My presentation concerns violence in relationship to female circumcision as a cultural and ritual practice. I focus my discussion on two different cultural instances: Somalis in Somalia and Somalis in London. In Somalia female circumcision, certainly intense in terms of physical force, is an act within the law and moral set-up. In London, however, female circumcision is defined as a criminal act. These are two different situations mediated by myself (as a witness and author), and by Somali women (and men) who have moved from one place to the other.

These words by Harvard's medical anthropologist, Arthur Kleinman, prompt us onto a terrain of analysis where we can discern some of the most interesting crossings of religion and anthropology. The crossings play within a homology that this paper explores, between religious-like characteristics in some medical anthropologists' own interpretive strategies, on the one hand, and their theories about religious (or spiritual) symbolic practices in the cultures they study, on the other.

In this lecture, I will explore the social tasks and social commitment of medical anthropology. I will reflect on some theoretical issues and discuss the dilemmas I experience with the help of my ethnographic work. I have no answers; I only have questions. This may be a weak bid. It is not the result of a lack of commitment, it is lack of scientific insight in a very complex world.