my greetings and did my best to reproduce the blessing I had heard another woman say.
“They waited too long,” Fatma told me quietly as we left the room. “She’s nearly eleven. Older ones suffer more.”
All of them must suffer, I thought, but I said nothing. Fatma had of course experienced this herself, so she certainly could empathize with the child. But I detected no hint of rebellion or resentment. It seemed too soon in our acquaintance to question her further, but the impression I had was that Fatma seemed quite accepting of this practice. In fact, it became my hypothesis in the many future conversations I had on this topic that for Sudanese women, tahur (purification, the colloquial term for both male and female circumcision) was seen as just another part of life—not a troublesome custom, but an assumed, normal reality. The impression was reinforced over and over in future conversations: any difficulties or pain that might be associated with female circumcision were, like the pain of childbirth, just one of the burdens and joys that go with being female.
I returned to the courtyard where the musicians were playing. In my absence, Jay had been served some whisky,1 apparently in honor of his being foreign because no one else had any. This must have been an expensive party for a family of modest means. When we got up to say good-bye, our host was beaming with pride, probably from the success of his party as much as from his daughter’s rite of passage.
What could explain the tenor of the event? Why the conspicuous consumption in celebration of the circumcision of a daughter?2 The pride, pain, sympathy, and acceptance all seemed intertwined. As an outsider, I found it difficult to comprehend. So it was to this puzzle that I returned again and again in the years that followed.
Cultural Expressions of Male Domination
Why do societies permit and promote actions that interfere with the wholeness of the body? The mutilating female genital “circumcisions”—in whatever form—clearly violate the bodily integrity of girls and women. Male circumcision violates the bodily integrity of boys and men. A sentence such as the latter, however, is usually followed by “but…” Male circumcision seems far less harmful than female circumcision, and there is therefore a tendency to dismiss it as a totally different sort of phenomenon, despite the strong similarities in reasons given for performing male and female genital operations. For example, a pediatrician and certified Mohel(et) (circumciser of males in the Jewish tradition), Dorothy Greenbaum, wrote to the Anthropology Newsletter to say she had “read with interest and disapproval … comments … aligning the custom of entering a Jewish male child into the covenant of Abraham and the painful, crippling genital mutilation practiced by societies in which women are sexually and socially oppressed” (1997:2). Her comments elevate the one practice to a sacred rite and denounce the other as nothing but a mutilation intended to cripple and oppress, “a morally reprehensible behavior.”
Greenbaum’s stand, rooted in her own cultural and religious values, is strongly moral and explicitly condemnatory, allowing no space for suspending judgment to exercise cultural relativism: “I will not be a voyeur to preventable tragedy,” she stated. Many outsiders, of course, share this view. But they also too often share her spare and simple explanation that female circumcision is an intentional (or subconscious) patriarchal action whose goal or consequence is the oppression of women. Too many observers who reach this conclusion offer little in the way of argument or evidence. And it can easily be imagined that female circumcision was conceived by men in some long-ago generation as a way of keeping women from having the full measure of their power and freedom and was passed down through the generations by male dominance and the ideologies of patriarchy.
This is an appealing argument that seems accurately to reflect both the latent functions (effects) and the correlates of the practice: indeed, in societies where it is practiced women are subordinated and males wield greater social power. Male sexual pleasure and family honor seem to be more universally acknowledged as important, and women’s sexuality, autonomy, reproductive abilities, and economic rights are usually subordinated to the control of fathers, brothers, husbands, and other men in their societies.
Patriarchy does not hold up well as a sufficient causal explanation, particularly because pervasive patriarchal social institutions exist widely, far beyond circumcising societies, but women’s and children’s social and economic subordination appears to be a necessary condition for the perpetuation of female circumcision practices.
So, is it patriarchy? “Patriarchy” is a term with a number of interpretations, but its basic meaning is “rule by the father(s).” It is frequently equated with male dominance. There is of course no society in which all males have authority or power over all females. Think of the male two year old and his competent older sister, adult mother, and grandmother. Each of these females no doubt has significant say over the small boy. And yet that same male child when older may well move into a position of considerable control over these women. Many cultures have even institutionalized that transition from childhood dependence and lack of power and authority to new roles with authority over women as the boys become men. Joan Bamberger’s examination of this issue offers the classic insight into why the transition into adulthood is so much more elaborate for boys than for girls in so many cultures in which the gender division of labor assigns the primary responsibility for child care to women (1974). Bamberger notes that whereas boys’ initiation rituals often involve grueling physical ordeals, lengthy group educational sessions with adult men (lasting weeks or months) to learn lore, rituals, behaviors, and attitudes appropriate to men, in contrast girls’ transitions to womanhood are rather brief, sometimes individualized, and in some societies no more than a fifteen-minute ritual on the occasion of a girl’s first menstruation. Bamberger’s conclusion is that males in a patriarchal culture must go through a far more wrenching experience than girls—they must learn how to assert control and domination over the females who have until then had a large degree of power over them. It is a role reversal that is at the core of the dominating male role, and it requires a severing or redefining of what is probably the closest relationship most humans experience, the relationship with his mother (and other female nurturers). One classic example of this transition in the mother-son relationship is found in the film Maasai Women (Llewellyn-Davies 1983), in which young men having completed the manhood rituals gather with their mothers in a location far from the settlements and engage in all sorts of entirely inappropriate joking and wild behavior to break down the former relationship of female authority and help both mothers and sons get used to their future reversed roles.
In Bamberger’s South American examples, girls more often merely carry on, continuing the roles they have been learning in apprenticeship to their mothers—doing women’s tasks, acting as caregivers to children, and being subordinate to men, but adding a new role in sexuality as they mature.
When we reflect on patriarchy in this way, it is also evident that age is part of the core power relations. Indeed, patriarchy is not simply a system of rule by males over females, but a more complex set of relationships that result in domination by older men over both younger men and females. But there is other domination and authority here as well: females over children, older women over younger women, older children over younger children, boys as they grow up increasingly asserting themselves over girls, even older sisters who used to have authority, and so on. Even in the most strongly male-dominated culture, where women might be said to be very subordinated, young men often do not feel that they have power.3
Patriarchy is not a single, uniform pattern. The degree of male domination, female autonomy, hierarchy among males, and other factors is quite variant and includes manifestations that defy any conclusion that patriarchy is a universal impulse of the species. For some time, anthropologists, seeking to refute the notion that patriarchy was universally found among humans, searched for its presumed opposite, matriarchy. Disappointment followed, as each example of matriarchy turned out to be either mythical (the Amazons), disputed, or to have inconsistent patterns of female power. Matrilineal societies in which women’s important roles in kinship systems are easily recognized nevertheless
