plays an important role in individuals’ repetition of the custom in the way of life that Janice Boddy documented in rural northern Sudan (Boddy 1989).
To call female circumcision practices “customs” is not, however, a sufficient explanation for their persistence. Yet much of the writing on this topic has not gone much further than to call the practices “customary,” which is an oversimplification of complex meanings that is sometimes deeply resented by writers from these societies. For example, Nahid Toubia wrote that “the implicit and explicit message [is] that it is something we inherited from an untraceable past which has no rational meaning and lies within the realm of untouchable sensitivity of traditional people” (Toubia 1981:4).
A more meaningful analysis results if we take the time to understand how female circumcision fits with the complex sociocultural arrangements of women’s subordination in a patriarchal society. For it is in most cases women themselves who are the strongest advocates for the preservation of the practices and who in fact carry out the operations, and this simply does not make sense without understanding the economic, social, and political constraints of their lives.
Where women must derive their social status and economic security from their roles as wives and mothers, we can anticipate that the rules of marriageability will be carefully followed. Even if, as is the case for a broad spectrum of circumcising groups in Africa, women have significant roles in subsistence production, wage employment, trade, production of commodities, and family work, economic well-being and even survival may require the efforts of a large family production unit that can take advantage of different environmental and economic niches and allow its members to weather the vicissitudes of the economy. A husband and children are necessary to a woman’s economic security for many reasons. There may be limitations or barriers to access to land, cattle, grazing rights, or cash income without a husband. There may be control of production that reinforces economic dependency. There may be a need for physical defense. But in any case, children contribute their labor at an early age to family production, especially in rural areas, making a large family not a drain on resources (as is the experience in industrial countries) but a boon to family prosperity in the short term.
Further, since the majority of people in most circumcising societies have no provisions for old age security other than reliance on family members and kin group loyalties, anything that interferes with a woman’s ability to reproduce in a socially acceptable way and to keep her relationship with her children as they grow up into competent adults would undercut her economic security. A childless woman might face a future of poverty or dependency in one of the undesirable social roles such as childless widow or old maid aunt or cousin, entitled to live with kin, but with no one to look out for her interests and provide her with more than the bare necessities.
Where female virginity at marriage is considered vitally important, as in Sudan, even rumors that question a girl’s morality may be sufficient to harm a family’s honor and effectiveness in a community and bar her from marriage. In this context, clitoridectomy and infibulation serve a clear and compelling purpose: they guarantee virginity, morality, marriageability, and the hope of old age security, all in one decisive action taken when she is too young to object. Any girl known to have been properly circumcised in the pharaonic manner can be assumed to be a virgin and marriageable, since there are usually a number of older women to bear witness to the thoroughness of the infibulation. People can therefore assume that there is both an attenuation of the girl’s sexuality (because of the clitoridectomy) and a barrier to penetration (because of the infibulation), so even if she had had the opportunity, they can assume she will not have engaged in premarital sex. But for a girl who has not been properly infibulated, as in the case in which her parents might have chosen to follow contemporary ideas about having only a milder form such as sunna circumcision, doubts can be raised about her virginity and her morality, leaving her vulnerable to being passed over in marriage.
I argue that attempts to formulate policies or activate programs against female circumcision must recognize the significance of the linkage between the operations and the social and economic goal of maintaining the reputations and marriageability of daughters under patriarchal economic arrangements. To that assertion, I must also add the need to consider social class, ethnic relations issues, and the particular structures resulting from economic development strategies, as well as the current political struggles in each of the social contexts. Examples are the Islamist movement in Egypt and Sudan, rapid alteration of traditional cultural life in Kenya and Uganda, rapid urbanization in the countries of West Africa, and of course wars and conflict wherever they are occurring.
In short, there is more to this issue than meets the eye. By no means is female circumcision a single phenomenon with a single purpose such as “controlling women” or “suppressing female sexuality.” To the extent that those occur, they are important to analyze, but often the control of women is not the core reason or conscious purpose for female genital cutting. Conscious reasons as well as the effective functions of the practices must both be addressed. The oppression or subordination of women, their poverty, and their restricted opportunities are a more fundamental issue to address if we wish to understand people’s willingness to continue to participate in these practices and the obstacles that reformers must face. “Patriarchy” is too simple an explanation. Understanding the historical, sociocultural, and economic context is vital to the analysis, and of course this book cannot provide an analysis of all contexts in which forms of these practices occur. It is an exciting development, however, that more scholars are now addressing these issues in their research (see contributors to Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2000), offering deeper understandings than have been presented in the activist literature that too often unfortunately seems to denounce the women and men of poor countries as unreflective and cruel parents.
The themes that are developed in the chapters that follow are intended to provide a fuller and more well-rounded consideration of the factors at work and the challenges that lie ahead.
1 This was prior to the enforcement of the Shari‘a law and the prohibition of alcohol under the government of Jaafar Nimeiri in 1983.
2 Sudanese anthropologist El Wathig Kameir noted a marked increase in “conspicuous consumption” at such urban parties in the 1970s.
3 This can also help to account for the anger some young men in my university classes in the United States have expressed when confronted by accounts of women’s disadvantages. They often do not feel any more advantaged than young women and conclude that feminism is unfair, blaming men for something they are not doing. In fact, young men experience their own sort of social disadvantage, based on their youth and the inadequacy of social opportunities for all those who are talented. It is difficult especially for white, working-class young men, who indeed do not have an easy time of it either. Hence the affirmative action backlash—it does not seem fair to these men that society and employers make space for women and minorities when they do not have enough opportunities themselves.
Chapter 2
Ritual and Meaning
The most common question on the subject of female circumcision is “Why do they do it?” In asking the question, we are trying to understand how anyone could submit their child to a painful and harmful practice that seems to offer nothing positive. It is a question about manifest functions, what people believe to be their reasons, and what they hope female circumcision will accomplish for them and their daughters. But analysts often also rely on the effects (or latent functions) as explanation, even if these are not consciously intended.
The result is a confusing mixture of explanations. For example, one of the fairly common ideas is that female circumcision plays a role in establishing gender identity and symbolically marking the difference between the sexes. Also, the operations often define or enhance ethnic identity. In some cases it is said to reinforce aesthetic preferences. The rituals associated with the operations sometimes mark status transitions and constitute rites
