CIRCUMCISION: A Riddle of American Culture by Reed D.
Riner, Ph.D.
Presented at The First International Symposium on Circumcision, Anaheim,
California, March 1-2, 1989.
Abstract
Circumcision is considered, because of its continued prescription in spite
of substantial objective evidence for its contraindication, as a riddle of
American culture. Traditional Euro-American explanations for the practice, as a
prophylactic against sin, insanity, and sepsis are reviewed in historic context,
and found unsatisfactory. Findings of a cross-culturally comparative
investigation support the theory that circumcision symbolizes subordination to a
fraternal interest group. The cultural connotations of the uncircumcised and
circumcised groups are developed and the traditional explanations and
contemporary practice are reconsidered and interpreted in this context.
Introduction
Why do I call circumcision a riddle of American culture? First, because of
the fact that it has become enough of a public issue that we are gathered here
to discuss it, and second because of the fact that a significant part of the
American medical establishment persists in prescribing and perpetuating the
contraindicated practice of genital mutilation, when all other industrialized
countries have almost or completely abandoned the practice. These seem
sufficient reasons to consider the practice a riddle of American culture".
That is not, however, how I encountered circumcision as a cultural riddle. I encountered it as a riddle in teaching introductory anthropology with Marvin Harris' text, Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches,1 and Cannibals and Kings,2 two books organized in terms of cultural riddles, such as "Why is the cow sacred (in India), and the pig taboo (in Semitic Cultures)?"
Another of Harris riddles is (why) the virtually simultaneous emergence of the universal religions, and in this context why, especially, the emergence of Christianity? In this latter context he asks, "Why were Peter, James and John", a group he calls the Jerusalem Triumvirate, "so violently opposed to Paul's version of Christianity?" The answer to this last riddle hinges on circumcision, but by answering that specific riddle a more general riddle emerges which Harris avoids: this is the more general cultural riddle of circumcision and the other forms of genital mutilation.
The riddle of circumcision is a very good riddle to teach with: it is emotion-laden and it is titillating - so it grabs students' attention: It provides an excellent example of why one should be suspicious of any one society's explanation of its own cultural practices, most especially one's own culture's explanations of itself: It demands that we employ the cross-cultural, cross-temporal comparisons and the interdisciplinary, holistic perspective that together are the hallmark of doing anthropology: and by answering the riddle anthropologically we find out a lot more about our own culture than we expected to.
I propose to lead you along this same line of inquiry, through a sequence of three steps or components of the riddle:
I. How has our own culture explained, or rationalized, circumcision, in the past and into the present ?
II. What other answer is apparent when we address this same question - why
circumcision? - to a sample of diverse cultures ?
and, finally
III. What are the immediate, and the continuing sociocultural consequences of persisting in the practice?
The answer to these questions runs in historic progression from sin through insanity then bifurcates into a medical and hygienic explanation on one band, and a sanity and normative explanation on the other hand, and leaves an aesthetic rationalization dangling somewhere between these.
I. A Look at Our Own Culture
From Biblical times, at least, we have had a taboo, a religious injunction
prohibiting sexual pollution in the forms of incest, adultery and masturbation;
these three are often treated collectively, as they all are concerned with the
control of human reproduction - and it is not getting ahead of my argument to
note here that no one of these can be adequately policed by any kind of mundane,
secular organization. Enforcement is therefore more effectively referred to a
higher authority, to supernatural sanction and taboo.
Reasons for wanting to preclude incest and adultery seem more morally and practically apparent than reasons for wanting to forestall masturbation. Circumcision was prescribed as one way of preventing a person's fall into these sins of pollution. (Allow that reasoning in Biblical contexts was not scientific - but as we'll see, symbolic, and more precisely metaphorical.)
Consequently through history up to the Enlightenment bans against incest and adultery were more consistently enforced than bans against masturbation - but the association between sin and masturbation - with circumcision as the prescribed prophylactic-persisted nonetheless. Unfortunately theological and moral reasoning are not adequate to explain cultural practice - for the very reason that they are cultural practice, and any such explanation is only tautological. This fact began to be recognized by in the new rationalism and naturalism of Enlightenment thinkers, and they attempted to explain the associations; between sexual pollution and circumcision in the more empirical terms of insanity rather than supernatural terms of sin.
One needed only to visit the new mental asylums of the 16th and 17th Century to see for one's self the persistent associations between incest, adultery and masturbation on one hand and insanity on the other. Here we are more concerned with the connection than the erroneous direction of effect and cause. If circumcision had been recognized as an effective prophylactic against such derangements in the past, why certainly it should have that game effectiveness in the present.
The earliest major work we can identify espousing this point of view is Onania: Or The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And All Its Frightening Consequences In Both Sexes Considered. This classic work identified masturbation as a religious sin with dire psychological consequences in the forms of both physical and mental diseases, most particularly masturbatory insanity, which science would late reclassify as hysteria. By 1750 Onania had seen 19 editions, some 38,000 copies in all of the major European languages, and was one of the most widely read scientific, medical works of its day.
This `mania with Onania' continued. In 1758, a Swiss, Dr. Samuel Tissot, published a strictly medical approach to the problem. He argued that masturbation weakened the mind and the body, caused physical and mental ills including masturbatory insanity, again, hysteria, neurotic behavior, adolescent rebellion, frigidity, epilepsy, wars and other medical ills, including also, no doubt, that inarguable evidence of pure animality, hair on the palms of one's hands. Dr. Tissot endorsed circumcision as the effective prophylactic against these ills.
In 1858, the medical community went on record endorsing the clitoridectomy to avert frigidity, to prevent hysteria, and to make women generally more sexually responsive. In 1891, the President of the Royal College of Surgeons reiterated the position in On Circumcision as Preventative of Masturbation. In 1893, this position was further reinforced by Circumcision, Its Advantages And How to Perform It. And in 1905 Dr. Tissot's classic was reissued, still the definitive work on the subject.
Here let me note that the aggressive prescription of genital mutilation may have reached its peak sometime between 1875-1900 and that the clitoridectomy was being regularly performed in the American South right up to 1937.
What cultural sense can we make of the Onania and circumcision mania? The facts certainly do not speak for themselves; rather we have to consider this practice in a broader, cultural context.
The period we have just addressed, from 1750 to the early 1900's coincided with the great western cultural transformation that we call the Industrial Revolution and the formative period of the Capitalist Era. We label this revolution for the change in technology and consequent politico-economic developments, but it is the sociocultural consequences that are pertinent to our line of argument. These sociocultural changes include:
1. A wrenching, rapid transition from the large, extended, patrilineal and
patrilocal rural, agrarian style family and household to urban households
characterized by neo-local residence patterns, wage-labor employment, nuclear
families and the increasing independence of women. Just a few years ago we saw
this transformation re-enacted in the televised saga of the Walton family, but
in the wake of the Industrial Revolution this kind of transformation was
happening to virtually everyone.
2. Particularly this transformation, these now divisions in productive, and
reproductive, labor both provided and encouraged alternatives to a quartet of
traditional core values, namely: the work ethic, especially the work-for-family
ethic; delayed gratification, especially delayed (and more or less arranged)
marriage; the family's most especially the father's, right to control the sexual
impulses of children, and the role of women.
This set of core values, of organizational and control principles, was
challenged on all fronts by the necessities and the opportunities of the new,
more independent and autonomous, urban, middle-class life-styles.
Simultaneously with this domestic sociocultural revolution, science
generally, but medical science particularly was striving to consolidate its
newfound abilities, its skills and knowledge, and its authority - not to neglect
its political authority. We can fix this trend in our time-line, by noting that
the American Medical Association was organized in 1847. This was a scant
generation before the peak intensity of the prescription for universal
circumcision.
We will recall the significance of this sociocultural transformation and
control crisis in the concluding section.
Then, rather dramatically in 1932, sin, insanity and medical
rationalizations, as a lot, were scuttled as the accepted rationalization for
circumcision, in favor of the cancer-prevention argument, hygiene.
To illuminate this hygiene rationalization, I have to recall to you a
previous classroom lecture concerning cultural notions of dirt and pollution.
What anthropologists have discovered to be universal about 'what is dirty'
follows very simply from the way we Americans define what a weed is. "A weed is
any plant growing where it is not supposed to" - including the poor, lonely
petunia in the onion patch. Now there's a dirty song for you. This is the key to
explaining not only our folk ideas about pollution and hygiene, but also all
dirty humor and dirty behavior; it is putting something, nothing, where it is
not, properly and culturally, supposed to be, like putting your hands in your
pants.
This anthropological, cross-cultural understanding of "what's dirty" shows
us that, however dramatic the apparent change of categories, the hygiene
argument for circumcision was really just as arbitrary as the preceding sin,
insanity, and medical rationalizations, and more like them than different from
them, as each in its way was concerned with preventing one from putting
something where is was not, culturally, supposed to be, thus causing some kind
of pollution and posing a threat to the proper social order.
Historically simultaneous with the hygiene argument, we must also
acknowledge the psychoanalytic assessment of circumcision. This psychoanalytic
argument was more by intent an explanation than an endorsement of circumcision
for however often it has been used as an endorsement. This argument is also the
ultimate appeal for the psycho-sociological normative argument, that when a boy
discovers that he is, or is not, intact like the other men in his family and
peer group then he likely will feel stigmatized, excluded, even traumatized by
the difference. We will recall the socio-economic, class-membership significance
of this argument also in the last section.
The psychoanalytic/normative argument for circumcision is predicated on
the culturally normative assumption of the early Industrial Revolution science
that the human body is an energy machine, both physical energy and psychic
energy (the two were equated, that is, the two were not differentiated or
distinguished from each other). The psychoanalytic theory was developed by
applying the physical law of the conservation of energy in (mistaken) analogy to
a construct that was conceived of as `psychic energy,' and could as easily be
dissipated. (This sounds like spiritualism again. In fact it was.)
Without belaboring the point, and recapitulating anthropology's debunking
of most of Freudian psycho-histrionics, the psychoanalytic argument has been
that circumcision is an effective antidote to the universal (which it is not)
Oedipal impulse, and a way of ineluctably establishing proper identification
with the culturally approved male role model, and all that that entails,
including the normative argument.
In previewing this sequence of permutations of our own cultural
rationalizations from sin through insanity, to medical and hygienic on the one
hand, and psychoanalytic and normative on the other, I said we would finally
arrive at an aesthetic rationalization dangling between today's two dominant
explanations. The only comment I can offer regarding the aesthetic
rationalization is that it probably provides final proof of the position that
"Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder."
If we ask our own culture, "Why circumcision?," that is the answer, or the
set of answers in various combinations, that we get, or do not get, because they
offer no objective causal explanation of the association between masturbation,
incest, adultery, frigidity and adolescent rebellion on the one hand and
circumcision on the other. Nor do traditional theories explain why the
circumcision should have any prophylactic effect against the former or the ills
attributed to them.
II. What answer does a cross-cultural, cross-temporal, and interdisciplinary,
holistic inquiry into circumcision give us?
Seeking the answer to the riddle of circumcision in the context of our
own, or any other single culture seems to do more to confuse our understanding
of the issue than to clarify it. In fact it amounts to generalizing from a
sample of one.
An alternative way to get at the sociocultural meaning of circumcision,
and all of the related forms of genital mutilation, is a four step process in
which we take a large sample of cultures, identify the cases in which
circumcision occurs, determine what those cases have in common that
distinguishes them from all other cases, and finally, consider that explanation
back in the context of our own culture.
The first three of these are the steps that I want to follow in this
section of my presentation; the fourth I reserve for the concluding section. In
considering what these cases have in common, I will group the traits under four
headings: the historic/geographic distribution, social organization,
socio-psychological consequences, and ritual/symbolic expression.
We will begin with a large sample of cultures, drawn from the Human
Relations Area File, that encyclopedic database that indexes the world's
cultures, past and present, and enumerates the many specific traits that
characterize and distinguish each of them. This sample has been restricted to
pre-industrial, pre-empire societies because the larger societies, especially
industrial level societies, are a heterogeneous mix of many cultural traditions.
This mixing would confuse our intent to discover the sociocultural associations
with circumcision in unbiased cultural contexts.
The sample that I am referring to has been further skewed in favor of
systematic representativeness of both geographical distribution and levels of
cultural complexity. It includes 144 band, tribal, chiefdom and simple state
level cultures.
A. The Geographic Historic Distribution
From this sample we shall select out all societies that report any
incidence of genital mutilation: that is circumcision, but also the more exotic
sub-incision or super-incision of males and the clitoridectomy and infibulation
of females. (Do any of the more exotic practices need description?)
We find that only 23 of the 144 cultures in the sample report occurrence
of any of these. This is definitely a minority practice, something that must
occur only under special circumstances. There is no reported incidence of any
form of genital mutilation, male or female, across all of aboriginal North and
South America, for example.
Within the set of 23 cultures there is a clear pattern regarding the
incidence of the kinds of genital mutilation that are practiced. We have
accounted for the majority of cases where this is done neither to boys nor to
girls. In the remaining 23, we find cases where genital mutilation is done to
both boys and girls, or to boys but not to girls, but never a case where it is
done to girls and not to boys. This suggests that female genital mutilation is
somehow dependent on the cultural presence of male genital mutilation, and that
if we explain the latter we have, for the most part, explained the former. In
other words, despite the more exotic variations, it will be sufficient for us to
explain just ordinary, garden-variety circumcision on which male sub- and
super-incision and female clitoridectomy and infibulation are dependent.
These 23 cases show a very distinctive geographic clustering. There are
three distinctive, evolutionarily unrelated, culture areas, three discrete
groups of similar, related cultural traditions. These three groups are: the
Semitic Mid-East, North and East Africa crescent, and the Melanesian, New
Guinea, Australian culture areas.
Despite their distinctiveness as cultural/historical areas, these three
areas represent only two basic subsistence types. The primary modes of
subsistence in these areas is (or was, typically) either a nomadic pastoralism,
i.e., herding, advanced horticulture, i.e., garden cultivation, or, as in the NE
Africa crescent, some combination of these two. These are not all desert,
sandy-terrain cultures.
While these kinds of subsistence patterns are employed in other culture
areas, here they are invariably associated with a particular kind of household,
domestic and social organization.
B. Social Organization
All of these 23 cultures are organized in terms of strongly patrilineal,
patrilocal, polygamous households. They are all of a population size (derived
from the success of their subsistence strategy) that family lineages alone are
not sufficient to accomplish all the communities' organizational needs.
Therefore all 23 societies also exhibit some form of strong, supra-household,
male solidarity groups. These fraternal interest groups may take the form of
clans, of age grades, of secret societies, or some other, but in some form a
strong, supra-household male solidarity, or fraternal interest, group is always
present.
These kinds of societies are, additionally, characterized by chronic
internal conflict and warfare, a device that maintaining a land base sufficient
to each sub-groups subsistence needs. This trait entails the development of high
degrees of male individuality and autonomy, a consequent premium on male
self-control and, in compliment, tight contractual control over women and jural
control over children.
This particular combination of traits, patrilineal decent, patrilocal
residence, polygamy, the presence of strong fraternal interest groups, internal
warfare, male individuality and control over women and children - distinguishes
our sample of 23 from all of the remaining 121 cultures.
C. Psycho-Social Consequences
This constellation of societal, structural features results in several
practical and psycho-cultural consequences distinctive cultural signature. The
matters of practice include: a relatively low protein diet that entails the
consequences of prolonged nursing, and a marked postpartum, postnatal, taboo on
intercourse, and males sleeping away from their wives, so that prepubertal boys
are more intimately associated with, and primarily socialized by, a community of
mothers and siblings.
There are three pertinent psycho-cultural consequences following from the
practical, adaptive arrangements in the 23 cultures of our sample. These
psycho-cultural traits are not, then, culturally universal, but are in fact the
cultural, structural consequences of the particular, practical and, given the
circumstances, adaptive cultural arrangements. In these cases, they are the
presence of:
1. A pervasive male legitimacy anxiety, expressed in the content of myths,
folk tales, jokes, insults, and socio-political accusations. Bastardy is taken
very seriously.
Conversely, this male legitimacy anxiety is virtually absent in
matrilineal, matrilocal societies; there natal legitimacy is determined by who
one's mother is. In patrilineal, patrilocal, polygamous societies there is
always room for doubt.
Also the culturally entailed correlative, the virginity anxiety
surrounding the females, is emphasized, exaggerated in patrilineal societies,
and effectively absent in matrilineal societies for comparable reasons.
2. A structurally built-in double-bind relationship between father and
son, Freud's misperceived Oedipus Complex. The double-bind relationship follows
from the fact that father in patrilineal systems must satisfy contradictory role
relations with his son, both as warm, nurturing male role model, and as primary
source of legitimacy, discipline, rewards and punishment.
Malinowski showed long ago that the Oedipus Complex was absent from
Trobriand Island culture, and from matrilineal cultures generally, because
mother's brother, a member of her lineage, and her son's family, is responsible
as the primary source of discipline, rewards and punishment, so that father, who
is not a lineal family member, is expected to be, indeed can only be, a warm ,
nurturing male role model.
This built-in double-bind relationship between father and son receives
further expression and reinforcement in the fact that in patrilineal, patrilocal
societies this good/bad father is in principle, and generalized from actual
practice, omni-present, omniscient and omnipotent, and the person who's role
must be `taken over,' in some way supplanted or otherwise internalized, as the
boy becomes a man. Notice that this latter is an activity of adult adaptation,
not a matter of early childhood experience.
In matrilineal, matrilocal societies this further conflict is precluded,
as mother's brother lives away with his won wife's family, and returns to
instruct, reward and punish only on special occasions; and the boy, rather than
supplanting this relationship with his mother's brother, will grow into a
similar, complimentary relationship with his own sister's sons.
3. The third psycho-cultural consequence of our distinctive trait cluster
is the development of a cross-sex identity crises in boys as they approach
maturity and manhood from a life experience dominated by mothers and siblings
and the specter of the good/bad, often absentee, but nonetheless all-powerful
father.
At this point, in conjunction with the presence of intra-cultural warfare,
these kinds of cultures find it necessary to provide special training in
aggression, in the manly behaviors associated with warfare, and the male role
generally, for the boys.
D. Symbolic, Ritual Expression
This special training in aggression for boys, and provision for their
orderly passage from boyhood to manhood, is organized by a pubertal rite of
passage. These rites have a common format wherever they occur. The boy or boys
to be initiated are placed symbolically and physically in a kind of magic
circle, separated from their natal community (and their identity in that
community); they are transformed, by actions of ritual specialists acting on
behalf of the community, in a sequence of activities that almost invariably
includes a progression through: a `last meal,' their `death,' circumcision, and
indoctrination.
The length, severity and amount of elaboration in this phase of the rite
varies; at one extreme the Tiwi, an island people off the north coast of
Australia, kept their boys in this phase of 14 years as the recipient partners
in institutionalized homosexuality, perhaps one of the most graphic
transmissions of the adult male role model.
The third and final phase of the pubertal rite of passage is characterized
by the `new man's' reincorporation, symbolized as a rebirth into his natal
society in the role, and with the privileges and obligations of an adult man.
On close inspection of our cluster of 23 circumcising cultures, we find
that circumcision is not in fact invariably accomplished in the context of the
puberty initiation rite. In cases it is; but in one case it occurs later in
young adulthood, in 10 it occurs earlier in childhood, and in 4 it occurs in
infancy. For three cases there is no date. Anthropologists suspect that at least
some of the 14 pre-pubertal cases may be historic displacements from the puberty
initiation rite. Regardless, in all of the cases, circumcision precedes and
proves to be an obligatory pre-requisite to marriage, that single most
inarguable prerogative of manhood, the formation of a new kinship and
politico-economic alliance, a new household, a new family, a new branch of the
tree.
We must identify, in addition to the cultural context of circumcision,
also who are the culturally specified participants of the rite, and their
relationships to one another. In this regard, we find, again, a constant
pattern. First, and most obviously, kids never voluntarily do this kind of thing
to themselves, which tells us a lot right there. Rather the dramatis personae of
the rite are: the members of the male solidarity group one or more ritual
specialists qualified to act on that group's behalf: collateral members of the
candidate's patrilineal descent group who have, explicitly or implicitly, called
for the rite: the father: and his son. The rite is always a public, never a
private, performance.
As we inquire into the social, ritual and power relations among these
actors in the sacred circle, we approach the anthropological explanation of
traditional circumcision.
Toward Explanation
Walter Goldschmidt and John Greenway offered one of the earliest assays at
an explanation: The severity of a rite of passage is directly proportional to
the importance of the information communicated in the rite.3
In severity, circumcision is the most extreme of all rites of passage.
Circumcision evokes a generalized stress or trauma response, increased
adrenaline flow, accelerated heart beat, increased wakefulness and irritability.
All obstetrical nurses know this. It is the kind of state that Sargent, in
Battle For the Mind,4 specifies is requisite to effective brainwashing and other
forms of ideological conversion. Goldschmidt and Greenway continue: The
combination of pain, ritual and moralization more indelibly inculcate the values
in the instruction.5
The secrets, and effective transfer of the adult male role, especially in
strongly patrilineal, patrilocal societies, are the key to the perpetuation and
prosperity of the lineages and the culture. That much makes sense, but the
Goldschmidt-Greenway explanation does not make so much sense with regard to the
14 cases of infant and pre-pubertal circumcision.
Bruno Bettleheim, considering this social, ritual situation in a
psychoanalytic perspective, concluded that what we are seeing is a projection,
an acting out on the real world, of psychic anxieties and conflicts of the
individuals. Anxieties are indeed present: the legitimacy anxiety, that wants
public resolution: "This is my legitimate son." The cross-sex identity crises,
that demands unequivocal male role identification, and special training in
aggression for the males: the father-son double-bind relationship that needs
some kind of amelioration, and: the more widely shared anxiety that the young
man's new household and family may signal a schism in the solidarity of the
lineage. Loyalty and submission to the fraternal interest group must be publicly
acknowledged.
But the ethnographic evidence suggests that we are pursuing a dead-end.
The paternal blood relatives, not the father, call for performance of the rite.
The fathers attest publicly to the legitimacy of their sons by presenting them,
in fact reluctantly, for the ritual, for their symbolic sacrifice to the
authority of the fraternal interest group. Bettleheim interprets the
circumcision as surrogate castration. In presenting their sons, the fathers act
out their own submission to the male solidarity group, to that group's authority
over the disposition of their son's penises and the potential each promises to
deliver.
As matter of ethnographic fact, the fathers more often take the role in
the ritual of defenders and comforters, of nurses for their sons. The symbolic
sacrifice is performed by ritual specialists on behalf of the male solidarity
group for the satisfaction of the collateral patrilineal kin, and not especially
for either the son or for the father. And the specialists are, otherwise,
typically priests who via ritual sacrifice regulate the allocation of meat
protein in a society where it is otherwise scarce.
We have to fault Bettleheim's explanation for attributing all motivation
for circumcision to individual psychodynamics and the resolution of early
childhood anxieties. This is overwhelmingly a ritual of adults, by adults, and
for adults. The boys and their foreskins are tokens in a larger game this line
of explanation led Frank Young6 to conclude that the circumcision ritual is a
loyalty oath and political deal among adults, both a testament and a promise of
continued solidarity within a group threatened by fission, threatened by a
rebellious son possibly starting his own competing politico-economic enterprise.
Young's explanation is based on structural and cultural features that effect and
involve everyone, features that transcend the variations in individual
psychodynamics, structures that are not caused by individual psychodynamics, but
collective psychodynamics that are the result of particular, situationally
adaptive cultural structures.
Karen and Jeffery Paige,7 whose research on the subject is, to date, the
most thorough and exhaustive, come to the following more comprehensive
conclusion:
Thus, the principal elements of a fraternal interest group theory of
circumcision are apparent in ethnographic descriptions of circumcision rites.
The ceremony is not designed to impress the child since the age at which it
occurs varies from infancy to adulthood; as a pre-requisite to marriage, it
occurs at a time when the father's political and military potential becomes an
immediate source of concern to his lineage. The theory states that the primary
purpose of the operation is to demonstrate loyalty to agnatic [paternal] kin in
general and to the village elders in particular. Representatives from both
groups are generally present at the circumcision, often take active roles, and
sometimes order that the ceremony be performed. As the theory suggests, the
father is reluctant to expose his son to the risks of the operation and
generally participates in a supportive or defensive role if at all, while hazing
and brutality are largely under the control of lineage elders or other
consanguineal kin [paternal cousins and uncles]. Despite his reluctance, the
father is forced to permit his son to participate in the ceremony either by
direct orders (in centralized political systems) or by social pressure, the
stigma attached to an uncircumcised son and the social prohibition against his
marring. This prohibition means that a father who wishes to expand his family
power base must have his son submit to the operation or forfeit the son's
assistance in continuing his line. Descriptions of the ceremony indicate that,
as earlier theories suggested, they are often brutal and sometimes result in
castration or death, but the fraternal interest group theory suggests that the
brutality is required as a vivid demonstration of the father's loyalty to his
own kin, not the result of the father's or is son's unresolved psychological
conflicts. Finally, the role of consanguineal [patrilineal] kin is, as the
theory suggests, ambivalent and these consanguines [relatives] frequently take
overtly or covertly hostile roles in the ceremony. The evidence from
ethnographic accounts of circumcision, then, support the contention that they
are obligatory demonstrations of fraternal interest group loyalty.8
Thus far we have considered two explanations for the reasons of
circumcision: that from our own culture which entails ideas of sin, medical
practice and hygiene, insanity and normative behavior, and a global,
ethnographic explanation that entails social control by a fraternal interest
group. These two explanations likely seem to be diametrically opposed. I
suspect, in fact, I intend that this opposition is creating some cognitive
dissonance for you. The third sociocultural significance and consequences of
circumcision, is dedicated to resolving that dissonance.
III. The Sociocultural Consequences of Circumcision
We have examined, thus far, two quite contrary explanations for the
practice of circumcision. The explanation provided within our own culture
entails consideration of sin and taboo, of insanity and social conformity, and
of medical illness and hygienic considerations. These explanations have in
common their advocacy of circumcision as a prophylactic against culturally
disapproved behavior, masturbation et al., and as a means to ensuring culturally
proper behavior.
The alternative, ethnographic explanation for circumcision appeals to
circumcision's symbolic function as a permanent, dramatic and public
demonstration to all parties involved of the loyalty and subordination of the
father and the son to the interests of a fraternal interest group.
In this concluding section, I will clarify how these two, seemingly
antithetical explanations, are in fact intimately connected and pertinent to
understanding the issue of circumcision in our own society.
The ritual of circumcision results in exposure of the glans penis to
permanent public view, set off by an irreversible, and highlighting, frame of
scar tissue. This is a mark of more than just a biological transformation;
biologically it is, in fact, irrelevant. Rather circumcision is a powerful,
multi-message, therefore symbolic, and only symbolic, statement of social and
cultural transformation.
Circumcision creates a biological boundary and simultaneously a
sociocultural boundary; the scarring separates males of a society into two
categories, into dichotomously opposed categories: the circumcised and the
uncircumcised. Circumcision simultaneously creates a social boundary, creates
two opposed social groups, and creates a specified relationship between these
two groups. The scar is emblematic of this sociocultural division, and of the
proper relationship between the categories it creates. We can discover more of
the cultural meaning, and the implications og circumcision by identifying the
significant and contrasting features of these dichotomous social categories.
The circumcised belong to the group which is fully male, dominant, public,
and legitimate. The uncircumcised belong to a group characterized by the
opposites of these traits; they are other than properly male, sub-ordinate,
private and not yet legitimate.
The circumcised are tame and domesticated in the sense that they conform
to the established cultural order. The uncircumcised are, by contrast,
potentially wild, aggressive, rebellious and insubordinant of the established
cultural order.
The circumcised are defined, set apart in their proper cultural place,
hence, controlled and predictable. The uncircumcised are not so defined; they
remain amorphous, unpredictable, indiscriminate, promiscuous, and without proper
place, hence, potentially polluting and dirty, where the circumcised are clean.
These contrasts appeal to more than a merely social boundary; this is one
expression of the boundary that distinguishes everything that is culture,
man-made, public, orderly, domesticated, sane and clean, from everything that is
not culture, from nature that is disorderly, wild, insane and dirty. And
circumcision moves the boy, irreversibly, from uncontrolled private nature into
controlled public culture, into the role of legitimate participant. The
individual's actual behavior is irrelevant. The categories are a priori
characterizations, stereotypes, of a kind a person. The ritual and scar of
circumcision imposes and communicates this distinction and meaning in every
culture.
It is this symbolic significance of circumcision that explains why
circumcision in so closely associated with the ban against masturbation,
masturbation results in putting one's seed somewhere, anywhere other than into a
culturally controlled and approved sexual, economic and political alliance. It
explains why that "elsewhere" is categorically and unalterably dirty .
It explains why James, Peter and John so opposed Paul's version of
Christianity. In rejecting circumcision, Paul openly rejected the legitimacy and
authority of Judaism, particularly of the fraternal interest group that included
Jesus' own kin, in proselytizing the new religion.
And it explains why the uncircumcised and the masturbators are stigmatized
as prone to wild, rebellious, disruptive, generally improper, dirty and likely
insane behavior. The ritual of circumcision removes this stigma and,
symbolically though not at all practically, the potentials of such anti-social
behaviors.
It is pertinent to note that this stigma is the stereotype that dominant
American society has projected on ethnic minorities; that is, not only on
Blacks, American Indi ans, Hispanics and other immigrants, but also on the
born-at-home, rural, breast-fed and typically uncircumcised, as opposed to
hospital-born, urban, bottle-fed and typically circumcised. These distinctions
illustrate continuation in our own society of the cross-culturally invariant
meaning of circumcision which ethnographically and historically has been used to
set apart classes and ethnic groups to establish and maintain dominant and
subordinant relations, both within and between societies.
The boundary imposed on nature by circumcision is an expression of man's
effort (and here I use the gender specific term advisedly) to impose his control
on nature, in particular on the natural tendencies of society. When man, and the
fraternal interest group, perceives any loss of control of that part of nature,
of that valued resource, of their own authority and legitimacy, the typical
reaction is to attempt to intensify the traditional modes of control, in this
case the desired control is moral commitment to the propriety and the social
category distinctions drawn and reinforced by circumcision.
This control crisis reaction explains the `Onania mania' that accompanied
the social transformations of the industrial Revolution. It was an effort,
albeit an effort in vain, to control behaviors such as the break-up of the
patrilineal, patrilocal rural household, that could not be otherwise effectively
policed. And the argument was couched, not in terms of sin and taboo, but In
their modern, more `rational' but still symbolic equivalents, insanity,
conformity and hygiene.
It does not matter that the effort to intensify the traditional modes of
control is counter-productive, that typically it more rapidly erodes the
credibility of its proponents. The proponent's argument is about the symbolic
propriety and cultural appropriateness of a gesture, and the particular kind of
social and cultural order that gesture represents.
No amount of empirical, statistical evidence will dissuade the proponents.
Statistical evidence argues from the position of, indeed it is, a description of
nature. The intent of the circumcision argument is, antithetically, cultural.
The argument over circumcision is, then, another face of that irresolvable
argument that rages between religious fundamentalists and biological
evolutionists, one is talking culture, the other nature.
I promised that in conclusion we would come back to circumcision as a
riddle in American culture, and see more clearly into the motivations and
dynamics of our own culture than we perhaps cared to. The history of the
circumcision issue since publication of the 1975 American Academy of Pediatrics
study, the one that says `If it works, don't fix it,' illustrates the argument I
have developed.
Recall the image of the actors involved in the circumcision ritual - the
members of the fraternal interest group and their designated specialists. Their
counterparts in our society are the American Medical Association (and perhaps
others, yet to be identified). Their opponents are the AAP and associated
medical and para-medical organizations including nurses mid-wives, advocates of
breast feeding, holistic healing, etc., but also insurance companies. This
latter might seem an odd alliance apart from understanding the symbolic,
significance of circumcision. But in light of that understanding we can see
nature as "nurture" and nature as empirical statistics in opposition to a
man-made, arbitrarily imposed cultural order.
This opposition is aggravated by the radical change in social categories,
roles and divisions of productive and reproductive labor which are consequences
of our current Telectronic & Biogenetic Revolution, a transformation of our own
society and culture comparable to the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago.
The other actors in the ritual of circumcision include the collateral kin
(perhaps paternal, perhaps not), the father and his son. Literature distributed
by the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers (NOCIRC)
includes anecdotal evidence that, in our society, much of the contemporary
motivation for circumcision is less apt to come from parents than as
encouragement from the collateral kin. The theory predicts, for example, that
paternal kin are more apt to urge circumcision than are maternal kin. This begs
more careful substantiation by a medical anthropologist, or ethnographer.
The anthropological explanation of circumcision as an American cultural
riddle also predicts that there will be a control crisis reaction, a back-lash,
an attempt by members of the fraternal interest group, perceiving a threat to
their interests, to intensify their traditional modes of control. It predicts a
20th Century expression of the 18th Century Onania mania. That circumcision is a
current issue provides support to that prediction. Our medical ethnographer
might also clarify for us what, more precisely, the interests and pre-conscious
assumptions of that fraternal interest group are, i.e. if its members would be
willing to cooperate.
By elaborating the characteristics attributed to the circumcised and the
uncircumcised, we have brought together the traditional and ethnographic answers
to the riddle "why circumcision?" We have seen how a social ritual -
circumcision - creates a social reality, dichotomous classes in an asymmetrical
relationship. And we have seen historically how this has been rationalized in a
succession of related metaphors: sanctity and sin, cleanliness and pollution,
propriety and impropriety.
Biography
Reed D. Riner, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona
University, Flagstaff, Arizona, 86011.
References
Harris, Marvin. Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches. New York: Random House, Vintage.
1974.
Harris, Marvin. Cannibals and Kings. New York: Random House, Vintage. 1977.
Greenway, John. The Inevitable Americans.
Sargent, William. Battle for the Mind. New York: Harper & Row. 1959.
Greenway.
Young, Frank, The Function of Male Initiation Ceremonies: A Cross-Cultural Test
of an Alternative Hypothesis, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 65. pp.
379-396.
Paige, Karen Ericksen. The Ritual of Circumcision, Human Nature, vol. 1, no. 5
(May 1978): pp. 40-48.
Paige, Karen Ericksen & Jeffery M. Paige. The Politics of Reproductive Ritual.
Berkeley: University of California Press. 1981. pp. 156-157.
Other References:
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1966.
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Randon
House, Pantheon. 1970.
Freilich, Morris. Myth, Method and Madness, Current Anthropology.
http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/first/riner.html