The process of exploring the female circumcision debates is valuable in developing one’s own position and becoming able to contribute in some way to promoting understanding and working for better lives for women. To explore these issues in our writing is not the same as trying to “speak for” others or become their unauthorized “allies.” Nor is it intended to tell “them” what to do or pretend that some imaginary superior “we” has the answer to the questions of when and how to pursue change. Instead, grappling with difficult questions is a human moral imperative, or try to understand our world and to promote discussion and understanding across the boundaries that divide people.
Humanitarian Values and Cultural Relativism
Upon learning of these female circumcision practices, people from outside the cultures commonly conclude that the continuation of such harmful practices violates humanitarian values. Certainly, for those committed to improving women’s rights globally and for those working on international health, the agenda seems clear: we respond with an urgent desire to stop the practices.
Yet if these practices are based on deeply held cultural values and traditions, can outsiders effectively challenge them without challenging the cultural integrity of the people who practice them? Cognizant as we have become, at the dawn of the millennium, of the injustice of exercising cultural hegemony and of the greater insight achievable when multiple viewpoints are consulted and disparate voices heard, can we adopt a position that declines to challenge any cultural practices? Under what circumstances and through what means is it permissible to attempt to alter fundamentally the beliefs and practices of others? And even if the ethical justifications are found, how effective will condemnations of a cultural practice be, particularly if they appear to condemn an entire people and their cultural values?
Simplistic condemnations are not only ineffectual but can also stimulate strong defensive reactions. On many occasions, the pious pronouncements of outsiders against cultural practices deemed “backward” or “barbaric” have provoked a backlash, with people staunchly defending their traditions against criticism. Jomo Kenyatta, who was trained in anthropology and later became president of Kenya, wrote a book entitled Facing Mount Kenya (1959, originally published in 1938), in which he argued strongly in favor of female circumcision, viewing British colonial criticism of it as essentially cultural imperialism. More recently, at the 1975 international conference in Denmark sponsored by the United Nations for the International Decade for Women, female circumcision became a major focus of controversy at the conference when some of the African women present took umbrage at the denunciations of anticircumcision political activists such as Fran Hosken; non-African women such as Hosken were accused of inappropriate cultural interference. As this discussion has continued to flourish in international gatherings into the present, even African women who are activists against the practice do not usually welcome outsiders preaching pompously against their societies’ traditions.
Critical opposition is potentially experienced as hostile ethnocentrism. Ethnocentric assessments that view the practices of others through the perspective of one’s own culture are often innocuous misunderstandings. To see cultural differences naively from one’s own cultural perspective is neither preventable nor necessarily harmful. But frequently ethnocentric views lead not only to misconceptions but also to strongly negative judgments of differences. That sort of ethnocentrism has a different tone entirely, one of scolding, distaste, condescension, and condemnation. Insofar as it is unreflective, such ethnocentrism contributes to prejudices, particularly when the cultural differences concern strongly held values.
In the argument against female circumcision, people have too often latched onto some single cause that can be condemned. This may enhance one’s conviction of the need for change, but if it does not include an understanding of how the practitioners view the issue, it will not bring us any closer to seeing how change can occur. A sound analysis requires looking at female circumcision from many angles, listening to what women who do it have said about it, and trying to understand the reasons for resistance to change. Doing that does not make us advocates for the practices. It simply recognizes that without a more sympathetic “listen,” we miss the fundamental causes and the concrete obstacles to change.
The Prime Directive
Like the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm and Star Trek’s “prime directive” not to interfere with indigenous cultures of other worlds, cultural anthropologists have valued the rights of peoples to pursue their traditional practices and values.2 This is not to say that in the past cultural anthropologists were not affected by ethnocentrism. Indeed there are many examples of disparagement and condemnation of customs to be found in earlier writings of cultural anthropologists. But anthropologists have struggled to clarify their perspective, recognizing the impossibility of totally “value-free” social science and yet pursuing a stance capable of greater objectivity than ethnocentrism affords. Any missionary zeal to change “the other” into a copy of the model of “civilized” culture offered by one’s own culture is understood to truncate one’s ability to understand.
Thus the anthropological antidote to ethnocentrism became cultural relativism—judging each culture within its own context rather than by the values of others. I regard cultural relativism not as an ultimate ethical stance but as a mental technique to assist people to avoid negative judgments of, say, food preferences, manners of greeting, or marital customs. Such a perspective is clearly necessary for carrying out ethnographic field research. While a cultural relativistic approach embodies certain ethical dilemmas, it is a beneficial starting point for promoting inter-cultural understanding. Although a useful mental exercise to free one from unreflective ethnocentrism, cultural relativism usually requires a degree of suspension of one’s ethical values. How far can or should one go with this?
Female circumcision offers a major test of whether it is possible to reconcile cultural relativist respect for cultural diversity with the desire to improve the lives of girls and women across cultural boundaries. It raises the question of whether the outsider’s desire to influence cultural practices constitutes ethnocentric interference or humanitarian solidarity. It demands consideration of how respect for cultural variation, which seems to imply noninterference, can be made to allow a constructive role for outsiders in social change.
The Limits to Cultural Relativism
One way to explore the issue of limits is to turn to some of the most extreme examples that can be imagined and see how individuals’ ethical values respond to these cases. Let us consider for a moment slavery. In slavery systems, one person owns and controls the fate of another, his or her freedom, work, sexuality, and well-being. In doing so, the owner may be following a socially permitted institution of another time and place, and he or she may consider slavery to be right and just. Applying cultural relativism would allow for better understanding and explanation of how that owner might manage to feel morally upright. An even more extreme example would be genocide. While it is jarring to think about it, those who have engaged in genocide or ethnic cleansing may have reasons for doing these things that they consider proper, such as perhaps a belief that it is God’s will or that racial/ethnic purity and homogeneity are the proper state of existence and the ancestral rights of inhabitants of a region.
But is it necessary to accept slavery or genocide as legitimate human institutions simply because certain cultures at particular historical junctures have justified them? Surely not. But to dismiss such views as purely crazy or “backward” is also to fail to appreciate the incredible complexity of the human mind, which can find justifications for behavior that in the light of a more general sense of human morality is clearly disgusting and outrageous. It is also clear that trying to understand the causes of such practices may prove valuable in preventing them in the future.
In my view, human beings should reflect upon and criticize historical events, whether they are directly involved in them or not. The exercise of understanding how those who practice