CUTTING AS CAPITAL: A SOCIAL CAPITAL THEORY ANALYSIS OF FEMALE CIRCUMCISION AMONG MAASAI WOMEN IN TANZANIA

Abstract

Contemporary anti-female-circumcision discourse tends to frame the practice primarily as a human-rights violation or a public-health crisis, an approach that has often struggled to explain why the custom persists even where communities are aware of its harms and of its illegality. This article argues that female circumcision among the Maasai of Tanzania is better understood, at the community level, as a strategic mechanism for accumulating social capital. It enhances networks and  confer status, operating through an interlocking system of social rewards, including inclusion, respect, and marriageability, and social punishments, including ostracism, mockery, and exclusion. Applying Social Capital Theory to historical, documentary, and field evidence from Maasai communities, particularly Siha District in the Kilimanjaro region, the article examines the cultural justifications offered for the practice, its function in preserving chastity and constructing an 'ideal' Maasai womanhood, its centrality to marriageability and bride-price negotiation, the patriarchal power structures that determine the value of women's social capital, and the vested economic and political interests of circumcisers, elders, and local officials in the practice's continuation. The article concludes that female circumcision functions as a self-enforcing social convention whose persistence is best addressed not through prohibition or health messaging alone, but through interventions that create genuine alternative pathways to the social and economic security that the practice currently provides.