School of Social and Political Science

Description

I draw on my monograph amaXhosa Circumcision: Stories of Manhood and Mental Health (2021) - recently released by Routledge - to explore how circumcision practices, enculturated into a phenomenal rite of passage, coalesce emergent and existing states of Xhosa personhood. 

The stories I describe originate from my research in Valkenberg Hospital for the Mentally Unwell, as here I was asked by a psychiatrist to explore the psychotic content in 75 amaXhosa men whose psychotic content contained resonating symbolic images from the 6-month ritual initiation. I take advantage of my position as a medical educator to briefly touch on how such traumatic injury instigates radical shifts in youths neurological and cognitive dispositions modelling their future behaviour. However, it is my substantial decades long ethnographic fieldwork that underpins my understanding of this cultural engendering. 

I describe states of personhood as engendered from the moment of birth and that in fathers’ taking their sons for circumcision after 16 years of age and with their consent, mothers withdraw releasing themselves to engender young women. In so doing, the mother’s son becomes the son of the mother. States of personhood are however, far more complex than this gendered dualism for wo-man-hood implies, for rites of passage - of which circumcision is but one - fashion a far more complex engendering of transitions and states of human-being amongst these African autochthons. My discussion on gender is inspired by a discourse on African Womanism and this infers on my ethical position in presenting this material as an African born, European woman.