By Lotte Hughes, with Ernst Graamans
A key question emerging from discussions about ARP is this: what exactly is it a passage to? If we don’t know the answer to that, there is little point in investing in ARP as a rite of passage and alternative to FGM/C.
- Is it a passage to womanhood, as FGM/C is said to be?
- Is it a passage to being uncut, and living as an uncut girl and woman?
- Is it a passage to some other kind of personhood?
As a result of FGM/C, girls are said to transition to women. But not everyone agrees with the wisdom of this claim. Girls clearly don’t become women overnight – either as a result of FGM/C or any alternative rite. They are neither physically nor emotionally ready for womanhood, let alone child-bearing. The danger with assuming ARP instantly transforms girls into women is that parents may consider them eligible for early marriage, and marry them off soon afterwards.
Some practitioners working on FGM/C and ARP feel that the communities they are working with see ARP more as a passage to acceptance of uncut girls and women as full and respected members of the community. But this prompts the question, who decides what is acceptable? And what is the new social structure and framework in which such fundamental social change takes place?
Ernst Graamans is a change management scholar at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who has carried out collaborative research on ARP in Kenya, and published on this subject. I asked him the following questions. Some of his answers have previously appeared in his published work.
Why must ARPs be a rite of passage to something?
Folklorist Arnold Van Gennep in his book The Rites of Passage (first published in English in 1960) divided rites of passage into three phases: a separation phase, a transition phase and incorporation phase. As a change management scholar, I see parallels with Kurt Lewin’s change management model that highlights three stages of change: unfreezing, changing and refreezing. The acronym ARP stands for Alternative Rite of Passage. It can be seen a rite on the one hand, and a planned change intervention on the other. Change interventions have both an underlying rationale for change and an intended effect. In this case, the rationale of ARP is that the circumcision of girls is bad; the intended effect is that girls will not be cut on their private parts; and, most importantly, they can still become fully-fledged members of their community even though they have not undergone FGM/C. This sounds great, but in practice this intervention tends to somewhat over-promise.
At the ARPs you have observed, what kind of transition do you think the participants believed this to be?
That really depends on who you ask and also, to some extent, on what the participants think you want to hear. It requires some probing to get to the real story, and even then, that story can change rapidly, even within a single conversation. On the whole, most participants expressed hope that by taking part in these events, things will change for the better, meaning that they won’t be cut and can pursue their dreams. But when I probed further I also noticed what I interpret as a sense of realism, an understanding that change does not happen overnight. None of the girls I interviewed considered themselves to be fully-fledged women after participating in these rites, nor were they considered as such by the elder members of the community. So your question ‘a passage to what?’ is justified and, as far as I know, nobody has a clear answer.
What problems does ARP present in terms of transitioning?
The ARPs I observed had two objectives: encouraging people to stop circumcising girls, and also ending child marriage. Both objectives are worthwhile, but the problem is that they are difficult to reconcile within the whole idea of ARP, which is to stop the cut and to do so within the traditional arrangement of which the original rite is part. Traditionally, after undergoing the cut girls were considered women and earned the right to marry (or rather, be married off) and bear children. But if that is not the case any more, what is the use of the rite, whether traditional or alternative, at all?
These alternative rites are actually more like ‘alternatives to a rite of passage’, ‘rites of prolonged passage’ or ‘rites of undetermined passage.’ Some would argue that these are not rites of passage at all, but just large-group interventions with limited transferability so long as the social environment to which the participants have to return after the event doesn’t also change in tandem. I don’t have hard data, but I have been told by health workers and community members who have embraced ARP that they are aware of this challenge.
How do traditional rites of passage differ in terms of transitioning?
In the traditional rite it was relatively clear what was expected from the girls, both during transitioning and thereafter. To follow Van Gennep, after the transition phase the girls were incorporated into a social arrangement that was set with clear codes of conduct and modes of behaviour. When it comes to the alternative rite that cultural embedding is not there. Put simply, the alternative rite is clear about the don’ts (no more cutting and child marriage) but ambiguous about the do’s thereafter.
What challenges does modernity present, with regard to transitioning?
Youngsters all over the world face uncertainties of a kind that their parents never had to face. Some have coined the term ‘waithood’ to describe a state of stagnancy and uncertainty for modern-day youngsters. As a father I also ask myself the question: when will my own children become fully-fledged adults? When they have reached a certain age or earned the right to vote? When they finish their education? When they buy a house? When they get a job? I honestly don’t know. And that is exactly it. The promise of a better life if one follows a template based on (let’s call it) ‘modernity’ might severely disappoint. In my research I have come across cases where Maasai youngsters chose a return to tradition after the promise of modern schooling, for example, failed them.