In the last few decades, the relationship between ethnologists and the people they study has changed profoundly. Formerly colonized countries, now independent, reproach ethnologists for slowing economic development by encouraging the survival of old practices and outdated beliefs. For nations that are eager to modernize, ethnology looks like the last incarnation of colonialism, and they display mistrust if not hostility toward it.
Elsewhere, the indigenous minorities who survive within a few large modern states—Canada, the United States, Australia, Brazil—have become acutely aware of their ethnic identity and their moral and legal rights. These small communities now refuse to be treated as objects of study by ethnologists, whom they see as parasites and even intellectual exploiters. With the expansion of industrial civilization, the number of societies that have preserved a traditional way of life and can still serve as fodder for ethnologists has greatly diminished. At the same time, the vogue for the social and human sciences in the wake of World War II multiplied the number of researchers. Even fifty years ago, people joked within the profession that an Indian family in the United States had at least three members: the husband, the wife, and the ethnologist. The situation has only gotten worse since then, and indigenous groups, exasperated at being the prey of ethnologists, are rebelling. Some demand that all kinds of forms be filled out to their satisfaction before you are allowed to enter their preserve. Others quite simply prohibit ethnological research: you can come to them as a teacher or health worker, provided you pledge in writing that you will ask no questions about their social organization or religious beliefs. In a pinch, an informant will recount a myth, but only in return for a formal contract acknowledging that it is his or her intellectual property.
In a curious twist, however, the old relationship between the ethnologist and the peoples he studies, rather than being severed, is reversed. Tribes appeal to ethnologists and even hire them to assist them in court, whether to help them assert their ancestral rights over lands or to have the treaties formerly imposed on them voided. This is happening in Australia, where aborigines—and the ethnologists in their service—have attempted several times to prevent the government from installing rocket launch sites or from granting mining concessions in territories held to be sacred. Under similar conditions in Canada and the United States, courts have heard and continue to hear cases concerning the possession of sometimes enormous areas of land. The Indians of Brazil are beginning to organize nationally, and initiatives of the same kind may well be taken there. In such instances, the ethnologist’s work completely changes in nature. Once he used the indigenous peoples; now it is they who use him. Adventure, with its aura of poetry and lyricism, is giving way to austere research in libraries, the laborious analysis of the archives to support the case being made and to find legal remedies. Bureaucracy and procedure supplant picturesque “fieldwork,” or at the very least transform its spirit.
French ethnologists did not expect to have that sort of experience in their own country. Yet that is what is happening, because of the scope that immigration, especially from sub-Saharan Africa, has assumed. For the last year or two, lawyers have been turning to ethnologists for assistance in defending African immigrants who have performed ritual excision on their female children or have had it performed by professionals. Feminist organizations and others dedicated to the protection of children have appeared as witnesses for the prosecution in the legal proceedings initiated by the state. In French law, ritual excision, initially defined as a simple offense falling under the jurisdiction of the criminal courts, became in 1988 a felony tried in the assize court, equated with willful assault and battery against the person of the child leading to mutilation, for which the parents may be found guilty.
A case of this kind tried in 1988 caused a stir because the child had died—not, it seems, from the ritual excision itself but from complications that went untreated. The charge of neglect, or of failure to provide assistance to a person in danger, was thus added to that of assault and battery. In early October 1989 the assize court of Paris heard another case of ritual excision, in which the procedure had had no harmful consequences for the child. But the punishment imposed in both cases was exactly the same: a three-year suspended sentence. Nothing better illustrates the awkward situation in which the courts find themselves. Whatever the outcome of the procedure, fatal or benign, they feel obliged both to condemn and to pardon.
Female ritual excision, commonly practiced by various peoples of Africa and Indonesia (and already in ancient Egypt), consists of the ablation of the clitoris and sometimes also of the labia minora. A girl on whom the procedure is not performed would be considered impure, even dangerous, and would not find a husband. Despite what Europeans often imagine, the practice is not imposed by men; it is “the women’s secret,” as the interpreters for the accused explained in the 1988 trial. Women want their daughters to have the procedure just as they themselves did.
In initiating legal proceedings, the public prosecutor’s office is acting under pressure from public opinion, over which feminist leagues and other well-intentioned organizations exercise a monopoly. How do they justify their indignation?
The first and foremost grievance, it seems, is that ritual excision supposedly eliminates female sexual pleasure, which our societies have made a new article in the declaration of human rights. Second grievance: excision is said to constitute an attack on the integrity of the child’s body.
It is surprising that the second argument has never been invoked against male circumcision, which, however, constitutes an assault of the same kind. Some will point out that male circumcision is a benign procedure with none of the major disadvantages that are imputed to female excision. But is that true? I had an excellent friend from an old Breton Catholic family; he was convinced that circumcision reduced the quality of male pleasure, and he would not back down. In the case of female excision, opinions differ. So imprecise is our knowledge of the indirect role of the erogenous zones that we would do better to admit that we know nothing about it. At the October 1989 trial, an African medical doctor who had been excised declared that she had never felt shortchanged in that respect. She added that it was not until she came to Paris that she learned that excised women were frigid.
In any case, it is clear that, even without any consequences for male pleasure, circumcision constitutes an attack on the physical integrity of the boy’s body, a violent trace that, like female excision, obliges him to perceive himself as different from other children. It is therefore not clear why the argument invoked in the second case is not also used in the first—unless it is because our Judeo-Christian culture is still steeped in the Old Testament and that such familiarity removes any shocking aspect male circumcision might have. Circumcision (for the Jews directly and for the Christians indirectly) belongs to a shared cultural heritage. It is for that reason and that reason alone that it does not disturb us.
Lawyers called upon to provide a defense in trials for ritual excision have solicited ethnologists’ opinion in an effort to choose between two defenses. They are tempted to plead lack of responsibility because they are persuaded—and think they can persuade the judges—that in societies defined as backward, individuals do not have free will but are rather totally subject to the constraints exerted by the group. Such individuals therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions. Ethnologists do not follow jurists down that path. They know that that way of envisioning societies wrongly called primitive or archaic is one of the outdated ideas of nineteenth-century thought. In all societies there is a great variety of individual behaviors. Members adhere more or less faithfully to the norms of the group; strictly speaking, no one is incapable of deviating from them. By means of that defense, lawyers might obtain leniency for their clients, but in the process they would discredit them and their culture. Paradoxically, defense attorneys would be shoring up the clear conscience of the prosecutors since they would agree to acknowledge the absolute superiority of the civilization on whose behalf the legal proceedings were initiated and in the name of which the court will pronounce its verdict.
Ethnologists will instead try to make the judges understand how beliefs that we ourselves judge barbaric or ridiculous are warranted for those who adhere to them. Everywhere in the world where female excision or male circumcision is practiced (and often these practices occur in tandem), the underlying logic seems to be the same: the Creator, in establishing the distinction between the sexes, did not perform his job properly. Whether because he was in too much of a hurry, careless, or distracted in his work, he left a trace of masculinity in women, a trace of femininity in men. The ablation of the clitoris or the foreskin has the result of completing that work, ridding each sex of a residual impurity and making each conform to its respective nature. That metaphysics and that way of thinking are alien to us. Nevertheless, we can recognize their coherence and not be impervious to their beauty and grandeur.
Instead of relegating the accused to some subhuman state, thereby unwittingly validating racial prejudices, we should endeavor to show that practices that are meaningless within one cultural order may be meaningful in another. Indeed, there is no common measure by which to judge systems of beliefs or, a fortiori, to condemn one or another of them, unless we claim—but on what basis?—that only one (ours, of course) conveys universal values and must be imposed on all.
There are no grounds for punishing, in the name of a particular moral code, people who are simply following practices dictated by a different code. Does that mean we must tolerate them? The conclusion is not self-evident. The ethnologist and the moralist make an objective observation: in our country, ritual female excision is an affront to the public conscience. Our system of values, which has as much right to respect as any other, would be profoundly weakened if, on the same soil, customs felt to be incompatible could freely coexist. Ritual excision trials thus have an exemplary value. The idea that one might condemn the defendants is absurd. But an ethical choice, with the future of the host country’s culture hanging in the balance, can be made only between two possibilities: either proclaim that anything that can be justified on the basis of custom is permitted everywhere; or send back to their own country those who—as is their right—intend to remain faithful to their practices even if, on whatever grounds, they gravely offend the sensitivities of their hosts. The only excuse to be found for the decisions of 1988 and 1989 is that, in the eyes of the accused, a conviction with a suspended sentence probably represented a milder punishment than expulsion from the country.
In another realm as well, ethnologists are being thrust onto the public stage. Some have been invited to sit on commissions that were formed to give an opinion to the governments of various countries on the new methods of medically assisted reproduction. Faced with the advances in the life sciences, public opinion vacillates. Several methods for producing a child are available to infertile couples: artificial insemination, egg donation, the use of surrogate mothers for hire or free of cost, in vitro fertilization with sperm provided by the husband or by another man and with an egg from the wife or another woman. Is everything to be allowed? Should certain procedures be permitted and others banned? And if so, on what basis?
Previously unknown legal situations arise for which the laws of European countries do not have a ready answer. In contemporary societies, the idea that filiation is the result of a biological connection tends to prevail over the idea that it is a social bond. In English law, social paternity does not even exist: the sperm donor could legally claim the child or be obliged to support it. In France the Napoleonic Code stipulates that the mother’s husband is the child’s legal father. It therefore rejects biological paternity in favor of social paternity: Pater id est quem nuptiae demonstrant. Nevertheless, a 1972 law belies that old adage by allowing paternity suits to go forward. We therefore no longer know whether the social or the biological relationship takes precedence. What responses, then, are we to give to the problems raised by medically assisted reproduction in cases where the child’s legal father is not the biological father and where the mother has not herself provided the egg or perhaps the uterus in which gestation takes place?
Depending on the case, a child born of such procedures may have one father and one mother as usual, or one mother and two fathers, two mothers and one father, two mothers and two fathers, three mothers and one father, or even three mothers and two fathers, if the sperm donor is not the father and if three women participate: the one donating an egg, the one providing her uterus, and the one who will be the child’s legal mother.
What will the respective rights and duties of the social and the biological parents be, now that they are different people? How should a court decide in a case where the surrogate mother delivers a disabled child, and the couple that employed her services rejects it? Or conversely, if a woman inseminated by the husband of an infertile woman and on her behalf changes her mind and decides to keep the child as her own? Must all desires be considered legitimate? That of a woman who asks to be inseminated with the frozen sperm of her deceased husband? That of two lesbians who want to have a child with an egg from one of them artificially fertilized by an anonymous donor and implanted in the other’s uterus?
Can surrogacy or sperm or egg donation be the object of a contract requiring payment? Must they be anonymous, or may the social parents and eventually the child itself know the identity of the biological parents? None of these questions is gratuitous: these problems and others even more outlandish have been and continue to be raised in court. All this appears so new that judges, lawmakers, and even moralists, lacking experience with comparable situations, find themselves at a complete loss.
Not so ethnologists, the only ones who were not caught off guard by this sort of problem. Granted, the societies they study are unacquainted with the modern techniques of in vitro fertilization, the removal of an egg or embryo, its transfer and implantation into a uterus, and the freezing of sperm, eggs, and embryos. But they have imagined metaphorical equivalents. And since they believe in the reality of these metaphors, the psychological and legal implications are the same.
My colleague Françoise Héritier-Augé has shown that insemination with donor sperm has an equivalent in Africa, among the Samo of Burkina Faso. Girls in that society are married off very young, and each must take an official lover for a certain period of time before going to live with her husband. When the moment comes, she brings her husband the child she has had by her lover; that child will be considered the firstborn of the legitimate union. A man may take several wives; if they leave him he remains the legal father of all the children they later bear.
In other African populations as well, a husband who has been abandoned by one or more of his wives has a right of paternity over future children. He need only have the first postpartum sexual relations with his former wife after she has become a mother. That act determines who will be the legal father of the next child. A man married to an infertile woman may thus arrange for a fertile woman to name him the father, gratis or in exchange for payment. In that case, the woman’s husband is the sperm donor, and the woman leases her uterus to another man or a childless couple. The burning question in France as to whether the surrogate mother must provide her services without charge or whether she may receive remuneration therefore does not arise in Africa.
The Nuer of Sudan consider an infertile woman the equivalent of a man; she can therefore marry a woman. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, rich women buy wives for themselves, sending them off to live with men. When a child is born, the woman who is the legal “husband” claims it or cedes it to the biological father in exchange for payment. In the first case, a couple composed of two women, who can therefore be defined as homosexual in the literal sense of the word, practice assisted reproduction in order to have children; one of the women will be the legal father, the other the biological mother.
The institution of the levirate, in force among the ancient Hebrews and still widespread throughout the world, allows and at time even requires that a younger brother sire a child in the name of his dead brother. This is the equivalent of insemination postmortem. An even clearer case is the “ghost marriage” of the Nuer of Sudan: if a man died a bachelor or without offspring, a close relative could take enough of the deceased’s livestock to purchase a wife. He would then produce a son (whom he considered his nephew) in the name of the deceased. Sometimes that son would in turn perform the same function vis-àvis his biological father—legally, his uncle. The children he produced would therefore legally be his cousins.
In all these examples, the child’s social status is determined by the legal father, even if that father is a woman. Nevertheless, the child knows the identity of its biological father; the two are united by bonds of affection. Contrary to our fears, transparency does not cause the child to feel any conflict about the fact that its biological father and its social father are two different individuals.
There are societies in Tibet where several brothers share a wife. All the offspring are attributed to the eldest, whom the children call “father.” They call the other men their uncles. The real biological connections are not unknown, but they are granted little importance. A symmetrical situation prevailed in the Amazon rainforest among the Tupi-Kawahib, whom I knew fifty years ago. A man could marry several sisters or a mother and her daughter from a previous union; these women reared their children together, showing little concern, it seemed, about whether the child a woman was caring for was her own or that of another of her husband’s wives.
The conflict between biological kinship and social kinship, which in Europe troubles jurists and moralists, does not exist, therefore, in the societies known to ethnologists. These societies give primacy to the social, but the two aspects do not clash in the group’s ideology or in its members’ consciousness. It should not be concluded that our society ought to model its conduct on such exotic examples. But these examples can at least accustom us to the idea that the problems raised by medically assisted reproduction allow for a good number of different solutions, none of which should be considered natural and self-evident.
In fact, we need not look so far off to be convinced. In matters of assisted reproduction, one of our major concerns seems to be to separate fertilization from sexuality and even, as it were, from sensuality. To be acceptable, everything must take place in the sanitized atmosphere of the laboratory, anonymously and through the intervention of the physician, in such a way as to exclude any personal contact, any sharing of eroticism or emotion between the participants. Before the advent of modern technologies, however, sperm donation was not unknown in our societies, but that type of service was rendered without a fuss and, as it were, “close to home.” In 1843, at a time when social and moral prejudices were much stronger than they are today, Balzac began a novel he never finished and which he called, significantly, “The Petty Bourgeois.” This novel, undoubtedly inspired by real events, tells of an agreement between two couples, one fertile, the other infertile, who are friends: the fertile woman takes on the task of producing a child with the infertile woman’s husband. The daughter born of that union is pampered in equal measure by the two couples, who live in the same building, and everyone around them knows of the situation.
In answer to jurists and moralists impatient to make laws, the ethnologist therefore dispenses this piece of advice: Be cautious. He points out that even practices and demands most shocking to public opinion—medically assisted reproduction for unmarried women, single men, widows, or homosexual couples—have their equivalents in other societies, which are none the worse for it.
The wise course, no doubt, is to trust that the internal logic of every society’s institutions and system of values will create viable family structures and will eliminate those that produce contradictions. Only time will tell what will be accepted or rejected in the long run by the collective consciousness.
Ethnologists often hear it said that their discipline is doomed because of the rapid extinction of the traditional cultures that formed its field of study. In a standardized world where every group aspires to the same cultural model, what place remains for differences? The two examples I have given, that of ritual female excision and that of medically assisted reproduction, show that the problems raised for the ethnologist by the world as it now exists are not disappearing: they are simply shifting. Female excision did not trouble the Western conscience when it was practiced far away, in exotic countries with which there was little contact. Even in the eighteenth century, authors such as Buffon wrote of it with indifference. If we now feel it is of concern to us, it is because the mobility of populations, and especially the scope that immigration from Africa has taken on, brings ritual incision home to us, as it were. Incompatible customs, which were able to coexist peacefully at a distance, collide when suddenly brought into proximity with each other. And if medically assisted reproduction also creates problems of conscience, it is for the opposite but symmetrical reason: a gap is opening within our own society between traditional morality and the advances of science. Here again, we do not know whether or how it is possible to reconcile situations that appear contradictory. The fact that in both cases people turn to ethnologists, call them in for consultations, urge them to give their views (which, in fact, are not followed), clearly shows that ethnologists still have a function to perform. The advent of a global civilization makes the clash between external differences sharper, and it does not prevent internal differences from erupting within a particular society. Ethnologists, as the saying goes, still have a lot on their plate.