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Female Genital Cutting, Migration and the Art of Legal Boundary Maintenance

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Intersections of Law and Culture

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Socio-Legal Studies ((PSLS))

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Abstract

A constantly evolving swirl of competing discourses, stories, images and scripts shape both our sense of the world we inhabit and who we are in this world. Jerome Bruner has referred to this assemblage of shifting narratives as a ‘communal tool kit’, a fund of knowledge that keeps us updated about ways in which our culture changes and how we should behave in order to get on in the world (Bruner, 2003). Not surprisingly, the idea of the nation and of national belonging or national identity continues to provide a tidy and compelling frame for how we think about culture — despite numerous attempts to reveal the constructed, indeed invented, nature of the nation and of nationhood. And speaking from within this frame, one obvious way to delineate national belonging has always been via stories about those who do not belong, namely a nation’s immigrants.

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Authors
  1. Caroline Wiedmer
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Berne University of the Arts, Switzerland

    Priska Gisler

  2. Franklin College Switzerland, Switzerland

    Sara Steinert Borella  & Caroline Wiedmer  & 

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© 2012 Caroline Wiedmer

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Wiedmer, C. (2012). Female Genital Cutting, Migration and the Art of Legal Boundary Maintenance. In: Gisler, P., Borella, S.S., Wiedmer, C. (eds) Intersections of Law and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-28500-3_5

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