Les deux fois circoncis et les presque excisées. Le cas des Dìì de l'Adamaoua (Nord Cameroun).

J.-C. Muller — Twice Circumcised Men and Nearly Circumcised Women: Ana-tomical Sex and Ideology among the Du (Adamawa, Northern Cameroon). Circumcision is the central—social, political and cultural—Dii institution. The Dii reject the anatomical interpretation whereby several African peoples (and some theoreticians) consider the foreskin to be a man's feminine part. On the contrary, ablation endows this physical organ with a kind of hypermasculinity, which is stressed even more in the case of village chiefs who are circumcised twice. The Dii also reject the widespread idea that the clitoris is a woman's masculine part. As a rite shows, women consider it to be a specifically female organ, which should be kept—after manipulations resembling circumcision—because it enables women to socially and physically control their sexuality. If no precautions are taken, their sexuality risks suffering from men's overactive viril-ity. These maie and female genital manipulations make sense in the local setting when compared with parallel customs in this region. They are variants of a meta-discourse common to ethnie groups sharing boundaries with the Dii.Muller Jean-Claude. Les deux fois circoncis et les presque excisées. Le cas des Dìì de l'Adamaoua (Nord Cameroun).. In: Cahiers d'études africaines, vol. 33, n°132, 1993. pp. 531-544