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| Photo Courtesy of Elena Butti |
“You are abusing
us” – this was only the last of the series of accusations which showered me
when I tried to address the topic of female circumcision in a focus group with
Maasai women during my work in the subvillage of Remiti, part of Mtakuja, in
Northern Tanzania. “Why do you want to know all this? Are you a health trainer?
If you want to hold your seminar, you
should give us food, and also pay us. We are losing our time here.”
Being accused of abusing
your own research represents the ultimate failure for a researcher. When the
women started attacking me, while I was sure I was doing all I possibly could
to be a sensitive researcher, discouragement took hold of me: I broke into
tears in the middle of the focus group, and the women’s effort to dry my
watering eyes with their clothes (not exactly what you would call soft cotton) did
not really help.
I had done something
wrong. But what? I knew in advance that the
issue of female circumcision was sensitive, and I had taken all the precautions
I could think of to address it properly. I had made sure to frame my questions
in a non-normative, open-minded and non-leading way. I had made clear from the
outset that I had absolutely no intention to claim that something was right or
wrong, but that I was just a student eager to learn from them. But still,
something in my questions made the women react on the defensive. What was it?
The thought kept me
thinking for days, until I realised that, perhaps, it was not so much my
approach that was wrong – it was the issue
itself, the very words “female circumcision” pronounced by a white NGO
worker. No matter how open-minded my approach was: the very action of me
addressing the issues triggered associations which were, apparently, deeply
problematic. The whole issue puzzled me. What had happened for female
circumcision to become so critical that it could not be addressed at all, even
with a non-normative approach like mine?
In this blog article,
I seek an answer to this question. I first provide an account of how female circumcision
(henceforth: circumcision) has historically been addressed by the government
and NGOs in Tanzania. I then elaborate on how the traditional “hard” approach
to the eradication of circumcision has proven counter-effective, making it
virtually impossible for any Westerner today to address the issue at all. This
claim constitutes the central thesis of this paper, and provides a possible
explanation to the reaction of the women in my focus group. After suggesting
some alternative “soft” approaches, I reflect on the inadequacy of the sole legal
prohibition in order to eradicate deeply embedded practices. I conclude with a
few remarks on critical reflexivity.
