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.

If this post doesn’t attract the spam bots, I don’t know what will…

Recently I saw an article in the Herald’s “Strange but True” section — where I do all my trolling for topical anthropology blog posts — about a Saudi guy who had paid $US50,000 for a solid 18-carat gold, diamond and ruby encrusted, penis enlarger. The subeditors had a field day with that one: “Saudi pays stiff price for sex toy” reads the headline.

I was immediately struck by the resonances with Lisa’s work about attitudes towards Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs in the Middle East.  Amongst other things Lisa noted differing cultural attitudes towards the drugs: while the men around the department here at Macquarie associated Viagra usage with a lack (we tended to laugh and claim “we don’t need it” when she jokingly offered it to us),  it has all sorts of positive associations for Egyptian men.  She noted that Egyptian men give each other Viagra as gifts without, presumably, any implication of a lack of virility, and that there are a number of food dishes trading on the “Viagra” name.

I sent the article to Lisa, noting the parallels with her research, and wrote a little riff about it.  Lisa liked it and thought I should post it to CM. So, despite my reservations, here it is:

When I saw the article (besides having a good chuckle) I was immediately reminded of the Viagra meals and gift giving you talked about back then — public, or at least shared, celebrations of virility rather than signs of inadequacy.  I thought, what a contrast between the shameful $400 penis enlarger, kept in a draw next to the bed and used in secret, and this ostentatious, ruby-encrusted monument to one’s cock.  It wasn’t just that this thing was so much more expensive than usual, but that its symbolic value is the opposite of what we’d expect; it was being treated like a luxury good or status symbol rather than a pseudo-medical apparatus designed to correct a problem.  I wonder if its given pride of place in the bedroom — maybe in a nice glass cabinet above the bed?

It’s funny, isn’t it?  The usual, Freudian, way we think about phallic symbols is as attempts to compensate for a lack, but the symbolism is always repressed and therefore indirect, concealed, at least to the “owner”.  The bloke just thinks his shiny new red sports car is really cool; the rest of us just look at each other knowingly and wiggle our pinkies.  And then there’s this Saudi guy, who doesn’t bother with sublimating this symbol into some other form; it’s out there, standing (literally) for what it is.  “Yes, this represents my desire for a larger penis.  Who wouldn’t want to have a larger penis?”    Sometimes a penis enlarger is just a penis enlarger.

The logic would seem not to be that of a compensation for a lack. Rather, when it comes to virility, more is always better.

– Jovan Maud

The Life and Style section of the Sydney Morning Herald has a fascinating article by Sydney-based writer Emily Maguire about the way culture trains men and women to respond in particular ways to their “biological responses to beauty.” Here’s an excerpt:

…boys are not taught, as girls are, that their bodies could have a disruptive effect on people around them, that they should wear looser clothing so as not to distract their classmates. They’re not told that how they look could incite nasty rumours or prevent them advancing at work or cause them to get raped. They aren’t told that the sight of their flesh may cause grown women to turn into mindless brutes.

But the fact is male bodies can have the same effect on women as female bodies can have on men. That far fewer men than women are harassed or attacked by people claiming sexual provocation is not because women aren’t visually aroused, but because women have learnt that their biological responses to beauty are not an excuse to commit acts of violence or discrimination.

The context is a recent attempt by conservative MP Fred Nile (Parliamentary Leader of the Christian Democratic Party in New South Wales) to ban women’s topless bathing on Sydney beaches.  Here’s what Maguire has to say about that:

Women’s learnt ability to deal with inappropriate lust brings us back to those topless sunbathers. In supporting Nile’s proposal, the NSW Labor MP Paul Gibson revealed his deep discomfort with both women’s bodies and the language used to describe bits of them when he asked, “Do you want somebody with big knockers next to you when you’re [at the beach] with the kids?”

Plenty of beach-loving mums can relate: there you are, rubbing sunscreen into your toddler’s back when a delicious slab of man meat lays his towel down right beside you. What to do?

How about this – remember that the person lying there is a human being whose hotness does not negate their right to bake unmolested. If the kids ask awkward questions like, oh, “What are those?” You say, “Nipples, we’ve all got them. Cool, huh?” Then you stop being a creepy perve and concentrate on the sandcastles and surf.

In a culture which is fascinated by biological arguments about the differences between men and women, it is awfully refreshing to hear a wittily argued rejoinder that lust and reactions to naked bodies are shaped by culture.

–L.L. Wynn

Yesterday’s Herald reported on a case in France in which a requested marriage annulment made by a Muslim man after he discovered that his wife was not a virgin was overturned.  The article states that:

Public outrage at April’s annulment ruling forced the Government to order the case be reviewed, against the wishes of both spouses.

The groom, a Muslim engineer in his 30s whose name was not made public, sought the annulment after realising his bride was not a virgin on the night of their marriage in a civil ceremony in July 2006.

His wife, who admitted to him she had had premarital sex, said she accepted the annulment.

The case is extraordinary both because the annulment was reversed due to public pressure and because it was done against the wishes of both spouses.  Reading the article, I asked myself why a case like this would generate so much outrage while other cases involving a breach of trust between newlyweds would not register a blip on the public’s radar.  I can only assume that the case fitted neatly into stereotypes about “Islamic oppression of women”, the public focusing mainly on the question of the bride’s virginity rather than on the issue of trust. Ironically, the French public may likely be more fixated on the issue of virginity than the groom himself.

The fact that in all the outrage about this case the views of the bride were ignored also speaks volumes.  I am reminded of discussions of “the veil” in which the opinions of veil-wearing Muslim women themselves tend to be excluded because it is assumed that these women have been so brainwashed by their socialisation that they do not realise they are being oppressed.

The case would seem to suggest that Muslims in France are subjected to a higher level of public scrutiny of their private dealings than most people would expect.  It would also seem to suggest that gender relations within the Muslim community form a privileged site of critique by the non-Muslim population, an area in which people feel authorised to be outraged, and to express that outrage actively and publicly.

I’ve been silent on Culture Matters for way too long: first I was on a research trip to Egypt, and then I was recovering from a bug caught during said research trip to Egypt (Flagyl is my friend!). And speaking of pharmaceutical products, ever since coming back I’ve had a stack of drug boxes on the desk in my office that has elicited a lot of curiosity from visitors:

These are all the local brands of sildenafil that I found in a single pharmacy. There’s the Pfizer-licensed Viagra, but we also have Virecta, Erec, Kemagra, Vigorama, Vigoran, Phragra, and Vigorex. The Kemagra box features a tiger: Rrawr!

Why the stack of drugs? That’s between me and my doctor. No, seriously, I picked them up as part of a research project on several new reproductive health technologies in Egypt, including erectile dysfunction drugs. I’m looking at religious debates about the moral implications of new technologies, representations in popular culture, and the way RHTs are taught in Egyptian medical schools. Also interesting to consider is elisions between biomedical technologies and indigenous health beliefs. Take, for example, this restaurant’s “Viagra Sandwich” (would you like your Viagra grilled or fried?):

This takes traditional notions of the virility-enhancing power of seafood and rebrands it with the notoriety of a global pharmaceutical product. By the way, it seemed that every other restaurant in Cairo has some “Viagra” dish. At the annual date market, one variety of dates usually gets called “Viagra” for the same reason.

The office interactions I have with colleagues about the stack of drugs on my desk have given me new insight into the different cultural meanings attributed to erectile dysfunction drugs. You see, every male colleague that comes in has a laugh at the boxes, and then typically I say, “You’re welcome to a box after I finish photographing them.” This usually leads to louder laughter and a protest, as he backs away from my desk: “No thanks, I don’t need it!” The implication seems to be that by accepting the drug, one is admitting to some sort of sexual failure. Perhaps this seems natural — it certainly reminds me of all the ribbing former presidential candidate Bob Dole endured when he agreed to be the first spokesman for the product in the U.S.

But in Egypt, this logic just doesn’t work. There, men often give the pills to each other as gifts. According to my Egyptian colleague who is researching the phenomenon, they are sometimes given by an employer to his employees as a kind of reward or incentive. Instead of connoting a lack, it seems to imply the cheerful anticipation of an excess of virility. It may also speak to the history of the drug’s availability in Egypt: before the market was opened up to all the cheap generic brands, Viagra was expensive and in limited supply. Thus the enthusiasm for trading it around was part of the wider intersection between gift economies and the black market economy.

Perhaps my Australian colleagues simply disapproved of the idea that I should be offering them drugs for which they didn’t have a prescription. Of course I should clarify that my offers were all in jest: I know that it is illegal for someone who is not a medical professional to give someone else a prescription drug. No, boys, these drugs are MINE, ALL MINE!!

–L.L. Wynn

[cross-posted at Khaldoun]

Ralph Nader has announced that he is again running for president in the United States. As the BBC notes, the 2% of votes that he received in the 2000 elections when he represented the Green Party was a deciding factor in Bush’s win over Gore, and this time around, Republicans again welcome his candidacy, since it is again expected to split the Democratic vote.

So, on the occasion of Ralph Nader’s entry into the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and since we’ve been talking about the anthropology links of another presidential candidate, let me tell you how I first found out who Ralph Nader was.

It was the summer of 1994, the year before my last year of undergrad at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and I was in Walnut Creek, visiting my grandparents. I was also getting ready to apply to grad school to do a PhD in anthropology, and we had a family link to Berkeley, since my parents had met there in the 60s, and it just so happened that one of my anthropology heroes (heroines, actually) was on the faculty of the anthro department there. So I made an appointment to go talk to Professor Laura Nader.

Now, most anthropologists probably know Laura Nader from her famous “Studying Up” article, in which she urged anthropologists to study elites, the affluent, bureaucracies, the powerful and the colonizers, rather than the poor, the downtrodden, and the colonized. But she has another article, published in a somewhat obscure journal, that is a cult classic with anyone who is interested in the Middle East and gender. It is called “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women” (Cultural Dynamics 1989; 2[3]:323-355). In it, Nader points out (with amazing prescience) that the same sort of rhetoric that we heard years later on the eve of the invasion of Afghanistan — about how we needed to save the poor Afghani women from their burkas and the Taliban — is mirrored by similar rhetoric in Middle Eastern countries. At the time, I was a voracious consumer of the Saudi English-language press, which was replete with denunciations of the vile treatment of women in the West. For example, consider this excerpt from an article in the Saudi Gazette circa 1992:

It is one thing to clamour for the rhetoric ‘women are equal to men,’ but when that very equality means in pure and simple language exploitation of the privacy and unique beauty of women, such as is witnessed in advertising anything from a screw to a tractor with a semi-clad beauty, the attitude of Islam begins to take on a new dimension — even for non-Muslims. (“Islam treats ladies with real respect,” Saudi Gazette, 24 April 1992, p.5)

Nader expands Said’s “observations that the Moslem world exists for the West, to include the notion that the West also exists for the Islamic world and serves as important contrastive comparison” (Nader 1989:324). She then goes on to argue that claims of ‘our women are better off than your women’ is an essentially male discourse that serves to distract women from the real issues and from the processes that serve to control women in both worlds. “[B]y taking a position of superiority vis-a-vis the other, both East and West can rationalize the position of their women” (ibid p.328)

Anyway, she’s better known for her other work with indigenous people in Latin America, but that was the piece that I loved most, and I idolized (and frankly still do) Laura Nader. I wouldn’t have had the guts to go meet with her to tell her how much I wanted to do my PhD under her if it weren’t for my parents’ encouragement, so they came with me. Nader graciously received the lot of us in her office at Berkeley. I told her how much I admired her work. She asked me about my own interests in anthropology. I told her about my perceptions of life in Saudi Arabia, where I’d been living with my family and working as a teacher and photographer before I went to McGill. My dad asked her if she was Arab, with the last name Nader (which is from the Arabic for “rare”). She said that yes, she was American-born to Lebanese immigrant parents.

Then my dad asked her if she was in any way related to Ralph Nader. She sighed and gave the impression that she was barely restraining herself from rolling her eyes. “Yes, he’s my brother,” she said.

“Who’s Ralph Nader?” I asked. I was naive. I felt really stupid for not knowing who they were talking about. But she smiled in a way that told you that she was pleasantly surprised to find someone for whom the name “Nader” meant “Laura” and not “Ralph.”

– L.L. Wynn

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

In the wake of Labor’s stunning victory over the weekend there is a lot of speculation about the future of the Northern Territory Intervention. One indigenous commentator on this is Professor Marcia Langton, who has never been one to mince her words. She has written the following article, published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, which says a lot about the complexities of the intervention and the social problems it is supposed to address. She points out the gender and generational dimensions of “the problem” and draws attention to the role of power within the indigenous population itself. Her approach suggests that the question shouldn’t be “intervention, yes or no?” but “intervention for whom?”

It’s time to stop playing politics with vulnerable lives

Marcia Langton, November 30, 2007

The crisis in Aboriginal society is a public spectacle, played out in a vast reality show through the media, parliaments, civil service and Aboriginal world. This obscene and pornographic spectacle deploys a special mode of dehumanising abuse and parody, and ultimately shifts our attention away from the everyday crises that Aboriginal people endure, or don’t endure, dying as they do at excessive rates.

This spectacle is not a new phenomenon in Australian public life but the debate about indigenous affairs has reached a new crescendo, fuelled by the uncensored exposé of the extent of Aboriginal child abuse.

More than a century of policy experimentation with Aboriginal people climaxed with the Commonwealth Government sending the army and a specialist taskforce into the Northern Territory, the only jurisdiction where it has such broad powers.

It legislated more than 500 pages of emergency intervention measures that subvert self-government powers of the Northern Territory in the most extraordinary federal takeover in Australia’s history. In some critical respects, the outcome is what many have recommended for decades: interventions to prevent the abuse, rape and assault of Aboriginal women and children and decisive action against the perpetrators.

The federal legislation and the emergency taskforce constituted a slap in the face for the Northern Territory Government led by the then chief minister, Clare Martin – a bracing vote of no confidence in her government’s capacity to deal with the Aboriginal crisis.

Even though the Commonwealth provides funds to the Northern Territory Government on the basis of the disadvantages of the population, it was the Commonwealth, rather than the Territory Government, that became the villain of the piece in the public debate about the intervention.

Last Sunday Labor’s Trish Crossin and Warren Snowdon reportedly demanded that the intervention be halted, with a list of demands: the reinstatement of the Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme; the removal of measures to limit alcohol sales; and the reinstatement of permit restrictions for Aboriginal communities that had been not just isolated from the outside world but effectively quarantined from the larger society and economy. It remains to be seen whether the Prime Minister-elect, Kevin Rudd, will honour his commitment to the intervention.

Now Martin and her deputy, Sid Stirling, have resigned.

There has also been a spill in the chairman’s position at the powerful Northern Land Council. Wali Wunungmurra, one of Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s cousins, was elected to the position. Just before the federal election, Yunupingu supported the principal intention of the intervention in a public lecture at the University of Melbourne.

The political earth is moving after so much pretentious, vain, and ultimately anti-humanist dancing with symbols while the practical responses to the crisis never came.

There’s a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy – a Trojan Horse – to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous.

Those who did not see the intervention in the Northern Territory coming were deluding themselves. It was the inevitable outcome of the many failures of policy and of the strange federal-state division of responsibilities for Aboriginal Australians. Added to this were the general incompetence of the civil service and the non-governmental sector, including some Aboriginal organisations, lack of political will and the dead hand of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

The combined effect of the media campaign for action and the emergency intervention has been a metaphorical dagger sunk into the heart of the powerful, wrong-headed Aboriginal male ideology that had prevailed in indigenous affairs, policies and practices.

It’s time for the voices of women and children to be heard. It’s time for both the federal and the Territory government to stop playing politics with the lives of the vulnerable and shut down the alcohol take-away outlets, establish children’s commissions and shelters in each community – as Noel Pearson has suggested – and treat grog runners and drug dealers as the criminals that they are. Otherwise, they will all have the blood of the victims on their hands.

Professor Marcia Langton is the Inaugural Chairwoman of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.

The Jammed, an “independent thriller” about the trafficking of women into sex work in Australia, is having unexpected box-office success. It opened this week in Sydney’s Palace Cinemas. The film’s success highlights a curious phenomenon: combatting “human trafficking,” dubbed the world’s largest business, is an issue that everyone from left-wing feminists to the Christian Right agrees on. Yet is it really as organised an evil as it is described to be?

Research by Sverre Molland at Macquarie University’s anthropology on Lao sex workers in Thailand suggests that while there is undoubtedly coercion and deceit in the migration of sex workers, much of the migration is voluntary, many “traffickers” are sex workers who recruit their friends, and the business is very rarely connected to “transnational organised crime.” My own previous research on illegal Chinese migrants to Europe has suggested that migration brokers work more like the airline industry – everyone specializing in a particular service and in loose touch with those at other stages of the migration process – than as a crime syndicate. I suspect that the hype about “human trafficking” is connected to the general criminalization of migration in today’s “securitized” world.

Sverre found an interesting comment on the film’s website:

I’m a sex worker in Kings Cross, close friends with thai sex workers
happily on contract (ie “trafficked”). I am insulted by the ridiculous
mythologies so easily believed by those who want to paint us all as
victims. Margaret and David, you’ve dealt a cruel blow to asian sex
workers in Australia by getting sucked into this discriminatory and
racist narrative. The “help the trafficked” sector is an industry in
itself, and is much more harmful and dangerous to sex workers than sex
work itself. They only want to hear stories of woe, and to make money
by stereotyping us.

See the rest of the comments here.

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