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Chapter 1

Patriarchy

My first female circumcision party occurred shortly after my husband Jay and I moved into a house in the Khartoum neighborhood known as As-Sajjana, just south of Qurashi Park. We were younger then—it was the mid-1970s—and still in the glow of the excitement of our second year living in this dusty, hot city. Here our milk was delivered by a man wearing a flowing white jalabiya and turban, riding on a donkey. The neighbors’ goats ate the garbage dumped in the central square beyond our walls, somehow turning it into milk for the evening tea. We joined the rhythm of the neighborhood, more or less, awakened each morning around 4:30 by the call to prayer, enhanced by the loudspeaker from the minaret of the nearby mosque, and retiring in the evening to the sounds of the neighbors’ radios or visitors on the other side of the wall that divided our courtyards.

From our lawn chairs on the second-floor balcony, we could see a lot of neighborhood life. We had covered the balcony rail with straw mats to afford ourselves a little more privacy than the builder of the rather fancy, modern, red-brick house had provided and had decorated with four large clay pots of bougainvilleas from a nursery near the Nile. From the balcony we could see barefoot children playing soccer on the smooth, dusty field and school kids in uniforms wandering home. Itinerant glass-bottle buyers and broom sellers called their trades in nasal chants as their donkeys trotted their routes through the neighborhood. Creaky old cars (like our ancient orange VW bug) had to drive slowly down the bumpy dirt road to avoid scattered broken bricks and drainage ditches. In the mornings we saw women in colorful tobes returning to their homes with baskets of purchases from the market. At noon and at sunset men, and a few women, hurried to the mosque to pray at the appointed times, especially on the holy day, Friday.

In the glaring sun, these public moments burned images into our minds. But one of the reasons we had decided to move to this house from our first apartment, in a high-rise building near the airport, was to be more involved in a neighborhood. Watching was not enough, so we walked a lot, practiced our Arabic by chatting with shopkeepers, bought fresh fried tamiya (felafel) in the evenings from a man preparing it at a nearby corner, and introduced ourselves to the neighbors in the small mud-brick houses on either side of us. But it was not easy to become a part of this neighborhood, as different as we were and living in a house so clearly above (both in height and in social class) the neighborhood norm.

So Jay and I were very pleased the day a neighbor came by and invited us to a party that evening. We eagerly accepted his invitation and promised to be there. He indicated a house across the 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 have authority or power over all females. Think of the male two year old and his competent older sister, adult mother, and grandmother. Each of these females no doubt has significant say over the small boy. And yet that same male child when older may well move into a position of considerable control over these women. Many cultures have even institutionalized that transition from childhood dependence and lack of power and authority to new roles with authority over women as the boys become men. Joan Bamberger’s examination of this issue offers the classic insight into why the transition into adulthood is so much more elaborate for boys than for girls in so many cultures in which the gender division of labor assigns the primary responsibility for child care to women (1974). Bamberger notes that whereas boys’ initiation rituals often involve grueling physical ordeals, lengthy group educational sessions with adult men (lasting weeks or months) to learn lore, rituals, behaviors, and attitudes appropriate to men, in contrast girls’ transitions to womanhood are rather brief, sometimes individualized, and in some societies no more than a fifteen-minute ritual on the occasion of a girl’s first menstruation. Bamberger’s conclusion is that males in a patriarchal culture must go through a far more wrenching experience than girls—they must learn how to assert control and domination over the females who have until then had a large degree of power over them. It is a role reversal that is at the core of the dominating male role, and it requires a severing or redefining of what is probably the closest relationship most humans experience, the relationship with his mother (and other female nurturers). One classic example of this transition in the mother-son relationship is found in the film Maasai Women (Llewellyn-Davies 1983), in which young men having completed the manhood rituals gather with their mothers in a location far from the settlements and engage in all sorts of entirely inappropriate joking and wild behavior to break down the former relationship of female authority and help both mothers and sons get used to their future reversed roles.

In Bamberger’s South American examples, girls more often merely carry on, continuing the roles they have been learning in apprenticeship to their mothers—doing women’s tasks, acting as caregivers to children, and being subordinate to men, but adding a new role in sexuality as they mature.

When we reflect on patriarchy in this way, it is also evident that age is part of the core power relations. Indeed, patriarchy is not simply a system of rule by males over females, but a more complex set of relationships that result in domination by older men over both younger men and females. But there is other domination and authority here as well: females over children, older women over younger women, older children over younger children, boys as they grow up increasingly asserting themselves over girls, even older sisters who used to have authority, and so on. Even in the most strongly male-dominated culture, where women might be said to be very subordinated, young men often do not feel that they have power.³

Patriarchy is not a single, uniform pattern. The degree of male domination, female autonomy, hierarchy among males, and other factors is quite variant and includes manifestations that defy any conclusion that patriarchy is a universal impulse of the species. For some time, anthropologists, seeking to refute the notion that patriarchy was universally found among humans, searched for its presumed opposite, matriarchy. Disappointment followed, as each example of matriarchy turned out to be either mythical (the Amazons), disputed, or to have inconsistent patterns of female power. Matrilineal societies in which women’s important roles in kinship systems are easily recognized nevertheless usually have men in important power roles as political leaders. Matrilineal kinship systems do not prevent women’s subordination or female circumcision. Societies that emphasized goddess cults may have had very important and revered roles for women, however, and some writers have interpreted these as matriarchies.

Eventually, anthropologists have had to conclude that if matriarchies ever existed, the evidence that they mirrored patriarchies, that is, senior women ruling and dominating men in their families and society, is slim. But in any case the truly profound opposite of patriarchy is not a matriarchy but a society that is based on gender equality. Several writers have embraced this model, alternately looking to the hunting and gathering and horticultural precursors of agricultural patriarchal civilizations (and their twentieth-century cousins, the marginalized hunter-gatherers who managed to pursue a somewhat parallel adaptation long enough to be observed by anthropologists in recent times) for examples of “different but not unequal” roles between the sexes (e.g., Leacock 1972) or to the apparently peaceful, goddess-worshiping ancient peoples who seemed to emphasize partnerships instead of conflicts in their values (e.g., The Chalice and the Blade, Eisler 1987, and Gimbutas 1989).

It is reasonable to believe that if female circumcision contributes to the oppression of women, it will be found only in the societies in which the oppression of women is established. But because the subordination of women and girls is so common, there is bound to be a strong correlation between patriarchy (broadly defined) and female circumcision. That does not make it causal, of course, because the vast majority of cultures that do not practice female circumcision are also patriarchal.

Antiquity and Folklore

The difficulty of offering a causal explanation for female circumcision practices is further complicated by its antiquity. Various mythologies are part of this set of speculations, and I have encountered them in oral tradition and in print. For example, Al-Safi states that “Female circumcision with infibulation was practised by ancient arabs [the uncapitalized form often means “nomads” in Sudanese writing] long before islam [sic] to protect the shepherd girls against likely male attacks while they were out unescorted with their grazing sheep” (1970:63). According to another speculative origin story, an ancient pharaoh who was endowed with a small sexual organ demanded that women should be infibulated to better enhance his pleasure (Huelsman 1976:123). From a social scientist’s point of view, this is no more believable as the start of a custom that lasted for millennia than is the tale about the origin of clitoridectomy reported by English explorer and “orientalist” Sir Richard Burton (1821–90), who sojourned in Somalia and Sudan during the nineteenth century: “This rite is supposed by Moslems to have been invented by Sarah, who so mutilated Hagar for jealousy and was afterwards ordered by Allah to have herself circumcised. It is now universal … and no Arab would marry a girl ‘unpurified’ by it” (quoted in Brodie 1967:110).

Although the origins of female circumcision practices are unknown, several authors report scattered references to its existence in the Nile Valley at least since the times of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Sudan (Assaad 1980, Sanderson 1981, Rushwan et al. 1983). In addition, there is widespread presumption among contemporary Nile Valley people who practice infibulation that it originated in the society of the pharaohs, as reflected in the contemporary term “pharaonic circumcision.” One study of mummies by Elliot Smith (reported in Sanderson 1981) failed to support this idea because he found no evidence of female circumcision in predynastic or later mummies from Egypt. There are documentary indications, however, that it existed. Sanderson cites a statement from Herodotus that Egyptians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and Ethiopians practiced female excision five hundred years before the birth of Christ. She also notes that “Aramaics have described excision in Egypt in the second century B.C. A Greek papyrus in the British Museum dated 163 B.C. refers to the ‘circumcision’ of girls at the age when they received their dowries in Egypt at Memphis. Strabo described ‘Pharaonic circumcision’ in 23 B.C. amongst the Danakils of Ethiopia and in Egypt. He noted it at Antiphilus, which was situated at about a hundred miles south of the present site of Massawa. He also described excision in the first century A.D. in Egypt” (Sanderson 1981:27).

Meinardus speculated that in ancient Egypt circumcision was related to the Pharaonic belief in the bisexuality of the gods; humans were thought to reflect this in their anatomies, with the feminine “soul” of the man being situated in the prepuce and the masculine “soul” of the woman being in the clitoris. Male circumcision and female clitoridectomy and labia removal are thus needed for one to become fully a man or fully a woman (quoted in Assaad 1980:4). That circumcision operations establish unambiguous gender identity is an idea widespread in circumcising cultures (see Chapter 2). Even if we were able to nail down the origins at a specific location and even if we were able to bring evidence to bear on the speculations of what it meant to thinkers like Meinardus, we would still need to understand why it is preserved by peoples living today. The preservation across the centuries is documented for several locales (Sanderson 1981:26–28), but because so little is written on the specifics of the practices noted, it is difficult for scholars to conclude whether there was a single origin for both infibulation and milder forms that then spread or whether there were many similar practices that influenced one another over the centuries of migrations and contacts.

In the Nile Valley, it appears certain that the practices predated and survived the spread of Christianity to the ruling groups of Nile Valley kingdoms in Sudan in the sixth century C.E. Waves of Arab migration came later, initially nomadic groups who began to intermarry with the indigenous Nile Valley peoples. Later, Arab identity was strengthened when Islamic teachers and Sufis successfully spread the new religion in northern Sudan, where it became the dominant religion by about 1500 C.E. and the language of its sacred texts eventually became the lingua franca.

In Sudan, pharaonic circumcision, along with other pre-Islamic or non-Islamic beliefs and practices, was successfully syncretized into the Sudanese Islamic belief system. These practices were incorporated in such a way that they acquired meaning that was consonant with Islamic beliefs. Indeed, the ability to absorb and incorporate preexisting beliefs and practices, at least for some generations, is one of the characteristics of both Islam and Christianity that has allowed many people to convert without immediate dramatic change to their cultures. Today, however, some of the accepted practices have come under criticism by reformers claiming to speak for a more “authentic” and orthodox Islam, including zar spirit possession practices (discussed further in Chapter 3), folk rituals for agricultural fertility or curing, and even the visits to tombs of venerated holy men. The spread of Islam carried with it the use of amulets and quasi-magical practices and the belief in the special status of descendants of holy men, all of which are still found in Sudan and elsewhere today, but some have almost had to go underground as the Islamist movement has challenged them.

But although pharaonic circumcision is considered one of those pre-existing practices syncretized into Islam, there is reason to believe that some Arabs, too, may have practiced some form of female circumcision in ancient times. During my short period in Saudi Arabia in 1990, I learned that the older generations in certain areas of the country had practiced some form of female circumcision in recent decades, but that people now considered it un-Islamic and the practice was dying out. However, given the fact that long-distance trade and enslavement of peoples resulted in movement across the Hijaz for many centuries, surely Arabs were aware of the practices. Indeed, that the question should have arisen for the Prophet Mohammed (according to the Hadith traditions, discussed below) indicates that this was so. Indeed, one Sudanese writer, Ahmed Al-Safi, draws upon the work of the noted Sudanese linguistic and literary scholar Abdalla al Tayib to note that a “mention in early Islamic verse suggests that at least in so far as the Sudan is concerned the custom [of pharaonic circumcision] could have been derived from Arabia” (Al-Safi 1970:63).

Custom

In the Nile Valley and especially in Sudan, over the centuries the practices have remained or become deeply embedded in local cultures, and the symbolic significance as a marker of socially approved female fertility plays an important role in individuals’ repetition of the custom in the way of life that Janice Boddy documented in rural northern Sudan (Boddy 1989).

To call female circumcision practices “customs” is not, however, a sufficient explanation for their persistence. Yet much of the writing on this topic has not gone much further than to call the practices “customary,” which is an oversimplification of complex meanings that is sometimes deeply resented by writers from these societies. For example, Nahid Toubia wrote that “the implicit and explicit message [is] that it is something we inherited from an untraceable past which has no rational meaning and lies within the realm of untouchable sensitivity of traditional people” (Toubia 1981:4).

A more meaningful analysis results if we take the time to understand how female circumcision fits with the complex sociocultural arrangements of women’s subordination in a patriarchal society. For it is in most cases women themselves who are the strongest advocates for the preservation of the practices and who in fact carry out the operations, and this simply does not make sense without understanding the economic, social, and political constraints of their lives.

Where women must derive their social status and economic security from their roles as wives and mothers, we can anticipate that the rules of marriageability will be carefully followed. Even if, as is the case for a broad spectrum of circumcising groups in Africa, women have significant roles in subsistence production, wage employment, trade, production of commodities, and family work, economic well-being and even survival may require the efforts of a large family production unit that can take advantage of different environmental and economic niches and allow its members to weather the vicissitudes of the economy. A husband and children are necessary to a woman’s economic security for many reasons. There may be limitations or barriers to access to land, cattle, grazing rights, or cash income without a husband. There may be control of production that reinforces economic dependency. There may be a need for physical defense. But in any case, children contribute their labor at an early age to family production, especially in rural areas, making a large family not a drain on resources (as is the experience in industrial countries) but a boon to family prosperity in the short term.

Further, since the majority of people in most circumcising societies have no provisions for old age security other than reliance on family members and kin group loyalties, anything that interferes with a woman’s ability to reproduce in a socially acceptable way and to keep her relationship with her children as they grow up into competent adults would undercut her economic security. A childless woman might face a future of poverty or dependency in one of the undesirable social roles such as childless widow or old maid aunt or cousin, entitled to live with kin, but with no one to look out for her interests and provide her with more than the bare necessities.

Where female virginity at marriage is considered vitally important, as in Sudan, even rumors that question a girl’s morality may be sufficient to harm a family’s honor and effectiveness in a community and bar her from marriage. In this context, clitoridectomy and infibulation serve a clear and compelling purpose: they guarantee virginity, morality, marriageability, and the hope of old age security, all in one decisive action taken when she is too young to object. Any girl known to have been properly circumcised in the pharaonic manner can be assumed to be a virgin and marriageable, since there are usually a number of older women to bear witness to the thoroughness of the infibulation. People can therefore assume that there is both an attenuation of the girl’s sexuality (because of the clitoridectomy) and a barrier to penetration (because of the infibulation), so even if she had had the opportunity, they can assume she will not have engaged in premarital sex. But for a girl who has not been properly infibulated, as in the case in which her parents might have chosen to follow contemporary ideas about having only a milder form such as sunna circumcision, doubts can be raised about her virginity and her morality, leaving her vulnerable to being passed over in marriage.

I argue that attempts to formulate policies or activate programs against female circumcision must recognize the significance of the linkage between the operations and the social and economic goal of maintaining the reputations and marriageability of daughters under patriarchal economic arrangements. To that assertion, I must also add the need to consider social class, ethnic relations issues, and the particular structures resulting from economic development strategies, as well as the current political struggles in each of the social contexts. Examples are the Islamist movement in Egypt and Sudan, rapid alteration of traditional cultural life in Kenya and Uganda, rapid urbanization in the countries of West Africa, and of course wars and conflict wherever they are occurring.

In short, there is more to this issue than meets the eye. By no means is female circumcision a single phenomenon with a single purpose such as “controlling women” or “suppressing female sexuality.” To the extent that those occur, they are important to analyze, but often the control of women is not the core reason or conscious purpose for female genital cutting. Conscious reasons as well as the effective functions of the practices must both be addressed. The oppression or subordination of women, their poverty, and their restricted opportunities are a more fundamental issue to address if we wish to understand people’s willingness to continue to participate in these practices and the obstacles that reformers must face. “Patriarchy” is too simple an explanation. Understanding the historical, sociocultural, and economic context is vital to the analysis, and of course this book cannot provide an analysis of all contexts in which forms of these practices occur. It is an exciting development, however, that more scholars are now addressing these issues in their research (see contributors to Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2000), offering deeper understandings than have been presented in the activist literature that too often unfortunately seems to denounce the women and men of poor countries as unreflective and cruel parents.

The themes that are developed in the chapters that follow are intended to provide a fuller and more well-rounded consideration of the factors at work and the challenges that lie ahead.

¹ This was prior to the enforcement of the Shari‘a law and the prohibition of alcohol under the government of Jaafar Nimeiri in 1983.

² Sudanese anthropologist El Wathig Kameir noted a marked increase in “conspicuous consumption” at such urban parties in the 1970s.

³ This can also help to account for the anger some young men in my university classes in the United States have expressed when confronted by accounts of women’s disadvantages. They often do not feel any more advantaged than young women and conclude that feminism is unfair, blaming men for something they are not doing. In fact, young men experience their own sort of social disadvantage, based on their youth and the inadequacy of social opportunities for all those who are talented. It is difficult especially for white, working-class young men, who indeed do not have an easy time of it either. Hence the affirmative action backlash—it does not seem fair to these men that society and employers make space for women and minorities when they do not have enough opportunities themselves.