagga communities decades ago, but continue to be the norm in these Maasai communities. Drawing on fifteen months of fieldwork, this paper explores how local efforts to end FGM are entangled with people's assumptions and assertions about the desirability of women's virginity and sexual fidelity. Maasai initiation into adulthood, emurata, involves genital cutting for both women and men. For many, this initiation remains integral to their Maasai identity, personhood, and religious relationship with the deity Eng'ai. Premarital sex is expected, extramarital sex is tolerated, and paternity is recognized in terms of marriage rather than biology. Recent increases in urban migration, however, have for some increased the importance ascribed to biological kinship. Christianity has played a pivotal role in Maasai discourses supporting an end to women's emurata. Maasai Christians advocating against women's emurata have in certain cases encouraged the 'modern' expectation of premarital virginity and discouraged the commonplace practice of child adoption. Non-Maasai NGO employees working around Kilimanjaro generally assume virginity is a traditional requirement for Maasai marriage. This assumption likely stems partly from the historical expectation of virginity prior to Chagga marriage as well as broader transnational discourses which present attempts to ensure virginity and prevent adultery as key reasons for the continuation of FGM procedures.