The Female Circumcision Controversy. Ellen Gruenbaum
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open space a little way down the street, where a couple of men were at work setting up a string of electric lights at the entrance and across their courtyard inside the wall.
The evening party was to be the formal occasion to celebrate his daughter’s circumcision; the actual operation itself and the initial celebration among the women had already taken place in the morning. We had heard women’s joyful ululation earlier, coming from that direction. Ululation is a sound like no other—a high-pitched, very loud vocalization, almost trill-like in its rhythmic variations in intensity and pitch. When performed simultaneously by several women, it announces to anyone within earshot (a long way in our open neighborhood of houses with open windows) that something significant and joyful is occurring—childbirth, circumcision, a bride’s dance, a reunion. The sound can also drown out many other sounds such as cries of intensity of effort or pain. It is distinctly joyful and contrasts sharply with the other form of neighborhood announcement of a significant event, women’s keening wail of grief upon receiving news of a death. So this time the ululation was a girl’s circumcision.
During the afternoon a truck delivered stacks of blue metal chairs that were taken into the courtyard of the house. The houses on that side of the open space were almost identical: modest government housing originally built for the guards employed at the prison—hence the name of the neighborhood, As-Sajjana (those who work in the sijin, prison). Each home had an entrance through the outside wall into an inner courtyard and at least two rooms. The basic living conditions were good. There was running water, electricity, and some drainage, though the sewage system was something of a mystery. Our own toilets flushed, but our next-door neighbor, like most others, still had a bucket latrine inside the front wall that had to be emptied from time to time by workers who accessed it from the street by opening a small, pale-green wooden cover. The interior walls of most of the houses were smooth and painted. Some families had added rooms, verandas, and animal pens over the years, leaving some court yards rather crowded. Most families still had dirt floors, though some had upgraded a visiting area—a veranda or one of the rooms—to cement tile. Most houses had water-resistant mud-and-dung roofs.
Jay and I waited until we saw from our balcony that evening prayers were finished at the mosque and that many of the guests had begun to arrive at the party. We had been to other sorts of parties with our students and faculty colleagues from the university, so we knew people would be well dressed, perfumed, and festive. We went over in our usual modified Western dress—I usually wore a long colorful jalabiya. The Sudanese considered this garment modest enough for a foreigner, but it was easier to manage than the Sudanese women’s wrap-around tobe.
By that time, the hired musicians had set up and were singing the lilting Sudanese songs that were so popular, accompanied by violin and ‘oud (a round-bodied string instrument related to the lute). We found chairs and tables set out in the courtyard for the men (and me). Something light and delicious to eat and cold drinks were brought to each table.
Eventually, I headed for the back courtyard, as I usually did on social occasions, to look for the women. I found my next-door neighbor Fatma there—she and several other neighbors had been helping prepare the food and were now relaxing with glasses of aromatic tea. She greeted me warmly and seemed pleased to see me there. She took me to a small, freshly painted bedroom to congratulate the girl who had been circumcised that morning.
The girl seemed to be trying to lie still and quiet as her visitors greeted her, but she intermittently moaned and writhed in discomfort. She looked older than I had expected. I was embarrassed to discover that people were putting small gifts of money under her pillow. My pockets were empty. But I offered 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