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*CFP AAA panel 2011
Annual Meeting of American Anthropological Association, November 16-20, 
Montréal, Canada

*

*Interrogating 'Harmful Cultural Practices' Comparatively (working title)*

Session Organizers:
Chia Longman, PhD, Ghent University, Belgium
Tamsin Bradley, PhD, London Metropolitan University, U.K.

This panel aims to bring together papers that critically engage with the 
notion of 'harmful cultural practices' from an anthropological 
perspective. We invite papers on harmful cultural practices (HCPs) and 
their conceptualization from all fields of anthropology; e.g., grounded 
in ethnographic research; qualitative and discursive analysis of 
activism, development work and policy-making; cross cultural comparison; 
and more (feminist) theoretically oriented work, including legal and 
ethical approaches throughout the world.

'Harmful cultural (sometimes 'traditional') practices' is a term 
increasingly employed in the last three decades by organizations working 
within a human rights framework to refer to certain discriminatory 
practices against women in the South, especially in Africa and Asia. In 
UN policy documents such practices are presumed to reflect shared values 
and beliefs that span generations and are tied to 'cultural traditions' 
of gender inequality which implya violation of women's rights to 
'health, life, dignity and personal integrity'. A wide range of 
practices has been labeled as harmful cultural practices, including 
female genital 'mutilation', child and forced marriages, unequal marital 
and inheritance rights; gender-based violence; nutritional taboos and 
traditional birth practices; son preference, prenatal sex selection and 
female infanticide; widow immolation and dowry deaths; honor crimes, 
polygamy; wife repudiation, etc.

Although it is not easy to find a clear-cut definition of HCPs in policy 
documents and in scholarly literature,certain shifts can be traced in 
some of its conceptualizations over time. On the international agenda, 
growing attention to HCPs has evolved from a limited health perspective 
to a human rights perspective in which 'personal' issues have become 
politicized, relating violence, embodiment, and reproductive rights to 
structural gender inequality. Yet the mainstreaming of feminist concerns 
in international development policies has also accompanied potential 
paternalist 'colonial' discourse and 'culturalist' conceptions of gender 
and culture, in which women in the 'Global South' have been reduced to 
their 'passive, reproductive and sexualized female bodies' (W. Harcourt, 
/Body Politics in Development/, 2009). Such critique resonates with the 
analyses by Third-world feminists, in transnational feminist theory and 
postcolonial scholarship in which the 'average oppressed third world 
woman' devoid of agency and subjectivity is constructed as the mirror 
image of the educated and emancipated 'western' woman. From a radical 
feminist perspective, then again, Sheila Jeffreys in /Beauty and 
Misogyny/ (2006), provokingly argues that western beauty practices such 
as make-up, high heels and cosmetic surgery should similarly be seen as 
damaging to women and clearly fit the UN definition of HCPs. Does such 
reasoning imply that veiling, eating disorders and hymen reconstructions 
are equally qualified as HCPs? And what about female genital cutting, 
which is widely accepted as a HCP, but focuses only on women? Can male 
circumcision and cosmetic vaginal surgery be considered as a HCP? What 
about 'self mutilation' and body modification practices such as skin 
bleaching, tattoos, piercings and ritual forms of self mutilation?

In this panel, we aim to bring together papers that engage with these 
and related questions, yet also in various ways may interrogate the 
viability of the notion of harmful cultural practices from the 
perspective of (feminist) anthropology from a variety of perspectives. 
What can anthropology contribute to policies on HCPs, or should the 
notion as such from an anthropological perspective be rejected? Can 
'western' beauty practices be analyzed or understood as HCPs, and/or are 
cross-cultural comparisons possible? How do HCP's evolve, transform and 
disappear through globalization and migration, and how do they relate to 
processes of culturalization, religionization and secularization? 
Through which theoretical lenses on gender, equality, freedom, 
embodiment, subjectivity, agency and power can HCPs be understood and 
assessed?

Please submit a 250-word abstract to:
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> and 
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> by *April 
5* *2011* to be considered. Deadline for panel submission is April 15th 
2011.

^-

Dr. Chia Longman
Lecturer in Gender and Diversity Studies
Ghent University, Rozier 44, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium
[log in to unmask]
http://cici.ugent.be/en/researchers/chia



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