Analysis: How West Africa Stops Cutting

Every culture in the world has their own traditions and customs they lived and die too. Around the world we see customs that are humane while there are customs that are seen by westerners as non-humane. Such topic is known as cultural relativism, which is the principle of the values, traditions, and cultural practices that a religion or a social group performs. Meaning that each individual group views their customs different from other social groups. We see different traditions occurring throughout the world, we see the practice of female genitals cutting, dowry, gender murder, and even animal cruelty. While these options I listed have differences what ties them together is that all these customs have global social issues that cause different

Magazine, “How West Africa Stops Cutting,” we learned about the occurring global issue of female genital cutting also known as genital mutilation. This female genital cutting is a traditional custom in which the elderly of the village cut the female genital in order to remove all sexual sensation and to maintain a pure image of a female. According to the article there are about 28 percent of the women in Senegal whom have suffered genital cutting. Also in Burkina Fuso about seven out of ten women were cut as a child. The reason why cutting is done at such a young age is because they want to preserve the purity that a female child holds. In such issue, there will always be social groups who want to prohibit such traditional customs from continuing. As mentioned in “How West Africa Stops Cutting” there are groups of people that help teach villagers of Senegal the health consequences and social consequences of female cutting. These social activists state “The idea being that, to change societal norms, large intermarrying groups must decide collectively to ensure that change last”. Meaning that in order to make a change there has to be enforced education for those who are unprivileged to understand the negative consequences to this issue. We also see the issue of female genital cutting and activists fighting to educate villagers that such traditions should change because they are full of health consequences in the movie “Shape of Water”. In the movie “Shape of

Although, there are some customs of our way of living that would appear strange to other countries such as fast food eating, spending sprees, and national violence, such as gun violence. The reason, why I think such customs would appear strange to other countries is because they represent carelessness and disorder. It also feels that the “first-world” has a big ego and that it tries to embrace its opinions on every “third world country”. In this week’s reading, I learned that the “first-world” view is seen as powerful and assuring and the “third-world” views are not similar to ours. For example, in many of these third world countries dowry is seen normal because it is a tradition. For of those of you who do not know, dowry is the exchange of money and property for the marriage of a daughter. Like in any culture there are standpoint views that believe this tradition should remain because it maintains culture and history. While there are others who believe such “tradition” should be removed because it controls the lives of many women. Overall, there are social issues that are harmful to people, but in order to be suitable activists, we first have to understand the values and differences of every culture. Because change is not always easy for everyone especially not for the elderly who grew up with traditional values. To be a successful activist in any type of equality there has to a common