ABSTRACT
How can one explain the fact that today in the same quarter of New York one finds youngsters who decorate their skin with body piercing, artists who use body mutilation as a form of art and African immigrants who practice clitoridectomy? The latter are usually fully integrated into Western society, that is, they work or go to school, they participate in public life and so on while still practising traditional initiation rituals. In such forms of body mutilations as clitoridectomy, one does not find simply the repetition of premodern forms of initiation; the return to these forms of initiation should rather be understood as a way in which the contemporary subject deals with the deadlocks or antagonisms of so-called post-modern society. And some practices of body art, as well as the fashion for body-piercing and tattooing can be seen as another way of dealing with these deadlocks.
