Under Many Fires: Factors Influencing the Adoption of Female Circumcision by Southern Sudanese War-Displaced Women in Khartoum

Rogaia Abusharaf, Sociology and Anthropology, Tufts University

Research Grant, 2002

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The people of Southern Sudan have been enduring the effects of the longest running civil war in the world. This war, which was prompted by the Sudanese government’s policies of Islamization and Arabization adopted since 1983, has led to massive human rights abuses, death, border crossings, and internal displacement. This project examines the impact of displacement on the social world of internally displaced women in Khartoum. The project examines the factors influencing issues of identity transformation and cultural change among women who started to intermarry with the local population and hence adopt cultural practices that are completely alien to the communities from which they descended. The project continues to examine these processes in an effort to illuminate the ways in which displacement threatens the cultural survival of Southern women. So far, intermarriage seems to be a primary factor in cultural change. The broader relationship that this project will continue to investigate is that between war and cultural responses in times of violence and transgression.

So far, intermarriage seems to be a primary factor in cultural change.