Highly Valued by Both Sexes: Activists, Anthr/apologists, and Female Genital Mutilation

On the back cover of Transcultural Bodies. Female Genital Cutting in Global Context, Richard Shweder praises the volume for taking “us a huge step beyond the global activist and first-world media (mis-) representation of FGM” that fails to acknowledge “genital surgeries ... [as] highly valued by both sexes.” Strongly implied is that the “highly valued” is, in fact, worthwhile. This characteristic complicity with a decidedly harmful traditional practice makes the book ineffectual for activists; of limited use for journalists; and downright dangerous for intellectuals who already prefer passivity. In an attempt to condone, Shweder points out, where genitals are altered, most people approve. But of course, in ethnicities that cut, the majority conforms. Who knows this better than NGOs do?


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Issue 128  Despite lip-service to hopes of the rite's demise, hardly a chapter in the Rutgers UP publication is likely to speed eradication (a word, by the way, that its editors dislike). From terminology that refuses to see the amputation of girls' genitals as a mutilation to multiple framings of the issue that neglect international consensus on human and children's rights, the book reveals the serpentine nature of its discourse in seemingly acceptable (if repetitive) statements such as this by contributor Aud Talle: "Writing about female circumcision cannot be anything other than a blend of rigid scholarship and 'sympathy' writing" (p. 106). But "female circumcision" is not the issue! "Circumcision" means surgical removal of the clitoral prepuce, hardly the kind of ablation to which most girls are prey. This is what FGM victims confront: As soon as the circumciser began cutting her flesh, the [fourteen or fifteen year old Maasai] girl started to fight back. … The women [who thronged around her] … did not manage to hold her down. Finally, the elder brother and guardian … told the women … to use ropes to bind her. … The operation had to be executed immediately because the cattle were restlessly waiting to get out to … pasture, and all the guests who had gathered were eager to begin … feasting. (p. 94) As a result, the assistants attempted to lasso My point exactly, with one proviso: anthropologists don't "somehow sanction" such an event.
They give legitimacy to it and thereby vitiate activists' urgent appeals. For FGM IS torture -sans quotation marks. And even when performed in clinics under general anesthesia, the amputations remain medically pointless and a violation of human rights.
More than a few authors in the collection sustain similar distortions, with Talle singled out for being so typical of much that is dubious here. If, admittedly, some chapters rely on objective data and even contain intriguing new data on sexuality after FGM, many also share faults with the above passage where emotional withdrawal abrogates scientific rigor. For example, Talle scripts like a creative writer in attributing thoughts and motives she could not possibly know to various actors and, in her effort to mediate the violence, abandons objectivity. She notes that "the nervousness of the women who executed the operation [how does she know they feel nervous?] had spread to the observers [who, we have been told before, were, if anything, hungry], and it was as if we sought support in each other's glances and presence" (p. 95). Support? Why? Is there something untoward going on? Something, perhaps, thought to be wrong? Procedurally, certainly, as the victim was expected to cooperate, but by now she has been subdued and the usual ululations are, presumably, covering her screams, notwithstanding the "heavy breathing" curiously audible despite the reiterated loudness of in-hut attendants. Given our common understanding of the English language, the author can only be projecting her own malaise, -her own sense that indeed, she is witness to a crime -, onto those whose behavior shows no sense of wrong-doing whatsoever. Yet, in the end, like others in the guild, the anthropologist holds to a creed that pardons what she sees.
Evidence of the author's ambivalence and thereby her honesty is, to her credit, shared with us, emerging from a repeated disclaimer that prefaces this scene: her Maasai informants told her that this time, things "did not proceed 'normally'" (p. 93) and she wishes her readers to believe this too -despite a dearth of scientific data in support. The research question is: given a statistically relevant sample of girls subjected to the cut, how many buck? How many grit their teeth in silence?
While told what is supposed to happen, what actually takes place, and how often, we simply don't know. And while I, too, lack the hard facts, having read testimonies and talked to victims, I have good reason to believe that girls' opposition is hardly uncommon. They do fight back. Nura Abdi, in this excerpt from Tränen im Sand, presented as Desert Tears in the last chapter of Empathy and Rage, is, admittedly, not scientific. We see only five girls who resist but in ways that seem both believable and representative.
Representing the challenge that anthropologists face when confronting scenes like the above, Talle has come to terms with an early admitted distaste she eventually sheds. Because "female and male circumcision" were "the order of the day," as a: cultural phenomenon [they] no longer raised feelings of anxiety or indignation. In Geertzian terms I could remain 'experience-distant' to that sort of bodily intrusion (Geertz 1983). Particularly when confronted with this piece of ethnography, it felt safe to repose in the cognition of cultural differences (p. 93).
Such a monumentally unsafe stance -vulnerable to ethical scrutiny -makes even the editors queasy. Hoping to shroud complicity, they evoke a "dual" among "FGC" scholars who oppose "rights and culture," enabling them to mediate by applying a "'prorights anthropology'" and Marie-Bénédicte Dembour's "'pendulum'" theory. As Hernlund and Shell-Duncan present her, Dembour sees in universal human rights one 'extreme' influence on society and in cultural rights (including misogyny) an equal and opposite 'extreme' . These concepts mark two ends of an arc. However, once one tendency ascends, the pendulum swings back toward the other.
Agreeing that human rights and cultural rights signify extremes, Hernlund and Shell-Duncan write: It is our ambition that this volume add to the growing number of voices in the field of FGC studies and activism that call for a move 'to the middle' . (p. 2) If you are, like me, unsure of what "the middle" means when the topic is ablation of a five-yearold's genitals, the editors clarify by quoting Elvin Hatch, an "extremist" with whom they disagree. He exemplifies the 'questionable' tendency to see excision as a "'test case'" for the limits of cultural relativism by "group[ing] FGC with political executions, genocides, and honor killings as 'situations in which ethical relativism is untenable'" (Hatch 1997, 372 qtd. in Hernlund and Shell-Duncan 7).

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Issue 128 | Winter 2010 Now, am I correct to understand that whereas political executions, genocides and honor killings really are ethically reprehensible, FGM is not? And if FGM is not reprehensible, that is because the non-anthropologist fails to distinguish among more harmful and less harmful, that is, not reprehensible, types? The answer is yes.
While some scholars "wrestl[e] with … alleged and real health effects of FGC" (p. 1) others "casually lump together under the label FGM/FGC/FC … diverse practices with varied consequences," thereby causing "confusion" with regard to "the effects that FGC can indeed have on health and well-being" (p. 2). Yes, as this wording suggests, more than a few contributors imply that some forms of FGM aren't all that bad, an argument whose legitimacy should, at the very latest, have ceded to the Lancet whose findings have not guided editorial choices but have merely been acknowledged in a footnote about "the World Health Organization['s taskforce] … on female genital mutilation and obstetric outcome [that] released a six-country study" (p. 44). The first such investigation based on a statistically relevant sample, "did find that women with [any form of] FGM, compared to uncut women, experienced an elevated risk of certain complications such as postpartum hemorrhage, stillbirth, or early neonatal death (WHO 2006)" (p. 44). One can, I think, conclude, supported by the impeccable authority of one of the world's leading medical journals, that reducing risk of "postpartum hemorrhage, stillbirth, or early neonatal death" means FGM is not a good idea for anyone. Now, in June 2006, when Lancet appeared, "the manuscript was going to press," so that, we are given to understand, it was too late for changes. Untrue! After all, the footnote is there. Decisive for inaction was rather the fact that Lancet's results make invalid not only considerable amounts of text but even entire chapters based on the idea that FGM's damage to health had not yet been measured and hence could not be known. Or as Shweder would have it, "lack of evidence of harm is equivalent to evidence of lack of harm" (p. 14). So why not err on the side of those who cut? Granted, adapting the text to new knowledge would have been a Herculean task, but allowing misinformation not only to remain but keep its place at the heart of the project vitiates the credibility of the book as a whole by revealing it to be even more strongly in thrall to ideology.
More important, though, than the medical journal's inconvenient timing is the option the editors neglected that could have avoided this embarrassment altogether. Had they only relied on activists, and in particular the study's principal collaborator Efua Dorkenoo, they would at least have known the work was underway and what it intended to uncover. They then could have anticipated outcomes. This is not to say that Dorkenoo wasn't discrete; even when speaking with insiders, confidentiality was strictly observed. Nonetheless, simply talking to her or another of the activist investigators, one of whom is at Harvard Law School, might have prevented faulty scholarship occasioned by the idée fixe that cultural majorities are, if not somehow in the right on this specific issue, also not entirely wrong.
As to the ethics here, if ending the practice brings clear advantages, continuing it does not, a state of affairs recognized by Ousmane Sembène, the pioneer Senegalese cineaste, whose Moolaadé prefigured Lancet's findings. In 2004 in Cannes, the movie took first prize in the category "un autre regard," and both Sembene and starring actress Fatoumata Coulibaly told me in private conversations that, without a doubt, it is against FGM. Nonetheless, in another egregious example of its sleight of hand, Transcultural Bodies reads Moolaadé quite differently -as not primarily about FGM at all.
Really? Here's our synopsis of the film: The storyline revolves around Collé Gallo Sy, an excised mother, who had freed her only daughter from the so-called purification rites, or 'salindé', organized every seven years.
In Important lesson … is that to respect the autonomy of individuals and the significance of their membership in local cultural worlds is to empower them to engage in critical deliberations of their positioning and commitments. This lesson is, arguably, subverted by the tenuous but relative expansion of the menu of options achieved for African immigrants by promoting female circumcision as evidence of persecution in the U.S. immigration process. (p. 71) According to my explication de texte this means, (a) 'female circumcision' should not be construed as persecution; and (b) should not be (mis)used by women to gain asylum in the United States because (c) doing so counters Sembènes main purpose in Moolaadé, to (d) reveal through a chronotope that break-through need not be imposed from without but can emerge from within. This, in turn, is important, as (e) a "fresh alternative" for all of us activist outsiders in our "narratives that typically construe the practice as overdetermined [sic] by the vested interests of the elite and portray African women as monolithically condemned to slavish conformity" (Obiora, p. 70).
Now, I agree that Sembène wanted to show what Obiora saw -the positive deviant deploying indigenous options -but did not wish to exclude what she covers up. When she writes that he "referee[d] the struggles surrounding female circumcision" (p. 70) the reader automatically places him at neutral, as referees must of necessity be. At risk of redundancy, this is not so. The film and film-maker oppose FGM, even if the means to do so, as Stephen Bishop argues in Empathy and Rage, draw on an "oppositional narrative" that works from within the culture. For Obiora, the fact that an opponent is permitted to emerge at all -and, presumably, is merely thrashed, not killedtrumps all else. She extols "women … act[ing] as change agents" (p. 70) in contrast to an asylum discourse that reduces them to passive victims. This activity, in turn, is what counts, making the object of protest -FGM -almost superfluous: … the film best animates the possibilities for change that inhere in a culture and illustrates al-raida Issue 128 | Winter 2010 the reality of indigenous transformative paradigms that often lie latent, even as arguably less efficient and effective reform aspirations are pursued. At once depicting culture as a surrogate for oppression and culture as a spontaneous zone of empowerment and resistance, the film extols knowledge as power, tracing how the culturally competent deploy the rich repertoire of cultural knowledge to fund radical change. (p. 70) Now, in light of my discussion with Coulibaly, herself an activist who suffered from excision as did the character she played, I'm disinclined to limit the protagonist to one of the "culturally competent deploying the rich repertoire of [indigenous] knowledge" (p. 70), especially because the thematic shift in popular opinion, from women supporting to women opposing the 'rite', reaches fruition only once their catalyzing radios are ordered burned, and these had urged that excision be stopped. Thus, in language better suited to the cinema screen, what Collé does is fight FGM; reveal the disfigurement resulting from numerous crude C-sections occasioned by her genital wounds; nearly amputates her finger by biting it in pain following a symbolic superimposition of FGM on intercourse, and shows enormous courage in not succumbing to the lash. That Obiora defends these several scenes of torture -both by failing to censure them and by ennobling them under the mantel of culture -is, to say the least, ethically suspect.
A heavy charge, I know, given that, like most contributors to this volume, her aim is not only not to oppose FGM but to attack its critics who (a) perpetuate negative stereotypes of Africans, (b) supply "demonizing narratives" (p. 73), (c) present "circumcision-as-persecution," Talle continues, however, trying to convince herself that relative values remain valid. One informant, for instance, proud of the courage she showed as a girl, now admits that the schmerz "came afterward, when she married and had children. 'This was an experience of agony', she added" (p. 101). And goes on without bitterness that she had suffered "in vain," while she pointed to her four-yearold daughter, noting that she "at least" should be spared from being "sewn." This woman had an unusual clarity when she spoke; it was as if she had been exposed to a sudden revelation -as if her present resistance had just waited to be awakened. (p. 101) Had Talle read Nura Abdi, she would not have been taken by surprise. This type of epiphany does indeed take place. In Abdi's chapter called "Am I even a woman?" the Somali has asked for asylum in Germany and spends the first few weeks sharing housing with other refugees where "nothing" in the experience "rocked [her] as much as learning that not all women in the world are circumcised" (p. 260). The discovery, to be sure, is far from amusing. A rumor having been set in motion that Nura "was the only one who wouldn't sleep around," an Ethiopian friend challenges her: "What's the matter with you? Why don't you have a boyfriend?" Hanna wanted to know. ... Then she looked at me as though a light had turned on and said, "Oh, right, you're Somali." I was taken aback. "What do you mean by that?" "You're circumcised," she said. An awful premonition shook me. "And you're not?" I asked, doubt in my voice. … So out it came.
And I learned that there are two kinds of women. (p. 260) Soon the asylum colony, composed of pre-fabricated 'containers' housing newly-arrived Afghanis, Africans from East and West, Balkan refugees and Iraqis, was, despite the language barrier, abuzz with the news.
And from all sides I was met by shocked, disbelieving, pitying glances. Above all the Yugoslavian women couldn't contain themselves. "How can anyone do a thing like that to such a pretty girl?" they wailed, shook their heads and felt obliged to offer comfort. As for me, I'd fallen into a nightmare. It appeared that not even the Afghan women had been circumcised! O.K., Ethiopians are Christian, I thought, so that might be [why]. But Afghanis are Moslems like me, and they don't do it? I felt myself hurled into hell.
But the worst of it was, they appeared to consider me a cripple, half a woman incapable of any feeling. They behaved as though I had been the victim of a crime, as though it were shameful to be circumcised -whereas I had always believed, circumcision made me clean! I wasn't going to stand for that. It came to verbal blows between Hanna and me. "You're running around with all your filth," I hammered into her, "and proud of it?! Maybe you think it's better to stink like the uncircumcised? At least … I don't smell!" I was angry. "Aren't you ashamed to be like a whore down there?" And Hanna, scornfully: "You're as smooth as a wall between your legs. They killed your sensitivity. They've destroyed you." I was shaking with rage. "Look at me!" I screamed. "I'm every bit as much a Mensch as you are! I have feelings just like you! And I'll bet I can love even better than you can!" … Didn't I have to defend myself? Hernlund and Shell-Duncan, however, and, above all, Johnsdotter, a major proponent of the self-vanishing school, claim to have more reliable sources to argue that not only is the number of affected girls diminishing -in spite of FGM advocacy -but will likely continue to do so without any public attention at all. Just look at Israel, Johnsdotter points out. The Beta Israel have stopped. Indeed they have, but theirs is a very special case based on immigrants' desire to be Israeli and specifically not to preserve but to shed the 'culture' of their homeland in which their very name -Falasha, or stranger -meant they did not belong. This motivation is decisive and not shared by other migrant groups who have unwillingly left.
Unwilling migrants do indeed tend to honor aspects of culture that preserve rather than dilute identity, and FGM is indisputably one of those practices. Yet Johnsdotter, in one of the contributions which, I admit, angers me most, generalizes from her dissertation based on interviews conducted with an interpreter among fewer than 100 Somali immigrants in Malmo that the practice has as good as disappeared. The implication is, therefore, that national governments, the EU, NGOs and private donors are wasting their money funding advocacy groups to fight a phantom. How does she know it's an apparition, FGM performed in the EU? Because Sweden, as well as most other nations, has yet to prosecute even a minimal number of charges.
In a few [trials] there was a possibility that illegal female circumcision had been performed but no way to prove it. The large share of unfounded suspected cases shows that the level of alertness is high in Sweden. It is unlikely that there is a substantial, but hidden, incidence of female circumcision, since most cases handled by the authorities turn out to be groundless. (p. 132) Here the abyss between academics and advocates appears at its most chilling. Activists know why this is so, because the problem lies at the very heart of advocacy work. Not because the charges are unfounded do cases escape the purview of the law, but because we NGOs wring our hands, clutch our hearts, and tax our minds when faced with the two untenable options: denounce parents and alienate communities -but go to court, or plod along in educational efforts that strive to include, not alienate, immigrant communities while at the same time risking girls' health and ourselves being charged with facilitating mutilators. In meetings lasting hours and hours, activists dissect these options to reach what is anything but a globalized, hegemonic response and, I admit, I resent the presumed superiority of ivory tower ideologues who research and report but far less often ACT.
As you can see, this anthology has, to risk being unacademic about it, gotten my goat, and the screed you have just read is, in fact, the first negative review I've ever written, preferring in most cases to let unhelpful books simmer in silence. But here I felt the gauntlet had been too clearly and insistently hurled, and, if anything, I regret not having penned this sooner. For Martha Nussbaum is right: We should keep FGM on the list of unacceptable practices that violate women's human rights, and we should be ashamed of ourselves if we do not use whatever privilege and power that has come our way to make it disappear forever.