BBC Tribe series: female intra-sexual policing re circumcision?

July 31, 2006 on 8:56 am | Friedrich Braun | Anthropology , Evolution, Health , Psychology , World Affairs | | Email This Post | Print this Post

There is a fascinating TV series titled Tribe on BBC TV in England. An English guy, Bruce Parry, with lots of experience of staying for long periods with traditional peoples, stays with various tribes in the Ethiopian Omo valley. What is very apparent is the separation of male and female society.

This is illustrated very well in tonight’s installment, which was with the Dassanech tribe, which practices female circumcision..

Women rule domestically (as usual), and men and women are confined to separate sides of huts. The village most senior woman elder rules female society and insists when interviewed that female circumcision is the most important thing in their culture, and that the culture would be destroyed without it. She explained that not circumcising would mean that the girl and all her family would die. Womanhood (as opposed to girlhood) is associated with the absence of the clitoris. The clitoris, if left in place, is imagined as moving through the body to the head and killing the girl — a striking metaphor for sexual impropriety.

It stuck me that there was no involvement in any way of the men: circumcision is an all-female ceremony, with the cutting performed by a woman elder with the assistance of the girl‘s female relatives. The girl, who had previously been teased by being called ’wild animal’ or ’man’, is thenceforth able to marry.

It seems clear that what is going on here is female intra-sexual policing. Young women denuded of sexual appetite obviously would be much less likely (either by initiation or complicity) to take men away from their wives, thus providing all women of the tribe with greater security against their worst fear: desertion by a husband. No girl will refuse to accept being a part of this set-up because she would not be able to marry — and furthermore would be excluded from the tribe.

Female cicumcision therefore appears to be a female controlled cultural practice to ensure collective avoidance of ‘cheaters’, if you like: female individuals who may ‘let the side down’ in offering or accepting sex without the standard commitment price of the binding promise of support through marriage.

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