Introduction

The words ‘cultural practices’ have returned to the public arena as a defence of FGM/C, whereas for decades, at least since the 1970s when the major international organisations formulated and classified FGM/C, these practices have been seen as an assault on women’s bodies and been used to denounce both the cultures that practise them and the practices themselves. According to MP Gibba, the banning of FGM/C ‘is a direct violation of citizens’ rights to practise their culture and religion as guaranteed by the Constitution’. In this sense, the ban’s abolition would also be a defence against external imperialism that threatens to erase one’s own culture. On the other hand, the very notion of culture ‘is often depicted as an obstacle to “progress”’ (Hodgson 2017) towards women’s freedom and emancipation. This idea has underpinned all the historical ‘neo-evolutionist’ discourses on FGM/C within the major international organisations and the feminist movements that have shaped them.

In this chapter, the focus is on examining umbrella terms such as ‘harmful traditional practices’, ‘harmful cultural practices’, ‘traditional practices’,3 For example, see https://www.unicef.org/protection/harmful-practices (briefing dated July 2023). A more recent video (March 2025) is this: https://knowledge.unicef.org/resource/prevention-harmful-practices-php-what-works-end-female-genital-mutilation [Both accessed 10 August 2025]. or ‘cultural practices that are violent towards women in the family’4 Delivered at the 58th Session of the Commission on Human Rights in 2002. in the international historical discourse. For simplicity, this chapter will refer to harmful traditional practices. It will go beyond the origins of this formulation, which has been addressed by others (Jaschok et al. 2024; Longman and Bradley 2015).

The long process that led to the WHO’s definition of FGM/C was discussed as a Foucauldian discourse (the way knowledge and meaning are historically organised in a social system within power relations that may involve different kinds of bodily discipline), reconstructing the historical use of the concept of non-therapeutic reasons for surgery. The author has also traced how FGM/C has been seen as a violation of bodily integrity and human rights, and how the practice has been isolated and defined, then grouped into four categories by the WHO, and finally criminalised and prohibited by law (Fusachi 2023). It is increasingly discussed alongside other genital modifications (Boddy 2020; Earp and Johnsdotter 2021; Fusaschi 2011, 2015; Mowat et al. 2015; and Chapters 3, 10, and 12 in this volume).

This chapter seeks to understand how certain specific categories of cultural anthropology (the author’s discipline), such as tradition and culture, are used to construct an imperfect glossary in the field of defining harmful traditional practices. It is important both to highlight the historical differences between the feminist movements of the Global North and South since the 1970s, and to understand the role of anthropology in the transition from women’s anthropology to feminist anthropology, which focuses specifically on power relations. This historical period coincided with the crystallisation of terminology within international organisations. This chapter is part of a larger study examining the discipline’s links with other feminist anthropological discourses of the period (Walley 1997), and examines how conceptualisations of these anthropological categories were integrated into the formula ‘traditional/cultural practices’. It then shows how this formula is used tactically by various actors, both local and global. It explores this imperfect glossary by highlighting its impact on ethnography and practitioners, which, in turn, complicates collaboration with policy makers who can manipulate it for their own purposes, hindering intercultural dialogue and complicating the fight against FGM/C.