I was intrigued to find  out from today’s New York Times (Michael Cieply, “In Polanski case, a time warp”) that a report by two probation officers who, in 1977, made a recommendation against a longer gaol term (as compared to the 48 days  he got) in Polanski’s case of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, they made the argument that while foreign filmmakers “enrich[ed] the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands, which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.” Implicitly, they were making a cultural argument in favour of a lenient sentence.

These days, the cultural defense is often used in sex crime cases of non-European migrants (it is rarely successful in Europe, more often so in the U.S.), and it tends to be forgotten that thirty years ago it was applied to South and East Europeans. Overall, cultural arguments in such cases have become more explicitly articulated, both by defense and prosecution (and especially in public debates). At the same time, attitudes towards child-rearing, the agency of children and the adult-child relationship, and the biological versus moral determination of sexual behaviour have changed in complex ways. These days, children are seen as being endowed with more rights, yet, as the article points out, they are given less voice in legal deliberations because of the assumption that they must be protected. It seems that the biopolitics of childhood has become more strongly entrenched because it is harder to find an interpretive framework for the ambiguities of individual cases (that is, the difficult questions of free will and choice) when they involve individuals coming from different societies, as they increasingly do. It seems that the most successful weapon to deploy against the schematicism of this biopolitics is an equally schematic politics of culture. Thus, in a case reported by Alison Dundes Renteln in her book The Cultural Defense, an Afghan father in the U.S. was put on trial for kissing his infant son’s penis. He would have likely faced a harsher sentence than Polanski had the defense not mobilised an anthropologist to testify that such behaviour was a culturally appropriate expression of affection.

When some colleagues and I did research on Chinese and Afghan children in Hungarian secondary schools in 2003-04, we found that xenophobic views were consistently expressed by Hungarian students more or less regardless of social class (though of course there was individual variation). We hypothesized that this had to do to a large part with the absence of what is usually referred to as citizenship education — i.e. a coherently transmitted picture of what constitutes the Hungarian polity — which allows the ethnicist, descent-based views of nationhood held by many teachers and not refuted in mainstream media to spread unchallenged. In this, Hungarian schools were starkly different from those in Northwestern Europe, and this has not changed since Hungary joined the European Union.

This has just been confirmed once again by a survey carried out by a group  of sociologist, led by Mihaly Csako, on secondary school students’ views of democracy. Fewer than half of the students considered respect for the rights of minorities an important feature of democracy. Consistent with this, a majority said they would be bothered if they had to sit next to a Gypsy student. (60% of students at the more ‘elite’ type of secondary school, gimnazium, said so, in contrast to 40% at vocational secondary schools, where they are much more likely to actually have Gypsy classmates.)

The relegation of minority rights to a marginalised liberal discourse has been a gradual process. Tolerance of all minorities — ethnic, religious, sexual or social, e.g. the homeless — has been rising. Whereas homophobia was not discernible in Hungary’s political landscape in the 1990s, it has today become a regular feature of nationalist discourse. It must be said that in the ’90s, gay rights were not part of the liberal human-rights discourse or the politicized identity that they have become now, with politicians’ “comings-out” and Western-style gay pride parades (very small and heavily protected from physical attacks by hecklers though they are). But in Hungary, homophobia has little to do with religious concerns; rather, the thematization of any minority rights provokes angry attacks by nationalists who see this as part of a liberal discourse that betrays national interests. Anti-semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Communism and anti-liberalism are related and almost interchangeable sentiments in Hungarian nationalism, and indeed frequently feature in the same speeches. The kike, the Chinaman, the faggot and the Commie have become signifiers for the same conspiracy that threatens Magyardom. In this respect the nature of xenophobia in Hungary is different from Western Europe (where it is conceptually difficult to be both Islamophobic and antisemitic) or Australia.

Just quickly.  The Sydney Morning Herald currently has a nice little multimedia presentation entitled “20 Little Australians”.  A condensed version of a longer story that will appear in the weekend paper, obviously designed to coincide with Australia Day on the 26th.  The presentation features 20 children who have migrated to Australia and provides snippets of their experiences and impressions in and of Australia.  Overall the presentation has a glossy, feel-good feel but the Herald folk avoid presenting Australia as the promised land for all comers.  There are some negative impressions, mentions of racism and so on, but most appealing and interesting to me were the unexpected comments, like the Russian boy who noted that people don’t speak as much to each other as they do in Russia, or the Pakistani boy who was amazed that he was allowed to call his neighbour by his first name.

Besides containing these little gems, the presentation is well worth the watch just to get a two minute overview of the astounding variety of migration to Australia and a couple of hints at what we do well and not so well for those who have chosen to settle here.

[Link.]

Several articles have appeared in today’s The Australian regarding the Northern Territory intervention, and on indigenous health and welfare more generally.  Of most interest to me was a report on calls to soften some aspects of the new government regime.  The article notes that while there have been some reported positive outcomes of the new paternalism in the NT, such as an increase in the amount of fresh food being eaten.  I’ve heard anecdotal evidence from an anthro working in Arnhem Land that the quarantining of welfare payments and the introduction of stamps for certain products has certainly had an effect on consumption patterns.  For example, kids are claiming “not to like” lollies anymore but to prefer fruit-based snacks like Roll-ups because the latter can be bought with stamps.  This allows them to continue to spend their free cash on cigarettes and other products not covered by the stamps.  It would seem that the new system has introduced new hierarchies of need where people have to make choices about which pleasures to keep and which to modify.  This is all interesting stuff and it would be great to see more reporting by anthropologists about what they’re seeing in the communities that they work with. All contributions are welcome and we are happy to reproduce them on this blog.

One area on which the Intervention doesn’t seem to be having an impact, and might even be making matters worse in some ways, is child welfare and the prevention of abuse.  This was of course the issue that prompted the Intervention in the first place.  According to a report by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care,

“A major unintended consequence of the NT intervention has been to stall and delay the necessary reform of the child protection systems (and) care needed to support children at risk of abuse and neglect,” the secretariat says in its submission.

“It has not uncovered the abuse of children or resulted in any significant change in child abuse notifications.

“Ironically, the intervention seems to have swept to one side the very issues that precipitated it in the first place.”

Other related articles in today’s Oz are as follows:

Call to lock in indigenous health gains
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24422991-5013172,00.html

Action, not words, needed to close gap on indigenous health
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24422990-5013172,00.html

The term ‘white flight’ is one I associate with the USA. I have never heard it used in an Australian context before. However, the Herald has just published a report about this phenomenon, which it says is producing an ever more ‘racially’ and religiously segregated education system. In both city and country contexts, they report, white students are increasingly moving into Catholic and independent schools and away from public schools with large populations of Aborigines, Muslims or Asians. An excerpt:

The NSW Secondary Principals Council conducted a confidential survey which raises serious concerns about “white flight” undermining the public education system and threatening social cohesion. Some teachers and principals have described it as “de facto apartheid”.

The findings are backed by research from the University of Western Sydney, which has identified evidence of racial conflict in schools in the wake of the Cronulla riots. It also suggests students of Anglo-European descent are avoiding some schools with students of mainly Asian background.

Not only have some public schools lost enrolments; they have become racially segregated. In pockets of rural and remote NSW, Aboriginal students fill public schools and white students attend Catholic and other private schools in the same town.

Around Sydney, the parents of some Anglo-European students are avoiding what they perceive as predominantly Lebanese, Muslim and Asian schools.

In New England, in towns such as Armidale, white middle-class students are flocking to Catholic and independent schools.

In their report, principals say this is so the students can “get away from their local school”.

“This is almost certainly white flight from towns in which the public school’s enrolment consists increasingly of indigenous students,” the report says. “The pattern is repeated in the Sydney region. Based on comments from principals, this most likely consists of flight to avoid Islamic students and communities.”

The term ‘white flight’ is not completely appropriate here because it’s not just whites who are making choices that leader to greater levels of segregation. On section of the article suggests, for example, that Asian families may be avoiding schools perceived to be ‘Muslim’. There is also the suggestion that in Southwestern Sydney, Aboriginal and white kids are ‘lining up against’ kids of Lebanese background rather than against each other, as was previously the case.

See also this article on the same theme, which includes details of students crossing from NSW to Queensland to avoid the local public school, perceived as ‘indigenous’ and (therefore) ’scary’ by students.

It would seem that there are several things going on here.  First, there has been a general move to private education among middle class families, which was exacerbated during the Howard years as more public funds were directed to private schools and policies encouraged school choice and student mobility.  Second, ‘racial tensions’ in schools seem to be on the rise — with the Cronulla Riots featuring, as a cause or result?  Again, one could argue that Howard government policies and rhetoric, which promoted a normative white model of Australian identity and encouraged xenophobic nationalism, have exacerbated this trend.  Third,  class is a factor, and much of this segregation could be understood as a product of increasing class segregation in Australian society.

I suppose another point to be taken from this is that this ‘white flight’ phenomenon, according to the reports, differs from the US in that families are not relocating away from neighbourhoods perceived to be undesirable and therefore creating monocultural ghettos.  Children are increasingly travelling long distances to schools, or boarding, but families are staying put.  It therefore doesn’t seem to be the case that ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods are necessarily being produced.

Generally speaking, I see this kind of development as an example of the sort of thing that happens when governments move away from being producers and guardians of public institutions and collective ‘goods’, to becoming the facilitators of privatised choice.  Faith in public institutions, in this case schools, diminishes at the same time as people are encouraged to be more entrepreneurial in their choices.  In short, a sort of market force is at work, and what might appear to be good at the level of the individual — more choice — can produce a systemic racism.

Gerard Noonan, The Herald’s Social Issues Editor, makes similar points when he argues that there are two main factors underpinning the trend towards de-facto segregation:

The first is the ideological obsession with “choice”, which a decade ago in NSW changed the way students in NSW were able to enrol in schools.

Previously students attended their “local” school, based on where they lived. With few exceptions, it was a century-old tradition which ensured a genuine mix in schools – the smart, the scholastic pedestrians, the talented musicians and the sports-obsessed, the immigrants, the local Aboriginal kids, the funny, the socially inept, the goofy – all mixed together.

This widespread and predominantly secular approach allowed Australia to claim, with some justification, that its supposed egalitarianism and lack of class pretension was nurtured and cemented in the nation’s schools.

Now students can effectively enrol anywhere. They do, and one of the results is the abandonment of schools such as the ones identified in the principals’ survey, often for no other reason than distaste by parents in their thousands at having their kids rubbing shoulders with others from a different ethnic, class or religious background.

The second institutional factor is the deliberate effort by federal and state governments to pour billions and billions of dollars into supporting private schools and making them more and more attractive options for the well-off.

These schools, with a few exceptions, generally enjoy far better facilities, lower student-teacher ratios and more “choice” and they make their pitch for a “specialness”: the antithesis of the secular equality of opportunity which underpins Australia’s boastful egalitarianism.

It’s difficult not to see this officially sanctioned abandonment – so starkly revealed by school principals in a report that was kept under wraps for two years – as evidence of plain, old-fashioned racism at work. (See his full article here).

I think the claim of “plain, old-fashioned racism” is a little simplistic.  What this case shows is that a lot of individual choices which are not necessarily racist per se — just wanting the ‘best’ education for one’s kids — can add up to a sort of racism at a much broader level.  This is not to say that racism is not an issue, but just addressing individual attitudes to race will not fully ‘explain’ the situation.

News Limited sources recently ran a story about a new case involving Judge Sarah Bradley, a Queensland judge who became the centre of a furore after not imposing gaol terms on nine indigenous youths who gang raped a 10-year-old girl in their community in Cape York. In this new case, she has allowed a teacher accused of sexually abusing a child time to gather evidence that he was enacting local cultural norms. The story is interesting in a number of ways, not the least in terms of how ‘culture’ can be deployed in legal settings, and where judges may appear to be more ‘culturally sensitive’ and culturally relativist than members of the communities in question.

In this case, an anthropologist from James Cook University has apparently been called in to write a report on the authenticity of the claim about the cultural legitimacy of the act. It would be interesting to know what s/he has to say. I would particularly like to know what the response to the question of whether the practice of oral sex between men and boys is a ‘part of’ the culture in question. From my reading of the article, there are a number of problematic issues arising from the way the issue is being constructed, particularly about the sorts of assumptions being made about the nature of culture.

For example, in a fascinating detail, although the accused was not raised in a ‘traditional’ manner, his lawyer argues that he was ‘imbued’ with the culture, presumably simply by living and working in the area. Culture as contagion, I suppose. It also seems to ignore the holistic premises of an anthropological understanding of culture, which require that we consider an act not in isolation, but within the context of wider institutions, beliefs and practices. To simply ask whether the performance of oral sex between men and boys in a particular community is a ‘part of the culture’ decontextualises the act. It assumes that if an act can be found ‘in a culture’ then the act is therefore ‘cultural’, regardless of the context in which it occurs. This would appear to be a particularly erroneous position to take with regard to ‘mens’ business’ rite of passage type acts. If they are occurring in secret, isolated from the political institution they participate in — the production of initiated men — then it would be very problematic to my mind to ascribe them with cultural authenticity. Making use of the fundamental anthropological notion that culture is both shared and practised, I would also be putting more emphasis on the opinions of members of the community about the legitimacy of the act, than on an anthropologist’s opinion about an abstracted and therefore reified culture. Sorry, anthropologists!

Ironic, really, that an anthropological insight serves to delegitimise anthropological knowledge. However, this legal prediliction to treat anthropologists as experts on a particular ‘culture’, understood to be a sort of archive — a relatively stable, bounded and possessing a traditional and authentic form that can be catalogued — actually puts anthropologists at odds with their own understandings about culture and how it works. If anthropologists are to be experts on cases such as these, I think it should be as much to consider and critique the manner in which culture is being deployed in the courts as to act as curators of a cultural archive.

The full text of the article follows.

Gang-rape judge in child sex furore

By Padraic Murphy, Natasha Robinson and Tony Koch

February 15, 2008

Article from: The Australian

THE north Queensland judge who last year allowed nine child rapists to go free has given a teacher, who has admitted forcing an indigenous 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him, time to gather evidence that he was educating his victim in “men’s business”.

James Last, a Sydney-educated teacher who recently worked in Northern Territory communities, last week pleaded guilty in Cairns before District Court judge Sarah Bradley to seven counts of indecently dealing with an 11-year-old boy over a four-month period in 1983.

But Judge Bradley has granted a three-month adjournment to allow Last, who claims he received no sexual gratification from the assaults, to allow his lawyers to find an anthropologist to support his claim that he had been trying to introduce the Torres Strait boy to “traditional” islander sexual practices.

Judge Bradley granted the adjournment despite the prosecution pointing out that it had two witnesses – “respected elders” from the boy’s home island – ready to debunk the claim that such practices were part of “men’s business”.

The adjournment has outraged indigenous leaders, who have already called for Judge Bradley’s sacking after she failed last year to jail nine males for the gang rape of a 10-year-old girl in the Cape York community of Aurukun.

Last, now 61 and living in Darwin, took the 11-year-old boy from his family on Saibai Island in the Torres Strait in 1983, promising to educate him in Cairns.

But Last, who was 37 at the time of the offences, repeatedly sexually abused the boy, at one point saying: “I’ve sucked you, now it’s your turn.”

Last said yesterday he had taken the “self-sacrificial” step of pleading guilty to the charges to spare the boy, who he loved, a trial. He said Aboriginal elders in the Torres Strait had “entrusted” the boy to him, and he was tutored by the elders in “men’s business”.

“I’m saying that certain things are not abuse and they never were in the traditional culture,” he said. “A lot of it is men’s business and that’s why, I think very wisely, Aboriginal islander people have said men’s business is men’s business. They say, ‘You don’t tell the white fella what he can’t understand’.”

Prosecutor Skye Growden told the court Last had told the victim the abuse was a part of traditional culture. “The defendant told the victim that this was traditional and that older men did this to young men when they loved them and he believed him,” she said. “The complainant says in his statement that the arresting officer in this matter was the first person that he told because he was ashamed about the offences and worried what people would say if they found out.”

Ms Growden told the court that although Last had a part-Aboriginal father, he was not raised in a traditional manner and that he should receive a custodial sentence to send a clear message to the community.

“It is stated in the defence material that he was born in Sydney where he was educated to grade 12. He then went on to receive a scholarship and teach in Wollongong and undertake postgraduate studies,” she said.

“He has gone on to have an illustrious and distinguished career. He is an educated man, using what he claims to be part of Papua New Guinea and Torres Strait Islander culture, that is, men’s business, to explain away his offending behaviour. I have been instructed that this is not part of the culture.”

But Judge Bradley rejected calls for an immediate custodial sentence, allowing Last’s lawyers to gather evidence that he had been abusing the boy as some kind of rite of passage.

“What we’ve got here is a plea in mitigation on the basis that the defendant genuinely believed that what he was doing was culturally appropriate and that he had that excuse for it,” Judge Bradley said on February 6. “I appreciate he’s pleaded guilty but the prosecution is not accepting that, so we’ll need some evidence. Clearly, it’s got a significant impact on penalty.”

The following day, Judge Bradley adjourned the case until May 15 to allow lawyers to ask an anthropologist from James Cook University, which is based in Townsville, to write a report on whether child sexual abuse was an accepted part of Saibai islander culture. “It’s clearly a live issue, and it’s clearly an issue that’s relevant to penalty, so I need to give the defence that opportunity,” she said.

Judge Bradley’s decision to consider the anthropology report was made after Ms Growden said it was “the Crown’s submission that an adjournment is not necessary unless you’re rejecting the submissions that I made yesterday, which were based on decisions of the High Court and the Court of Appeal. I do have two people – two elders from Saibai Island – that are on standby this morning, but can give evidence that it’s not part of men’s business at Saibai Island.”

In earlier submissions, Last’s counsel Kevin McCreanor said his client had become “imbued” with indigenous culture.

He said Last told police when interviewed about the allegations that an elder on Saibai Island had told him cultural secrets.

Mr McCreanor said the interviewing police officer told Last that in his investigations in the Torres Strait he, too, had heard that boys’ first sexual experiences were “with an older male of their tribe to teach them about his body and things like that”.

But Ms Growden, a former associate to Judge Bradley, later said that statement was “a tactic” of the interviewing police.

Mr McCreanor said Last told police: “Those things were told to me as well, but I was encouraged because of the incapacity of most people to understand, and the derision that flowed back on to so-called primitive people, not to talk about these things.”

Judge Bradley said it was up to Last to supply evidence to support his contention that his actions were “culturally appropriate”.

Late last year, Judge Bradley had refused to impose jail terms on nine youths and men who gang-raped a 10-year-old intellectually impaired girl on Aurukun community, on western Cape York.

The Court of Appeal in Brisbane on Wednesday ruled that the Crown would be given an extended time to appeal against those sentences.

Many thanks to Kirsten Bell, former lecturer at Macquarie, for alerting me to this article.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23215930-2,00.html

The article’s a month old now, but I find myself still thinking about it, so I thought I’d share. The Boston Globe ran a piece entitled, ‘Leave Those Kids Alone,’ about the adult practice of playing with children. You can find the original article here.

The article commits its own grievous errors of cross-cultural universalizing, but it makes some worthwhile points about the peculiarity of certain Western conventions of childrearing. For example:

“Adults think it is silly to play with children” in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, “but adults aren’t part of the picture.” Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans — abetted, he says, by psychologists — are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.

There is now a concerted effort to spread adult-child play beyond its stronghold in the upper- and middle-classes of wealthy countries. To this end, many cities and states support programs of some sort. Massachusetts will give the Parent-Child Home Program, which has 33 sites in the state, $3 million this year (up from $2 million last year). Through the program, staff members visit the homes of low-income residents and offer tips not just on good books for toddlers but also on “play activities” for parents and kids. Likewise, the eminent Yale psychologist Jerome Singer has partnered with a media company to devise imaginative parent-child games (examples: “My Magic Story Car” and “Puppets: Counting”) that librarians and social workers can teach to low-income parents.

Similarly, my former colleague at the University of Notre Dame, Dr. James J. McKenna (profile and info about his sleep lab here), has written extensively about how Western childrearing practices dealing with sleep are idiosyncratic and may even contribute to certain health problems in infants.

This work is hardly unusual (see, for example, Barbara Rogoff 2003), but it bears frequent repeating because of the normatizing power of certain Western ’scientific’ discourses about child care that emerge out of some branches of the medical and psychiatric fields. Certainly, there is a space for anthropology to undermine these aggressive authorities who do so much to create anxiety in young parents.

What’s worse is that so much of the scarce resource base for child care in the United States, slashed by ‘family values’ politicians (ahhh… irony is delicious….) is being spent on force-feeding one social groups norms of parent-child interaction to groups that don’t particular like to behave that way.

But there’s also a theoretical point to be made here on child development. In fact, lots of different techniques and traditions are out there for raising children. I haven’t done anything approaching exhaustive research on the subject, but I’ve been surprised the degree to which anthropological research about the diversity of child rearing methods doesn’t penetrate the obdurate Western normatizing field that surrounds childcare (not just the work of McKenna and Rogoff, but also of Meredith Small, Jermoe Kagan, Judy Loache, Alma Gottleib, and a host of others in psychological anthropology and the anthropology of education). Western ‘authorities’ about development wield such enormous power over anxious parents.

In fact, the paths to ‘normalcy’ seem to be quite varied — and ‘normalcy’ itself so contextual — that these authorities and their singular notions about what produces ‘health’ should be undermined more easily. From a theoretical perspective, most social scientists have a confirmation bias when we read the science news (that is, we all tend to see our favourite pet theories confirmed in any new discovery, however ambiguous the results), but I do think that the variation in paths to (at least relatively) ‘normal’ functioning are so many that it provides strong evidence for a dynamic system approach to child development (see, for example, Thelen and Smith 1996). Rather than get roped back into the same nature v. nurture fight about the percentage contributions of environment and genes (as if the two were the only variables contributing to the outcome), however, I just want to point out that if children were so fragile, even more of them would be messed up. As Jim McKenna frequently pointed out to me, the goal is not to impose another single sense of what parents must do with their children, but to recognize and support many ways of parenting.

References
Rogoff, Barbara. 2003. The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thelen, Esther, and Linda B. Smith. 1996. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.

Below is an announcement about an extraordinary seminar dealing with the events following the release of the Little Children are Sacred report.  I’m sure that a lot of people who can’t make it to Darwin would be very interested in hearing what the speakers have to say.  I will check if there are plans to share the papers/speeches in some form.

You are invited to attend a public forum on

Indigenous policy reform in the Northern Territory

An extraordinary debate for extraordinary times

Hear local and International experts discuss the federal government’s recently announced reforms, which are reshaping Indigenous policy in the Northern Territory, and debate the outcomes and possible solutions.

When: Friday, 20 July
12:45pm – 3:30pm
Where: Charles Darwin University
Casuarina Campus
Mal Nairn Lecture Theatre
Admission is free and light refreshments will follow

Speakers will include:

Professor Elizabeth Povinelli
Anthropology and Gender Studies Co-Director,
Centre for the Study of Law & Culture, Columbia University

Olga Havnen
Deputy CEO,
Northern Land Council

Professor Allan Patience
Professor of Political Science,
Charles Darwin University

Professor Gary Robinson
Director, School for Social and Policy Research,
Charles Darwin University

Ken Parish
Law Lecturer,
Charles Darwin University

Jovan brought to my attention a Yahoo! news item reporting that Egypt has just banned all female circumcision (aka female genital mutilation or FGM). There is a decade’s history of the practice being banned in Egypt, yet it has persisted. In 1996, the Ministry of Health banned any state-affiliated medical personnel from involvement in female circumcision, according to the BMJ. Then, according to ReligiousTolerance.org, the ruling was challenged by a Muslim cleric, Sheikh Youssef Badri, who claimed it was permitted by Islam and that the state was overstepping its bounds in banning it. In 1997 a court overturned the ban, but then the government took the case to the Egyptian Supreme Administrative Court which ruled that it was not an Islamic procedure and that citizens therefore did not have a right to practice it. The state banned the procedure, but allowed gynecologists to perform the surgery if they deemed it necessary for health reasons.

The extent to which this health exception is invoked is revealed by recent surveys that have shown that upwards of 90% of Egyptian women continue to be circumcised. Circumcision crosses religious boundaries, with both Egyptian Muslims and Christians circumcising their daughters at or before puberty. The minority of women who aren’t circumcised are typically members of the urban upper class.

The new ban removes the earlier ban’s exception and prohibits all members of the medical profession, both in public clinics and private practice, from performing circumcisions. It also criminalizes physicians who circumcise. The government ban was supported by the highest ranking clerics in the country, both Muslim and Christian: the Grand Mufti, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar, and the Coptic Pope Shenouda.

There is substantial debate over the topic — even the name used to speak of the practice is hotly disputed (“female circumcision” vs. “female genital mutilation” or FGM). Some argue that the government’s provision allowing circumcision to be performed by physicians for ‘health reasons’ was an attempt to ensure that it be done by medical professionals under hygienic circumstances, avoiding the high rates of infection often associated with circumcision by traditional medical practitioners. Others say that it only gave the veneer of a ban for the benefit of a critical international community but allowed the practice to continue. The procedure was taught in some of Egypt’s most prestigious teaching universities such as Qasr el-Aini medical school in Cairo.

The latest ban comes in the wake of the widely publicized death of a young girl (sources peg her age at 11 or 12) who died during the procedure (the news wire source all say she died from an incorrect dose of anasthesia). Some reports claim that the doctor who performed the procedure as well as the girl’s mother were arrested. This points to the complicated costs and benefits of bans. On the one hand, bans delegitimize the procedure in a way that allowing ‘health exceptions’ does not. On the other hand, families who are determined to have their daughters circumcised but cannot have it done by a clinician may turn to more dangerous sources (in Egypt, typically barbers and midwives). They may also be less likely to seek medical care in the wake of a botched circumcision or infection if they fear that family members will be arrested.

For more anthropological reading on female circumcision, see Ellen Gruenbaum (who points out that Western opposition to the procedure typically leads to local backlash) and Janice Boddy, whose Wombs and Alien Spirits is a classic symbolic anthropology reading of circumcision in Sudan and how it linked up with cultural aesthetics (of not only the body but also things like home decor — if you ever wanted to know why Sudanese villagers blow out ostrich eggs and hang them in their houses, read on!) Boddy also covered debate over the practice in a 1991 article in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.

On a personal note, I spent 3-1/2 years living in Egypt, studying Arabic and doing fieldwork, and I knew Cairene women from all different classes, and the only one who ever brought up the topic of circumcision with me was an upper-class young woman who was taking a sociology course at the American University in Cairo and who commented to me that in a class discussion on the subject, students were mortified to have to discuss it in a mixed (male and female) group, and most could not even bring themselves to say the word out loud in class. At least amongst my little cohort of female informants, it was a non-issue.

L.L. Wynn

Here’s a summary piece on recent research suggesting that infants have a host of previously unexpected abilities, including a surprisingly facility to distinguish languages by lipreading (!), discern among different monkey faces (that adult humans can’t distinguish), and recognize rhythms. I have a personal soft spot for infant research, in part because I have overly-romanticized images about how this research would actually take place. When I read the reports, they summon images of cute babies in front of video screens or stacks of toys or listening to music, startling when researchers change the stimulus, leading a bunch of adults to excitedly write down notes…

but enough of that. Anyway, the research again points to the possibility that humans enter the world with a substantial amount of structure to the way that they perceive, and that much of early development is actually the foreclosing of potential developmental pathways in perceptual ability. For example, infants seem to recognize more speech sounds than do older children, leading scientists to suggest that unused ability to differentiate these sounds eventually atrophies and disappears: use it or lose it. The process seems entirely consistent with what Gerard Edelman calls ‘neural Darwinism’ (no relation to illegitimate step-sibling, ’social Darwinism’), a process of development in which an ‘over-wired’ neural system learns by eliminating unused connections.

Unfortunately, in anthropology, the people who have paid the closest attention to research findings like this have tended to use the research to argue for ‘innate’ ability, such as innate grammars or innate brain modules. The big story for me here though is not innateness, but the dynamics of development, working not from a ‘blank slate’ brain but instead from a promiscuously connected nervous system, one that is challenged to eliminate extraneous information and stimuli.

The presence of so much connectivity in the infant brain and nervous system does not serve the argument for ‘innate’ intelligence, like grammar, as much as proponents would like, in my opinion. In fact, it undermines one of their central arguments for suggesting innate, pre-programmed intelligence is intelligence: that, without it, the stimuli for producing something like grammar are too poor. That is, Chomsky’s approach to grammar is often argued for on the basis of poverty of stimulus; children learn grammar, and this allegedly can’t be explained by learning alone as the models they have to work from are too poor. Although language is a hard case (and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it as I don’t do any original research on language), this approach often gets extended to other areas of intelligence or human activity, like motor learning and perception (which I do work on).

If infants’ brains are already hot-wired with an excess of connections, however, it may make sense that they respond to all sorts of stimuli, eventually getting control of their phenomenal worlds by learning what to ignore, what to pay attention to, and developing significant abilities to disregard irrelevant stimuli. The late Esther Thelen, along with colleagues like Linda Smith, did some brilliant work on how children learn to do basic movements, like grasping objects, which suggested something similar. Infant learning trajectories differed significantly; some had to learn to control movements, others to overcome inertia. ‘Learning’ to grasp involved developing different abilities depending on what the child’s pre-existing movement tendencies and control abilities were. Of course, what is ‘extraneous’ movement, like the question of what is ‘irrelevant’ in perception, language, or cognition, may vary among cultures, between individuals, or with relation to the training they undergo. And ‘unlearned’ ability may not completely disappear, but may go dormant and be subject to reinforcement and re-emergence later.

The display of promiscuous infant perceptions, however, may overcome one of the central arguments for innate intelligence: the poverty of stimulus argument. In fact, environmental factors don’t have to explain completely the associations that the brain and perceptual systems can make. Many of them exist already. Rather, environment is, at least in part, pruning and reinforcing certain neural connections and abilities, not creating them from scratch.

Although it’s far too early in the research to make these sorts of blanket statements, I do think that our account of infant enculturation will wind up being far more baroque and interesting than current models, so tilted as they are to simplistic nature v. nurture or ‘percentages’ of each models of how culture shapes cognition, perception, experience, or emotion.