Boys' circumcision and girls' puberty rites among the Swahili of Mafia Island, Tanzania

Abstract

Opening Paragraph In the north of Mafia Island, the rites surrounding the circumcision of boys and the first menstruation of girls are no longer, if indeed they ever were, universally performed. This article attempts to explain this situation, and in so doing, draws on some of Turner's work on symbolism. In particular, his distinction between different levels of meaning expressed by symbols—the exegetical, the operational and the positional (1962)—is followed in a discussion of the political implications of performance or rejection of the rites.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.