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ABSTRACT
James Boon stressed that circumcision is first and foremost a cultural practice. One of the cultures that interprets circumcision is that of medicine. "Its adversarial position for or against simply reflects again Boon's claim of its function 'separating an 'us' from a 'them' [as] entangled in various discourses of identity and distancing'" (Gilman 2014:71). [Keywords: Circumcision, health exception, James A. Boon]
[Keywords: circumcision, health exception, James A. Boon]
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[Ключевые слова: обрезание, исκлючение по состоянию здоровья, Джеймс А. Бун]
[Palavras-chave: circuncisâo, exceçâo na saúde, James A. Boon]
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
A consistent interest (if not obsession) I have shared with the Princeton cultural anthropologist and my old friend, James A. Boon, has been the many meanings ascribed to circumcision-of all types and practiced on both men and women of all ages. From The Anthropological Romance of Bali, 1597-1972 (1977), where he first commented on the hostility generated by the Islamic and Hindu attitudes towards the practice as "an intense religious index" (210ff.), through a wide swath of books and essays including his Other Tribes, Other Scribes (1982), Affinities and Extremes (1990), and Verging on Extra-Vagance (1999), Boon has argued: "foreskins are facts-cultural facts whether removed or retained. Absent versus present prepuces have divided many religions, politics, and ritual persuasions... (Un)circumcision involves signs separating an 'us' from a 'them' entangled in various discourses of identity and distancing" (Boon 1994:556-585; 1982:162-168; 1990:55-60; 1999:43-471). For Boon circumcision is the model case for examining difference. It is this theme-circumcision as a cultural fact that provides meaning when there is a confrontation between traditions and peoples that advocate and disparage the practice-that I wish to pursue in this essay. I will trace multiple religious and medical approaches to circumcision, focusing on discourses of the relation between circumcision and health to illustrate how both religion and science both structure and are structured by the cultural meanings of the procedure.
Circumcision, as Boon has shown, can be seen as an index of difference in societies, but it can also take on nuances that societies give it in regard to other, highly valued arenas where other forms of meaning are produced. Foreskins are thus not only cultural facts, they are a space for the accretion of multiple cultural...