Genital stretching among the venda ethnic group (South Africa)

Abstract

Different interventions on the body are topics of great interest for anthropologists, as they were historically found in populations lacking the concept of “separateness” from their own body, reducing it to an instrument, a conveyor of symbols. Interventions on genitalia are of particular interest, not only because of their symbolic value, their inter-ethnic impact, and the ethical and moral questions they raise, but by the fact that they are sometimes adopted from surrounding populations as a “founding” cultural trait and maintained over a period of time. In this chapter, we present some data on the genital stretching of women from the Venda group, an ethnic group in South Africa; a practice that became a part of their system of rites and, due to “modernization,” is now fast disappearing.