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Chapter 2

Ritual and Meaning

The most common question on the subject of female circumcision is “Why do they do it?” In asking the question, we are trying to understand how anyone could submit their child to a painful and harmful practice that seems to offer nothing positive. It is a question about manifest functions, what people believe to be their reasons, and what they hope female circumcision will accomplish for them and their daughters. But analysts often also rely on the effects (or latent functions) as explanation, even if these are not consciously intended.

The result is a confusing mixture of explanations. For example, one of the fairly common ideas is that female circumcision plays a role in establishing gender identity and symbolically marking the difference between the sexes. Also, the operations often define or enhance ethnic identity. In some cases it is said to reinforce aesthetic preferences. The rituals associated with the operations sometimes mark status transitions and constitute rites of passage. Their goal may be enforcement of religious expectations or socially defined moral behavior. Or the operations may be intended to suppress sexuality.

Writers using the theoretical perspective of functionalism in anthropology routinely offered such resulting functions as explanation for social practice. But that perspective has been critiqued for its tendency to presume that cultures are essentially stable and unchanging and for its failure to account for the differences within a cultural system that contribute to the dynamics of sociocultural change. Contemporary anthropologists have actively critiqued that theoretical perspective, and yet functionalism continues to permeate much writing on “the other.” Peoples and cultures are seen as static, except as a result of outside influences. In the writings on female circumcision, the functionalist perspective has contributed to the view that it is ancient and unchanging, serving purposes such as those mentioned above (maintenance of ethnic identity and gender roles, etc.), which cannot change without fundamental disruption in the social fabric. Cultural relativist perspectives are often assumed to adhere to this static perspective.

The general and various interpretations of the latent functions do not completely answer the human question of what motivates a parent or family to carry out the practice, allowing them to cause or witness a daughter’s pain. Nor do these interpretations clarify the sociocultural obstacles to discontinuance that might be found in the different situations. “Why do they do it?” remains a key question.

To thoroughly answer the question would require examination of scores of cultural beliefs and value systems because there are different primary reasons given in different cultures. Indeed, each region or culturally identified group is likely to have more than one explanation for any practice. Thus within groups that share a culture or religious tradition, a parent deciding on an operation for his or her daughter or a woman choosing to have herself reinfibulated may select reasons from among those available that make the most sense in that situation. Because of this individual variation in meaning assigned, there can be no simple catalog of reasons given by separate groups.

A good example of this variation is found in the survey research done by Rushwan and colleagues in Sudan. Reporting on a sample of 1,804 female and 1,787 male respondents, the authors found that answers to the question of why female circumcision was practiced (where more than one reason could be given) varied a great deal. The majority of men (59 percent) said it was because of “religious demand,” but only 14 percent of women gave that reason. The most frequent reason women gave was that it was a “good tradition” (42 percent), but only 28 percent of men gave that reason. Substantial numbers of men (28 percent) and women (19 percent) said it promoted cleanliness, while relatively few thought it promoted fertility (1 percent of women and 2 percent of men). Surprisingly, only about one-tenth explicitly mentioned protecting virginity and preventing immorality (10 percent of women, 11 percent of men), and even fewer said it “increases chances of marriage” (9 percent of women and 4 percent of men). Quite a few (13 percent of women and 21 percent of men) mentioned the increase in the pleasure of the husband as a reason (Rushwan et al. 1983:92–93).

Data like these are difficult to interpret because those who did not mention a particular reason as their first or second reason nevertheless may have agreed with that reason as well. Most respondents just mentioned their first choice reason. That there were so many different first choices is instructive: The why of female circumcision is not a simple matter, even in a single society. As Rushwan and colleagues have noted, “Respondents hard put to clarify their support for a practice so obviously ‘right’ as FC often resorted to some vague reference to tradition.” When asked about pharaonic circumcision, “tradition” was even more likely to be their response: 64 percent of women and 69 percent of men (Rushwan et al. 1983:93).

Similar results are reported for Somalia in a study by Dirie and Lind-mark (1991), with religion playing a major role in people’s justifications for female circumcision. Allowing respondents just one choice of reason to justify female circumcision, they found that of the 290 female interviewees in their survey (of medium to high socioeconomic status), 70 percent stated “religion,” 20 percent said “to remain virgin in order to get married,” and 10 percent said “tradition” (Dirie and Lindmark 1991:583). The three reasons are not fundamentally different, however, as infibulation creates a barrier that preserves virginity, which Muslims consider the will of God and therefore religious.

Yet the belief that God demands circumcision is quite different in consequence from a belief that it merely enhances cleanliness. Quite different discussions would need to take place for change to be considered.

It is not very helpful merely to invoke tradition as the reason, even if that is what respondents to a survey might tell you. It makes it sound as if people are unthinkingly succumbing to some generalized tradition or custom without reflection. I would contend that such is seldom the case. I challenge the notion that practitioners are “prisoners of ritual,” as Lightfoot-Klein’s book title suggested. A more nuanced understanding is needed to understand how families use female circumcision to achieve more complex ends.

A Morning in Abdal Galil

“Get away! What’s the matter with you? You’re like a bunch of animals!” One of the older women slapped the wire netting that formed the window screen, then stomped outside to continue to chase the small throng of laughing, curious children away from where they were trying to get a peek inside.

She rounded the corner of the rather nicely built rectangular adobe brick house and accosted the boys and girls at the window with her high-pitched, agitated voice: “Move it! See this switch? Let’s go!” She smacked the ground threateningly with her long, thin stick, the sort commonly used to prod a wayward donkey or goat.

Predictably, the children scattered. One of the older, more sensible boys standing nearby took up a position where he could keep the others away for a while. The woman returned to her duties inside the house where the circumcisions were to take place.

Young women with elderly woman spinning cotton, Abdal Galil village, Sudan.

I was there at the invitation of Besaina, the midwife of the village of Abdal Galil (pronounced AB-dal ja-LEEL). I had arrived in the village only a few days before, planning to spend several weeks doing participant observation as part of the study I was doing for the Sudanese Ministry of Social Affairs on the utilization of health and social services in Gezira Province. My research assistants had already carried out interviews in a sample of villages and at schools and clinics we had selected throughout the region. But as an anthropologist, I knew the findings would not be complete without looking at the sociocultural context of people’s decisions to use or not use the government services. We also needed to include information on the alternatives to these services that drew upon people’s traditional ways of meeting their educational and medical treatment needs.

A colleague at the University of Khartoum convinced me to include Abdal Galil village as the site of the more ethnographic piece of the study, one that would be useful both for the Ministry of Social Affairs study and for my dissertation on health services and health in Sudan’s irrigation schemes (Gruenbaum 1982). Thus began my long association with Abdal Galil. Gezira Province was the site of the most extensive irrigated agricultural scheme in the world at that time, a feat made possible by the abundant water of the Blue Nile, fertile soil, ample sunlight, and extremely flat land that gently sloped to the north, allowing for gravity-fed irrigation canals. During the period when Sudan was under the control of the British, pilot projects were conducted and a massive dam, a network of canals, and an infrastructure of railroads, roads, and management offices were constructed, imposing new social and economic arrangements on the people of the area, including some population migration to provide additional labor.

My colleague Ibrahim Hassan Abdal Galil, then director of the Economic and Social Research Council of Sudan’s National Council for Research, thought this village would be particularly appropriate for study because it was a fairly old village (about one hundred years old) with a strong tradition of education and religious observance and it was led by an influential family of which Ibrahim was a member. His father had been a prominent leader in the trade union the farmers had formed during the colonial days. Others in the family had achieved high levels of education and were prominent in regional and national politics; his brother had been the minister of agriculture for several years. The village founder was Ibrahim’s grandfather, Abdal Galil Hassan, who had gathered kin and supporters at a new well site to build their homes, following a dispute in the nearby village where they had been living near the end of the nineteenth century. The new village had flourished under his and his sons’ leadership, attracting educated religious scholars to teach the children of the region at a mahad, or school for the study of the Qur’an and religion, literacy, and mathematics. Families housed children of distant kin who came as students. Although it was boys who studied there in its early years, Abdal Galil and his family were early supporters of education for girls, donating money to the famed “father of girls’ education,” Babikr Bedri. Bedri founded the school in Omdurman (across the Nile from Khartoum) that has become the foremost women’s university in the country, Ahfad University. When the government began providing teachers to teach a government curriculum, the inhabitants of Abdal Galil raised money to build a school for girls shortly after they built one for boys.

Abdal Galil offered an ideal situation for research. The village had electricity (as only about half of the villages of the irrigated area did), clean well water in a tall water tank that fed the local taps in homes of the better-off families of farmers, and a fairly good dirt road. There was a clinic that was much superior to the one-person “dressing stations” found in many places. Abdal Galil’s clinic was a “health center” that boasted a trained medical assistant, a lab technician, clerical staff, cleaning staff, and even a health visitor, whose duty was to supervise the midwives of the surrounding villages.

My research assistant and I were invited to stay at the home of Ibrahim’s widowed, elderly mother, which afforded a respectable niche and easy entree for two women on their own among strangers. Hajja Fatma welcomed us with gracious hospitality. The title hajja recognized that she had gone on the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. My assistant, a researcher from the Ministry of Social Affairs named Awatif Al-Imam, was unmarried, and although she was educated, employed, and the daughter of liberal parents who did not disapprove of her pursuit of a career that necessitated rural research, this respectable and reasonably comfortable living arrangement was valued. We were both used to Sudanese urban middle-class lifestyles (with electricity, telephones, refrigeration, plumbing, and cold-water showers), so the latrine without a door (requiring a discreet cough as one approached in case someone else was already there) and the sometimes muddy and poorly lit paths of the village took some getting used to. Hajja Fatima offered us beds on a screened porch, fine for the warm nights. She had a refrigerator, so we could drink cold water after a hot morning of visiting and interviewing, and we did not need to cook for ourselves.

The house was well located, just a short distance from the mosque at the center of the settlement. The lofty minaret—from which the call to prayer was chanted at the five prayer times of the day—was visible from a great distance and served to orient me to our house. After hearing about the village midwife from the clinic staff, I met her in our neighborhood.

Besaina was an extremely capable and confident woman, and I liked her immediately. A widow with five children, she was a farmer who held claim on a ten-acre tenancy in the irrigation scheme. She had made the difficult decision some ten years before to spend an entire year living away from her family to undergo the government’s midwifery training in a distant town. Literacy was the prerequisite for the training (Besaina had had a few years of elementary school), which consisted of courses and ample direct experience under the supervision of a health visitor with advanced nurse-midwifery training. The class of thirty-six students went to many villages to attend births, and each student had to do twenty deliveries by herself before she could be certified.

So that prospective midwives would apply themselves to their studies and not forget what they had learned, the government’s midwifery training schools did not allow students to go home for the entire twelve-month period. Their children could be brought for visits only on Fridays, and those who attended schools at some distance from their homes seldom saw their families.

Despite the hardship, Besaina was very pleased to have had the training, as she could earn additional income and her role had earned her respect in Abdal Galil and the neighboring villages. She earned a reputation for never having any problem deliveries because she referred difficult births to the nearby hospital early and she had done several successful breech deliveries. When I first met her in the 1970s, however, Besaina’s government salary was the equivalent of only thirty dollars a month, a very small sum even by local standards. The midwives had been passed over when government raises were set that year; she explained that the government believes that the additional payments and gifts midwives receive from clients provide adequate income. But those sources are not much. At that time she reported such payments to be very small—about five dollars for a circumcision and eight to fifteen dollars for a birth. She was also expected—and was willing—to perform services for free if a family could not afford to pay. Families usually also gave the midwife gifts on both occasions, usually soap, perhaps perfume or incense, and some of the meat if an animal was sacrificed for a celebration.

Once certified as a government midwife, Besaina had been issued some basic equipment she kept in a metal box she carried with her when she went to see clients. Midwives were entitled to ask for supplies at the health clinics, but she told me they usually did not have what she needed, so she bought her supplies in the market in town: razors, disinfectant, antibiotic powder, a plastic mat, and xylocaine to inject for local anesthesia. One day she described her shopping list to me, and the total came to about seven dollars for antibiotic powder, a plastic sheet, and local anesthetic. “Vacation is here,” she laughed, “and it’s time for circumcisions.”

Indeed, within a few days I was invited to join her at a circumcision. “But isn’t it forbidden by the government?” I asked, wondering if that mattered to her.

“Yes, but it’s what the people want. The health visitor [her supervisor] never told me not to do circumcisions. If she had, I wouldn’t have done it. But she didn’t.” Evidently, the relationship with the health visitor was positive; she had supplied Besaina with gauze and surgical thread, useful for both circumcisions and births, and was available to do deliveries and follow-ups when Besaina needed to be away for a few days. Abdal Galil village fit the pattern I had encountered elsewhere—there was no government enforcement of the ban on female circumcision.

Besaina had done only about six circumcisions in the village that year. The West Africans (the Hausa, discussed again below) in the laborers’ quarter of the village do not circumcise (masheen sakit, zey intu, roughly, “they go untouched, like you foreigners”) and seldom summoned her for childbirth except for very difficult cases. Besaina was responsible for several villages, but one of the larger ones had sent off a young woman for training that year, so there would soon be more help.

The day of the circumcision, Besaina sent for me early in the morning, around seven o’clock, and I joined her at the home of one of the farming families, near the edge of the village adjacent to the dirt road that ran along the canal on the north side of the village.

“Sit right next to me so you can see everything,” she instructed me. I scooted my small stool, a bumber made of ropes woven on a wood frame, across the packed dirt floor to be closer to where she sat, next to a bed of similar construction placed near the window. The light was good. She prepared her instruments on a small table to one side, placing a new razor, hypodermic needle, a curved suture needle, suturing thread, and a small scissors in a large blue and white enameled metal bowl. A kettle of water was heating on a low charcoal stove outside so she could sterilize these instruments with boiling water when the time came.

Meanwhile the other arrangements for the circumcisions progressed. The plan was to circumcise three children the same day, all members of one extended family (two sisters and their male cousin), thereby allowing the families to share the cost of the celebrations. The boy had been taken by car very early in the morning to the rural hospital about four kilometers away in the town of Mesellemiya to be circumcised by a doctor. He was back by around 8 A.M. Greeted with ululations, he walked slowly to a bed where he could recover. The girls stood nearby, able to see him arrive and lie down.

Then it was their turn. Their mother brought both the girls to the door of the house. The two wore colorful new dresses for the occasion, and the special protective ornaments (jirtig) and the family’s gold jewelry were ready for them to wear during their recuperation. The girls looked recently bathed, and their hair was freshly plaited and dotted with a little henna paste. The henna and jirtig are commonly used in relation to mushahara customs intended to prevent excessive blood loss or the harm that may be caused by spirits (jinn). The mushahara beliefs and practices were not as ardently held in Abdal Galil as in the northern Nile Valley region of Sudan, where Janice Boddy did her research (see 1989, especially chapters 2 and 3), perhaps because the inhabitants of Abdal Galil had a stronger association with more orthodox Islamic institutions and longer experience with formal schooling and bureaucratic government institutions. Beliefs in zar spirits and the need for quasi-magical protections were very deeply held by many of the residents of Abdal Galil, however, and even for those less concerned, the use of jirtig was routine for circumcision.

By the time of the boy’s arrival, about ten women—kinswomen and neighbors—had taken up places in the room, ready to assist and witness the event. There were three beds along the walls of the room, in addition to the one positioned to catch the maximum light from the window, each covered with an ordinary clean cotton sheet and a cotton pillow.

The girls were the center of attention and the subject of conversation, but there was no formal ritual or special sequence of events prior to the cutting, except for the midwife’s preparations. Both girls knew that this was their special day and that they would be circumcised, but they did not seem particularly fearful, knowing little of the details of what they were about to experience.

A rather animated discussion developed when the mother of the girls vacillated about her decision to allow both girls to be circumcised. The older girl was six, and doing her circumcision now would allow her to heal before it was time to start school. But the younger appeared to be not much over four.

The mother held the hand of the little one. “Maybe we should wait. She’s so young.”

Immediately Besaina and the other women offered a torrent of reassurance about the decision to circumcise: It’s better to do it early, they don’t remember as much, she’ll be healed long before school, she’s already prepared. The midwife admonished the mother gently but firmly: Don’t worry so much, it will be over soon. It’s better to just do it, and if she’s younger it’s better.