Shaun de Waal Body Language Cape Town artist Peet Pienaar’s work I Want to Tell You Something …, in which he had himself circumcised on camera (reported in this paper last week) raises debate about taboo issues. The first is that of cultural traditions. Fellow artist Thembinkosi Goniwe objected to Pienaar’s original plan to go under the knife as his contribution to a group show examining masculinity. He said Pienaar was appropriating a ritual not part of his culture. This conception of cultural tradition reinforces exclusive ethnic and/or religious identification. To pretend that such traditions are unchangeable is oppressive; it is to present identity in an essentialist way that would make perfect sense to the architects of apartheid. Would Goniwe defend “traditions” such as the subordination of women? Would he object to the way Africans have “appropriated” European cultural forms such as soccer? These things are man-made, not God-given. They are, in fact, in a state of constant adaptation, and people within such traditions are seeking to broaden them. For instance, in 1996, white and Indian girls were invited to participate in the Zulu reed dance, a ritual that constructs femininity (and marriageability) in a way analogous to that in which circumcision constructs masculinity in, say, Xhosa culture. The second issue around which Pienaar’s work should generate argument is circumcision itself. This is a particularly sensitive area, one frequently defended by the invocation of tradition. Yet the rationale of traditional and religious practice itself often segues into other, secular defences, exposing the paucity of convincing reasons from within the tradition itself. Witness the way in which circumcision has been rationalised in Jewish culture. The original covenant with Jehovah, who tells Abraham in Genesis 17 that this penile snip is how he shall define his descendants as chosen by God, is later explained and defended in all sorts of other ways in rabbinical literature. Perhaps the need to do this is driven by the lack of any real biblical sense of why Jehovah should choose this particular, rather bizarre way of marking his chosen people. In any case, circumcision is not peculiar to Judaism; it is practised by Muslims, for instance, despite the lack of any mention of circumcision in the Koran. Its anthropological origins are mysterious, though it may have something to do with the Hebrew “captivity” in ancient Egypt, which provides the oldest known example of the practice.
In the 12th century, the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides argued that circumcision was intended to “bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question … The bodily pain caused to that member is the real purpose of circumcision.” Yet his follower Isaac ben Yedaiah confused matters, seeing circumcision as a way to increase male sexual pleasure and speed up the sex act: the circumcised man, he writes, “will find himself performing his task quickly, emitting his seed as soon as he inserts the crown”, thus discouraging too much female interest in sex – and we all know how fatal it is to get women into a lustful state. Free feminine sexuality is even more threatening to the social fabric than the retention of foreskins. The absurdity of such arguments is highlighted by the masturbation scare of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which encouraged routine circumcision in the United States (still performed on about 80% to 90% of male children there). In 1903 Dr Mary R Melenby wrote that masturbation “lays the foundation for consumption, paralysis and heart disease. It weakens the memory, makes a boy careless, negligent and listless. It even makes many lose their minds; others, when grown, commit suicide.” Circumcision was proffered as the ideal remedy. The leading health freak and inventor of cornflakes, John Harvey Kellogg, argued that “a remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.”
It is not a long way from this to female “circumcision” – that is, genital mutilation. Still practised in many parts of Africa, including Egypt, it is seen as a way to control woman. Few Western commentators defend it, yet there is no consensus about the mutilation of male children in the West. As medical arguments around hygiene and disease control offer conflicting evidence, such practices are still defended in the name of tradition. For instance, circumcision is seen as an essential part of Jewish identity, just as it is often seen as crucial to certain African identities. But cultural traditions, to have any meaning, must be espoused and renewed by their practitioners within a changing social context. An example for the interrogation of tradition in Africa is the way Jewish circumcision is being questioned today: some argue it is inconsistent with the Torah’s prohibitions on bodily marking or scarring. And it was questioned during the Hellenistic period (fourth century BC onward) and in the German reform movement of the 1840s. In any case, the transition from partial (milah) to full (periah) circumcision took place in the Hellenistic era, driven by rabbis trying to counter the deracination of diasporic Jews. Yet, as one writer put it in the Jewish Spectator: “The biggest threat to Jewish survival is assimilation. There is no evidence that circumcision prevents or slows it.” In the same way, and particularly in a country like South Africa – still caught between modernity and the demands of ethnic identity – the debate around such cultural traditions should be opened.