Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs. Saida Hodžić, Oakland: University of California Press, 2017, 416 pp.

Abstract

and Life after NGOs provides a compelling feminist anthropological analysis of the waning of female genital cutting in Ghana. Based on extensive periods of fieldwork from 2002 to 2009, Hodžić integrated herself into the daily activities, formal and informal, of two NGOs, GAWW (Ghana Association for Women's Welfare) and RHI (Rural Help Integrated). This ethnography sits at the intersection of feminist anthropology, medical anthropology of reproduction and health, anthropology of policy ("social life of law"), and anthropology of humanitarianism and human rights. Among the themes explored are governmentality, biopolitics, cultural pathology, carceral feminism, sovereign violence and governance by extraction as forms of "slow harm," cultural significance of blood loss, and the instability of "punitive rationality" in human rights questions.