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  • Introduction
  • Adriaan Van Klinken

The book featured in this roundtable—Laura Grillo's An Intimate Rebuke—presents an incredibly rich study of indigenous religion, ritual, and gender in West Africa, specifically Côte d'Ivoire. The phenomenon the book focuses on is a fascinating one: rituals of "female genital power" (FGP). Grillo coins this term in order to refer to ritual practices in which postmenopausal women—or "the Mothers," as she calls them—strip their bodies naked, using their breasts and genitalia to curse and cast out the forces of evil. These rituals, in Grillo's reading, are a performance of moral authority and constitute religious and political responses to abuses of power. The ritual can be performed in secret, as spiritual warfare against witchcraft, but also in public, as a form of social and political protest. The latter happened, for instance, during Côte d'Ivoire's civil wars from 2002 to 2007 and 2010 to 2011, where FGP was used to protest violent assaults on the civilian population—especially women, who were [End Page 287] sexually harassed on a large scale—perpetrated both by the rebel forces and by the state. Grillo provides an in-depth historical background to these recent public performances of FGP and offers a brilliant ethnographic account of the cultural and religious symbolic meanings behind the practice. The book foregrounds the remarkable continuity of this ritual practice across centuries while highlighting the timeliness of FGP as a form of political protest in contemporary history.

An Intimate Rebuke argues that the moral power embodied and enacted through the women's ritual nakedness and the invocation of their sex forms the foundation of West African civilization. In conversation with scholars such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Ifi Amadiume, Grillo maintains that this civilization is not so much characterized by a structure of matriarchy as by the principle of "matrifocal morality." This principle constitutes a value system in which female elders are held in esteem as bearers of supreme moral authority and spiritual power.

The book is based on fieldwork and research spanning three decades—Grillo became fascinated by the phenomenon she first encountered when living in Côte d'Ivoire more than thirty years ago. The pages of this book reflect her sustained engagement with the subject, her in-depth analysis of the wealth of ethnographic data, and her long-term thinking about the conceptual and theoretical framing of the material as well as the methodological questions emerging from it. Structured in three parts around emergent concepts—unhomeliness, worldliness, and timeliness—that help to make sense of the complexities and ambiguities of the contemporary postcolonial situation, An Intimate Rebuke develops a highly innovative and critical theoretical approach, and it carefully navigates the methodological challenges inherent to a project like this. Truly multidisciplinary, the book builds on, and considerably expands, current debates in fields and disciplines as wide-ranging as African studies, anthropology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, religious studies, and ritual studies. The book's important contributions are manifold. Let me identify at least three of them, and then leave it to the contributors to this roundtable to discuss these and others in more detail.

First, with regard to the study of religions in Africa, the book demonstrates the ongoing salience and significance of indigenous religions, and the importance of studying these traditions in order to understand the religious, social, and political current on the continent. The contemporary study of religions in Africa sometimes appears to be predominantly concerned with Christianity and Islam as major sites of religious vitality and change, yet this book exemplifies how in a country like Côte d'Ivoire indigenous ritual practices continue [End Page 288] to appeal to deeply rooted religious sensitivities and to hold moral authority and spiritual power. This affects how we conceptualize and analyze religious modernity in Africa, and indeed how we understand processes of cultural, social, and political change in Africa more generally, especially with regard to "local" phenomena such as FGP in the context of globalization. The unique contribution of An Intimate Rebuke is its analysis of these questions through an explicit focus on women and the critical analytical lens of gender, clearly addressing a gap...

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