This article examines resistance to the eradication of the ritual practice of female circumcision in the enclaves populated by the Ejagham people in Southwest Cameroon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study shows how in the face of abject poverty and institutionalized state marginalization, resistance to opponents of female circumcision becomes a placemaking project. It demonstrates that the social arrangement sustaining female circumcision has been kept in place by conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and dependency as well as by local gendered discourses of respectability, honor, and reciprocity among kin and community. Within this system of inequality, women use ritual female circumcision as a powerful tool for negotiating with patriarchy. By focusing on health alone, antifemale circumcision interventions by both the state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) miss the point even as this practice is increasingly becoming a human, social, gender rights, and development issue. The article suggests that for health education to be successful, it must take cognizance of the local needs met by female circumcision so as to empower the people as dialogic partners in development and not ostracize the target population.

Participatory video (PV) is being used by several nongovernment organizations (NGOs) in many different countries. It is often assumed to be a non-problematic process that enables less powerful groups to gain power and participate in social change. While scholars have for long critiqued participatory approaches, it is only in recent years that academic and professional debates that challenge assumptions about PV have emerged. This paper adds to those debates, while focusing primarily on critiquing the PV practice. Drawing on the concepts of participation, agency, and gender, it examines how the agency of less powerful groups can be affected over a period of time as they participate in PV projects initiated by NGOs. It discusses these issues through a case study of a long-term PV project done with young women in a community in Hyderabad (India), undertaken during a doctoral research. It draws attention to the several aspects of a long-term PV project that impact agency-development. The paper argues that while PV can enable participants to gain agency, it is equally challenging to do so in the presence of power relations.