Culture or behaviour, which is it?
Some of the ideas discussed here have been touched on previously by other scholars. Graamans (2020:154), for example, writes:
The idea of culture itself could very well be the culprit of common misunderstandings about the production of behavior and of upholding barriers to change. For it is often used as an excuse for behavioral patterns that are harmful to at least a part of the populace and beneficial to another, more privileged part. However, although the idea of culture is not given up easily, the word culture itself is sometimes replaced for words representing the same idea. For example, if harmful practices, such as girl circumcision, are framed in terms of a culture, it might evoke resistance on the part of the communities targeted. People might feel their culture is under attack and instead hold on to those practices, however harmful, even more. The emphasis is moved away from culture – in order to safeguard the idea and avoid people’s sensitivities about it – to norms.
Voestermans and Verheggen (2013:9) argue persuasively, from a cultural psychology perspective, against labelling certain behaviour as culture:
Culture … is used as a general label for a vast array of behaviors … We still do not have a true understanding of what motivates individuals in their daily behaviors. Saying that they are being steered by culture is like saying that a flock of birds steers every individual bird in the proper direction. It requires only brief reflection to see that ‘culture’ is of course not the operating force, just as the flock is not the operating force behind the movements of the individual birds.
The tendency to label behaviour in this way, they write, does not allow us to see the dynamics of a situation, and they specifically mention FGM/C (ibid.:15).
Winterbottom, Koomen and Burford (2009:47) flag up the risks of denigrating Maasai communities which practise FGM/C, warning that approaches ‘that do not address local contexts of FGC, including the complex politics and history of interventions designed to eradicate it, can in fact reify and reinscribe the practice as central to Maasai cultural identity’. Koomen (2014:256), like Hodgson (2017), is uneasy about the ‘pervasive understandings of female excision as a problem of traditional culture’ that are evident in campaigns against it, particularly in historically marginalised communities. She argues that this may have the unintended consequence of politicising the ‘contextual significance of excision’ which may result in the cut ‘[gaining] new significance as a reified symbol of insider Maasai identity’. Van Bavel et al. (2017:10) also see the cut as serving to inscribe Maasai identity onto the body, and as an act of resistance to outsider intervention. Esho, Enzlin and Van Wolputte (2013:225) note that FGM/C inscribes social identity, femininity, sexuality, and fertility onto the body.
Koomen (2014) traces continuities in resistance to colonial-era anti-FGM/C campaigns, and warns of the dangers of overlooking wider struggles by marginalised groups to defend their land, rights, and autonomy. Gruenbaum (2001:25) has written: ‘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.’ These ‘outsiders’ can include other Africans. Graamans et al. (2019:8) make similar remarks. Gruenbaum (2005:431) summarises points made by several scholars:
Shell-Duncan and Hernlund caution analysts to avoid what Gosselin (2000:18–19) has called the ‘trivialization of culture’ that can occur when FGC practices are removed from their social and historical contexts and offered up as ‘barbaric customs’. Such oversimplifications of ‘reasons’ evoke an image of people mindlessly following rituals that are passed down without reflection, offensive to the very people reformers seek to engage with …
Prazak (2007:30, 2016:213) notes the unhelpful ‘rhetoric of blame and shame’, while Hodgson (2017:98) claims that Maasai culture is ‘demonized, presumed to be only a source for the oppression of women, not their empowerment’.
This chapter will mostly discuss practices in age-organised societies in Kenya. I prefix my analysis by saying that ARP is a laudable attempt to find an alternative to FGM/C. However, that does not render it above and beyond critique. I should make two things clear: 1. I am not saying that culture does not matter; and 2. The practice of FGM/C has changed over time, as people modified it of their own accord without external intervention.
What is culture?
This was a question I and colleagues wrestled with while researching constitutional cultural rights in Kenya.
1 I led this ESRC-funded project (2014–17), ‘Cultural Rights and Kenya’s New Constitution’, at The Open University, UK. My case study on FGM/C and ARP was part of it. Field research took place in 2015–16 at locations in West Pokot, Kajiado, and Narok counties. I attended ARPs organised by World Vision and Amref, and interviewed or consulted staff at these NGOs and others, including Equality Now, Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative, S.A.F.E. Kenya, 28 Too Many, and ASKenya. We deliberately did not define culture, because we wanted to hear how our informants defined and used it. We simply treated culture as a social construct. The uses of culture in Kenya range very widely, from the branding of the nation and devolved counties to tourism marketing, political campaigning, and ethnicised land and other types of rights claims (Hughes and Lamont 2018). Culture is invariably seen in Kenya through an ethnicised lens – people will tell you that this is the way the Kikuyu do things, this is how the Maasai do things, and so on, which does not reflect the reality that ethnic groups have borrowed cultural practices from one another for generations. There is very little mono-cultural about culture these days, in a globalised world characterised by mixing and intermingling. Yet one would not know that from the so-called cultural elements in ARP, which adhere firmly to a mono-ethnic model – often an outdated and inaccurate one.
2 For example, I asked campaigner Agnes Pareyio in 2014, years before she became head of the Anti-FGM Board, what source material on culture the Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative uses in the educational part of its ARPs. She is founder and director of this girls’ rescue centre in Narok. Her answer was Sankan’s slim 1971 book The Masai. This largely only mentions women in relation to men. A chapter on initiation only discusses boys. Most of the cultural practices it describes are no longer happening. Pareyio was elected MP for Narok North in August 2022 and has since stepped down as head of the Board.The term ‘culture’ has by and large been abandoned by anthropologists and other scholars in recent years. However, it has simultaneously flourished in non-scholarly parlance and practice, not least in Africa. That coincides with the increasing proliferation of global indigenous and cultural rights activism. Scholars such as John and Jean Comaroff (1991:21) see culture as a ‘space of signifying practice’. However, as I have previously written, ‘this definition would be unrecognisable to millions who adhere to a “ways of life” concept of culture that is homogeneous, static, timeless, essentialist, and often defined in terms of ethnic difference – the very model that anthropology has dumped … The two concepts are visibly in tension in the space of ARP’ (Hughes 2018:275).
3 The Anti-FGM Board uses the ‘ways of life’ definition; see its ARP Guidelines: ‘Culture is a way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs of a people at a given time.’