The Female Circumcision Controversy. Ellen Gruenbaum
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femininity was clearly marked, stylized, and valued. The women (about 10 percent of the students in those days) always sat in the front of the classrooms, a location that allowed them to concentrate on the lecture and afforded them the chance to discreetly rearrange and adjust their tobes after class without having to make eye contact with the male students while doing so.
It was difficult to imagine that it was these women who were the ones who practiced female circumcision. And could these affable, joking, confident men at the university be the fathers, husbands, and brothers who expected women to be circumcised?
I remember sitting with our friend and colleague Mohammed on one of those very hot, slow afternoons after lunch at the University of Khartoum Staff Club. Most offices closed about 1:30, and Jay and I usually drove our battered Volkswagen home by 2:30 or so, but we had decided to wait that day until the weather cooled off a little. We sat inside, away from the blinding tropical brightness outdoors and as close as we could get to the evaporative cooler that was built into the wall. Jay always complained that the ceiling fans—meant to circulate the cooled air—were so slow that the flies rode around on them. That day I believed him.
“Ya, Salim!” Mohammed called. He knew all the waiters’ names. The middle-aged man in a worn jalabiya, loose turban, and scuffed leather loafers took our order for another round of Pepsis and then returned with the heavy tray. “Sorry, no more ice,” he said as he set the thick, refillable bottles in front of us. They were barely cool to the touch.
Mohammed insisted on paying for all of them, treating us like guests again, even though we had been there for several months. More than once we had been accused of not respecting their cultural values if we tried to resist someone’s hospitality. Even after I learned the Arabic for “No, by God, it’s my turn,” and Jay could say “By the divorce!” (which meant “I’ll divorce my wife if you don’t let me pay,” which always got a laugh), we still did not often succeed in paying. To get a turn, one of us usually had to find the waiter in the corridor and pay him halfway through the meal before the others knew about it.
We learned much about Sudan from Mohammed. He often spoke passionately about politics, criticizing the latest policy of the minister of social affairs or passing on one of the many President Nimeiri jokes with which Sudanese expressed their dissatisfactions with the government. At first I was surprised that he would speak so frankly to foreigners. But he had spent several years as a graduate student in Britain and had traveled widely to international conferences, so he had numerous foreign friends and a cosmopolitan outlook. He was quite at home, however, in the small villages of Sudan. He was a man who combined a strong sense of cultural pride with a genuinely global view of humanity: we humans were all in this together, he seemed to be saying, so why bother hiding anything?
That day our conversation turned to the situation of women. His wife was a homemaker, though she had finished high school, had been abroad with him for part of the time, and spoke English fairly well. When we visited them, their home seemed very traditional to us. Several female relatives who lived nearby came and went through the women’s entrance and stayed on the private side of the house, while Jay had to stay with Mohammed on the formal side of the house, which consisted of the living room and courtyard by the main entrance. Although Mohammed’s wife, dressed in a colorful tobe, had ventured in to greet Jay, she seemed to prefer the company of the children and other women who were helping her prepare the meal while Mohammed relaxed with us. Did he prefer this division of labor and space, I wondered?
In fact, Mohammed was critical of the situation of women in his own culture. Many aspects of women’s roles didn’t matter much to him—separate entrances at the mosques and whether one wore a tobe or not—those were just traditional. “When people are ready to leave those things, they will. But for now they are comfortable with them.” He thought the division of labor in the family might also change.
But there were two things that Mohammed thought were real injustices: the limited educational opportunities for girls and female circumcision. As the father of several daughters, he wanted them to have excellent educations and good career opportunities. Since most schools—except for a few of the elementary schools—were sex segregated, there were far fewer schools for girls than boys. Whenever a village or town set out to build its first school, it was almost always for boys. Only many years later would the girls get a school. Mohammed’s urban residence and influential occupation meant that his daughters would get elementary school places, but the competition was very tough for the much smaller number of places available at each higher level.
Mohammed told us that he was also worried about female circumcision for his daughters. He had told the women of his family that he did not want them to be circumcised. I naively assumed that in a culture where the males are clearly dominant, his decision would be enough to protect them.
Not so. He was afraid that if he left the country to go to the conference he was planning to attend, the grandmothers would simply arrange everything and have the older two daughters circumcised in his absence. He was sure his wife would not oppose her own mother.
“Wouldn’t they be afraid you would be angry?”
Of course. But they just go along with me when I’m here. Among themselves they say it’s not men’s business.”
“But 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