The Female Circumcision Controversy. Ellen Gruenbaum
Читать онлайн книгу.
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 (a position I examine in the final chapter). From this perspective, we should stop using cultural “excuses” for human rights abuses of women and children. Gordon advocated that we anthropologists “draw the line” at female circumcision (1991), and increasingly anthropologists are willing to consider doing so (e.g., Fleuhr-Lobban 1995).
Novelists, journalists, other writers, and filmmakers joined the discourse in the 1990s. Hanny Lightfoot-Klein’s “Prisoners of Ritual” (1989) was just the first of many provocative titles that aroused tremendous public interest. Words like “crimes,” “pain,” “brutal ritual,” and “torture” figured prominently in titles; examples include “The Ritual: Disfiguring, Hurtful, Wildly Festive” (French 1997) and “Battling the Butchers” (Brownworth 1994). Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) and Walker and Pratibha Parmar’s book and film Warrior Marks (1993) persuaded large numbers of people that a highly damaging, oppressive “ritual” was being inflicted without reflection, based on male domination and ignorance. With all of this awareness of the issue, anthropologists owe it to the public to offer their best ideas and analysis.
Recent analytical work and public education writing by anthropologists (and our kindred social scientists) has developed in a very gratifying direction, generally offering the contextualized analyses while accepting and contributing to ideas for change. Writers such as Scheper-Hughes (1991) and Gruenbaum (especially 1996) stress that circumcision practices are already changing and that the peoples affected are “arguing this one out” for themselves. Obermeyer (1999), Abusharaf (1998), Hale (1994), Hicks (1993), Lane and Rubinstein (1996), Boddy (1998b), Walley (1996), and the contributors to the new edited volume by Shell-Duncan and Hernlund (2000) all offer examples of contextualized analysis that neither condemns those who practice female circumcision nor endorses the continuation. This new body of literature could perhaps be characterized as being calm and optimistic about the prospects for change, while urging critics and reformers to make serious attempts to understand the contexts.
Feminist anthropologists who are committed to ameliorating the social injustices of the world and especially those based on women’s subordination must grapple with ethical dilemmas. Our respect for and analysis of the ways that humans have adapted culturally to many environments and social situations throughout our human past should not eclipse the fact that as human social actors, we are also engaged in the process of forming the human future. As feminist anthropologists, we should be involved in trying to find our way forward to a harmonious and sustainable future that allows autonomy for individuals and social groups but moves toward resolving conflicts in these differing world views and social practices.
No one has all the answers, but many fruitful avenues are being pursued. One area of possible dialogue is the expansion of the agenda of the human rights movement. In 1997, I became involved with the American Anthropological Association’s Committee for Human Rights. It was my hope that the human rights discourse might contribute to alleviating human suffering, but of course it is never easy to map such terrain. Human rights discourse requires anthropologists to consider conflicts between group rights and individual rights, between one group’s valued traditions and religious beliefs and the traditions and beliefs of others. The human rights movement internationally has at times allowed one set of cultures to be hegemonic, leaving it open to accusations of ethnocentrism, clearly counter to our anthropological