The Cool Knife: Imagery of Gender, Sexuality, and Moral Education in Kaguru Initiation Ritual

The Cool Knife: Imagery of Gender, Sexuality, and Moral Education in Kaguru Initiation Ritual. T.O. BEIDELMAN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997; 312 PP. The Cool Knife, which was written for the Smithsonian series on the ethnographic enterprise, is the second volume of a planned trilogy by Beidelman. The first volume, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (1986), explored the relationship between morality and imagination in Kaguru social thought, beliefs, and social practices. Volume Two follows with an examination of the central role of initiation rituals in developing this moral imagination. The last volume will consider how that imagination is challenged and altered by modern colonial and nationalist experiences (p. 29). The Cool Knife adds to the rich anthropological literature on East African societies and would be of interest to those concerned with gender issues, the relationships between ritual, ethnicity, and personhood, and ontological issues surrounding the power of wordplay and other forms of symbolic expression. This volume would also serve as an excellent text for an undergraduate anthropology course given its close attention to the relationship between theory and ethnography. Many scholarly publications have been devoted to initiation rites among East African societies. Therefore, a certain amount of the material recounted here will seem very familiar, a point of which Beidelman is certainly aware. To the Kaguru, a horticulturally-based society in east-central Tanzania, initiation is the primary opportunity to reveal to the next generation those symbolic elements of culture which are uniquely Kaguru. In fact, as Beidelman points out, many of the ritual elements imparted are widely shared by neighboring peoples. Still, the ethnographic material in this book is richly inscribed. The Kaguru use initiation ceremonies to confer full adult social status and identity on their adolescent members. This identity is inexorably intertwined with notions of age, gender, and sexuality. Of the three, sexuality is the most important, as "Kaguru have chosen sexuality as the theme on which to play out their primary expression of their memory and identity (p. 251). Although sexual issues are openly discussed between members of adjacent generations for the first and only time at initiation, very little new information is actually imparted. Children know a great deal about sexuality and adult gender roles from observation and from stories told to them by their grandparents generation. What they do learn during initiation is how to deploy this knowledge toward political ends. Sexuality, like language and alimentation, is something to be controlled and constrained to become a proper Kaguru adult. But unlike speech and alimentation, sexuality and the related concept of gender are difficult concepts to define and, therefore, to control. All societies, Beidelman states, have contested concepts, and gender is one such concept among the Kaguru. What the Kaguru learn about age, gender, and sexuality at initiation is not that these are easy and clear, but that these generate a world of play, manipulation, machinations, and struggles, the essence of Kaguru social life (p. 72). For the Kaguru, gender attributes can not be teased out into two oppositional lines. Gender attributes are left deliberately ambiguous and will always be debatable, contested, and problematic, ultimately because they are embedded in "intractable and complex embodied sexuality" (p. 241). Kaguru initiation songs, whether they be about pregnancy, childbirth, or sexual conduct, are all enclosed in symbolic imagery which seeks to conceal as well as to reveal, to subvert as well as to uphold, elements of an idealized social structure. As Beidelman states in his earlier work, "What better than contradiction could encompass the myriad difficulties of actual experience (1986: 180, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought, Indiana University Press)? …