isn’t it illegal?”
“Oh, yes. Since the British law of 1946. But what difference does that make?” He laughed and shrugged. “I couldn’t have my own mother arrested, or my mother-in-law. If they do it, I’d just have to accept it.”
He took another sip of his Pepsi. “Anyway,” he continued, “I think I’ve figured out a way to take the family along for a vacation while I’m at the conference.”
Entering the Debates
I presented my first paper on the topic of female circumcision in 1980 and rapidly began to appreciate the intensity of this controversy. The fact that I had known little about female circumcision before my departure for Sudan in 1974 was not because it had never been written about. Indeed, in the British colonial period in Sudan, it was a topic of interest to policy-makers, government reformers, and activist groups. Nevertheless, it does not appear to have caught tremendous notice in scholarship, probably because most of the previous writing on the subject was to be found in medical journals that offered little social contextualization and this writing had not filtered into the consciousness of the women’s movement. With women’s studies only recently coming on the scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, no one had yet undertaken the project to sort out for the public the information that was there to be gleaned from the medical articles and from existing ethnographic sources.
I would also note that during the early decades of the twentieth century, and to some degree even to the present, ethnographic writings usually were not written to be accessible to public policymakers. Instead, the image of anthropologists was that they cared only about obscure, “primitive,” “tribal” people and that such people were not of great interest to, or were seen as inferiors by, the dominant cultures of the developed countries, particularly in the period before the civil rights movement and the wholesale termination of overt colonial control of African countries. Anthropologists’ policy contributions often were directed to governing such people in colonial settings, offering insights into our evolution as a species, or at times assisting in cultural profiling to aid in war and counterinsurgency. Of course that is only one part of our history as a discipline. But although we and our forebears have been passionate about documenting cultural differences and have treasured the peoples whose stories we have come to know, we have not been immune from the use and misuse of our knowledge for less than lofty purposes.
Given that context, it is understandable that it was not until the momentum of the women’s movement that more information began to be available. In 1975 the American Ethnologist carried an important article by Rose Oldfield Hayes based on research in Sudan that linked the practice of “female genital mutilation” with fertility control, women’s roles, and patrilineal social structure. Here at last was an accessible argument that offered information and linked it to social context.
It was in this period, after I returned from my first research trip to Sudan, that I had been invited to present my paper. Like Hayes, my position was a feminist one that sought to explain the context and provide understanding of this as a women’s issue that was constrained by patriarchal relations and global inequality of opportunity. My paper evoked intense interest that led me to publish it (Gruenbaum 1982b). But I also encountered other reactions.
First, I found that several of the women scholars of Middle Eastern origin were intensely critical of this topic entering the Western discourse on the Middle East at that time. They considered it an inappropriate topic for outsiders because it tended to sensationalize and stigmatize their cultures. I agreed with them that the general public and scholars in the United States knew too little about Islam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Arab cultural heritage, and the daily life of the many peoples of the Middle East/North Africa. They had a valid point: talking about this shocking practice could contribute to stereotyping, rather than promoting understanding.
The positions that Rose Oldfield Hayes (1975), Marie Bassili Assaad (1980), Janice Boddy (1982), and I (1982) had offered in our analyses recognized the value of the practices in their cultural contexts—not very pleasant or healthy, perhaps, but a significant element of the culture. Although Cloudsley (1983) gave the original version of her book the pointed subtitle Victims of Circumcision, she too documented its cultural significance.
None of these analyses was an apologist stance; anthropologists who wrote at that time recognized that change was happening and was likely to continue, perhaps at a gradual pace. We wrote as analysts rather than activists, but with an eye toward conditions that might lead to change (e.g., Gruenbaum 1982b). I strongly argued, as I continue to do, that there is a lengthy agenda of life struggles facing the poor people of the societies in question and we must not neglect to address their other dire problems like war, displacement, famines, high rates of disease and infant and child mortality, lack of educational opportunities, and economic exploitation (see also Morsy 1991). Harmful traditional practices are on the list, but from the perspective of rural women, they may not be at the top of the social change agenda.
Some of the Western feminist scholars who studied the affected countries made the decision to suppress this topic in their own writing and teaching. That was not only because Middle Eastern and African women asserted that it was not our place to bring it up, but also because many of us who had worked so hard in our teaching and writing to promote interest in and understanding of the cultures of Africa and the Middle East discovered that once this topic was mentioned, we could not discuss much else. The effect was, as Hale (1994) and Fleuhr-Lobban (1995) have discussed, a tendency to silence oneself on this topic, even among those who knew a great deal about it, leaving this issue to a footnote or not mentioning it at all.
Meanwhile, most social scientists from Egypt and Sudan rarely mentioned female circumcision in their work during the 1970s and early 1980s. Only a few Middle Eastern feminists wrote about it in English or translated works, with Egyptian novelist, doctor, and political activist Nawal El Sadaawi being a noteworthy example. The chapter entitled “The Circumcision of Girls” in her book The Hidden Face of Eve (1980) was particularly influential, as was the section describing her memories of her own circumcision, which was excerpted for Ms. magazine in the early 1980s. Its publication brought greater attention to the subject among North American feminists. But the most extensive and explicit analyses by Middle Eastern social scientists came later, for example, Morsy’s work on Egypt (1993) and her rejoinder to Gordon (1991).
Fran Hosken is credited with presenting the bombshell that generated much of the popular awareness of the seriousness and wide prevalence of these practices (discussed further in Chapter 8). In particular, her 1980 publication of The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females (see also the third edition 1982) offered new information, a multicountry perspective, and an impassioned plea that aid missions, church groups, and international organizations should take a firm stand, including the withholding of aid, to require governments of the affected countries “to prevent the operations.” Hers was a take-no-prisoners approach that justified even forceful external interference.
While I differed with her analysis and tactics, Hosken did succeed in opening up to a broad audience a debate that was inevitable: how best to promote change. Her radical “eradication now!” position contrasted sharply with the gradualist program of medicalization that Sudanese reformers were pursuing in the 1970s—providing better hygiene and safety by performing these procedures in doctors’ offices, providing midwives with medical supplies to do them better, and trying to persuade people to do less severe forms. (Today public health programs refer to such approaches as “harm reduction,” pursued when eradication seems an impossible or distant goal.) Several other writers in the 1980s were also strongly oriented toward change (Sanderson 1981, Koso-Thomas 1987, Accad 1989, originally published in 1982 in French).
For impassioned change agents, however, reform programs are considered an obstacle and contextual analysts are viewed as apologists
