Making Harmful Traditional Practices

Chapter 2, Making Harmful Traditional Practices, examines the Ghanaian problematization of cutting as a “harmful traditional practice,” and contextualizes it within governance discourses and policies that conceptualize poverty in northern Ghana as an effect of harmful traditions. It shows that the codification of harmful traditions is embedded in the larger frameworks of modernization and development that have shifted over time. The national discourse of harmful traditions is the primary mode of problematizing northern poverty; it draws on neoliberal technologies of recognizing scarcity while shifting the responsibility for it to northern Ghanaians and their traditions. I suggest that anti-cutting campaigns employ this notion to mediate the fraught relationship between Ghana’s North and South and the place of the North in the Ghanaian polity. I suggest that the public embrace of this problematization results from the construction of northern Ghana as a counterpoint to southern civilization and modernity and a site for displacing national lack, shame, and disorder.