explores the anthropologist’s relationship to respondents, to activism, and to a commitment to human rights.
Western interest in genital operations has come and gone in waves. The most recent wave rolled in during the mid-1990s, when the practice of genital cutting in Africa gained prominence in the eyes of the world through the efforts of medical practitioners, human rights proponents, and the general public. Western media became thoroughly engaged by the legal cases of African women seeking asylum in order to forestall deportation from France and the United States, doing so by appealing to Western abhorrence of female genital cutting.9 In Western discourse, the altering of female genitalia is usually deemed barbaric and harmful to the women involved, and the term “female genital mutilation” (or the well-known acronym FGM) is routinely employed by the media and various influential Western observers and organizations. In the associated discussion of medical and psychosexual complications, FGM tends to be used indiscriminately to refer to many different forms of operations, though each carries different potential complications and outcomes. Moreover, the term FGM is rarely used in discussions that include the viewpoints of African women who have undergone any of a variety of genital cutting procedures, and in turn acculturate their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters to the practice in their communities. These discussions tend to lose the sociocultural context of genital cutting, and many Africans feel that the negative attention directed at their customs is both insensitive and intrusive. Even those who welcome change maintain that the best solutions would be proposed by Africans, not by Western critics.
Two seminal articles on the topic of genital cutting published in the 1990s (Parker 1995; Walley 1997) address questions similar to those I had as I participated in and observed initiation rituals. Both authors focused on how people of the West regard and talk about female circumcision practices. And both made it clear that, regardless of whether it was scientists, social scientists, members of the media, or members of the legal profession who were expressing their views, none of the discourse was objective or scientific in the way that is valued by our science-based worldview.
Having witnessed female genital cutting operations in northern Sudan, Melissa Parker was struck by the intense emotion that underlay her Western colleagues’ and friends’ interests and concerns about the practice. She concludes that unless greater attention is paid to understanding the source of the emotions and the ways in which they influence fieldwork and data analyses, our understandings of female genital cutting will remain partial (Parker 1995, 506), while researchers would run the risk of lending credence to fierce moral judgments and campaigns aimed at remaking other cultures in our own image. This runs counter to the avowed aims of anthropological academic research, which seeks to conduct investigations from a scientific, neutral, or relativistic stance. Dominant Western views regarding female genital cutting appear uncomplicated: Female genital cutting, regardless of the particulars of a surgery or the context in which it occurs, is viewed as abhorrent, and is described with an array of derogatory and insulting adjectives applied to the women who carry out genital cutting and the societies that allow it.10 Many of those who condemn genital cutting see their attitudes as unequivocally right and good, even enlightened. Few opponents of genital cutting appreciate the importance of thinking about the issues of genital cutting in terms other than physical mutilation and the presumed consequent denial of sexual pleasure.
Clinical evidence has revealed a number of complications associated with specific female genital surgeries, including problems often evidenced immediately or soon after the operations, such as shock, hemorrhage, injury to adjacent organs, difficulties with retention of urine and menses, and infections. In addition are long-term problems, such as scarring and keloid formation, recurrent urinary infections, vulvar cysts and abscesses, pelvic inflammatory disease, formations of fistulas, and potential hazards in childbearing. All of these are grounds for serious concern, but the frequency with which they occur is far from certain. Data collected in clinical settings do not convey information about the proportion of females who experience gynecological problems from genital cutting. Focused epidemiological research could provide a detailed understanding of the overall effects of female genital cutting for female morbidity and mortality, but it has not been carried out. In the absence of wide-ranging data collection, clinical accounts too often focus on anecdotal sources or the severe cases that do involve hospitalization. The anti-FGM responses to such cases are often filled with anger and frustration over the “needless” damage to health, yet generally fail to appreciate the rationale for the practice, and sometimes even convey racism and paternalism (Parker 1995, 514–16).
Sentiments run high in all directions. For example, at the 2006 annual meeting of the African Studies Association, a woman identified herself simply as African and proceeded to passionately denounce the hypocrisy of Western critics of genital cutting in vilifying African practices while ignoring parallel activities that take place routinely in the United States.11 She implored the audience to recognize that women the world over alter their bodies to become more attractive as sexual partners, citing surgeries performed in the United States and Europe to augment or to reduce women’s breasts. Such surgeries, she argued, also have lasting repercussions for women’s health, including possibly affecting their abilities to nurse their infant offspring. To her, these seemed as senseless as genital cutting in Africa appears to many Western observers.
Beginning in the 1970s, key anthropological publications studying the social and cultural aspects of female genital cutting were often written by women academics informed and influenced by social movements in their home countries, and this, of course, affected the questions they asked, as well as their findings. These findings include that genital cutting denies women the right to a full and satisfying sexual life (Hosken 1981); that genital cutting is a reflection of the asymmetrical power relations between men and women (Hayes 1975); and that genital cutting is primarily a socially important procedure concerned mainly with establishing clan membership and adult status (Lyons 1981). The work of Janice Boddy in northern Sudan describes genital cutting as an assertive and symbolic act, controlled by women, which emphasizes “the essence of femininity: morally appropriate fertility, the potential to reproduce the lineage or to found a lineage section” (Boddy 1982, 696). Though many elements of Boddy’s formulation hold true for Kuria practices as well, the type of operations the two societies practice are physically and surgically different.
Christine Walley’s critique of the FGM literature centers on the two seemingly polar viewpoints commonly expressed in western countries toward female genital operations—moral opprobrium and relativistic tolerance (1997, 406). Questioning whether these perspectives are sufficient to construct an adequate feminist and humanist political response to the issue of female genital operations, she argues that, to some extent, Westerners hold responsibility for the terms of the debates over female genital operations that have been adopted widely in Kenya and other African countries. She cautions that Western interests stem not only from feminist or humanist concerns, but also from the desire to sensationalize, titillate, and call attention to differences between “us” and “them” in ways that reaffirm notions of Western cultural superiority (409). Accounts of female genital cutting disseminated through Western media feed into powerful and value-laden understandings of the differences between Africans and Euro-Americans, presuming a radical difference between the first and third worlds, between “modern” Euro-Americans and “traditional” others. Further, the very concepts of “culture” and “tradition” are constructed in problematic ways. As Walley argues, “Rather than focusing on ‘culture’ as historically changeable and broadly encompassing beliefs and practices characteristic of a social group, the discourse on genital operations understands culture as ahistorical ‘customs’ and ‘traditions.’ Such ‘traditions’ are simultaneously depicted as the meaningless hangovers of the premodern era and as the defining characteristic of the Third World” (421). The allegedly coercive and oppressive nature of African cultures and societies is emphasized, and, from dominant Western perspectives, collective culture is judged to be less relevant than rights premised on the individual.
Examples supporting Walley’s position abound in Kenyan media. Increasingly, accounts of genital cutting emphasize the distinction between traditional (rural) and modern (urban), using the
