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Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: a Convention Account Gerry Mackie American Sociological Review, Vol

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Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: a Convention Account Gerry Mackie American Sociological Review, Vol Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account Gerry Mackie American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 6. (Dec., 1996), pp. 999-1017. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28199612%2961%3A6%3C999%3AEFAIAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0 American Sociological Review is currently published by American Sociological Association. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/asa.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Sun Feb 3 03:03:03 2008 ENDING FOOTBINDING AND INFIBULATION: A CONVENTION ACCOUNT* Gerry Mackie St. John's College, University of Oxford Female genital mutilation in Africa persists despite modernization, public education, and legal prohibition. Female footbinding in China lasted for 1,000 years but ended in a single generation. 1 show that each practice is a self-enforcing convention, in Schelling's (1960) sense, maintained by inter- dependent expectations on the marriage market. Each practice originated under conditions of extreme resource polygyny as a means of enforcing the imperial male's exclusive sexual access to his female consorts. Extreme po- lygyny also caused a competitive upward flow of women and a downward flow of conjugal practices, accounting for diffusion of the practices. A Schelling coordination diagram explains how the three methods of the Chi- nese campaign to abolish footbinding succeeded in bringing it to a quick end. The pivotal innovation was to form associations of parents who pledged not to footbind their daughters nor let their sons marry footbound women. The "convention" hypothesis predicts that pronzotion of such pledge asso- ciations would help bring female genital mutilation to an end. emale genital mutilation (clitoridectomy to 300 years, according to one educated Fand infibulation; hereafter FGM), a Sudanese (Lightfoot-Klein 1989: 135). Pain- painful and dangerous practice, is one of the ful and dangerous footbinding afflicted most major human rights and public health prob- Chinese women for a thousand years, and re- lems in the world today. It affects perhaps as form-minded Chinese women at one time many as 100 million women across some two "agreed that footbinding was of no use, but dozen countries in Africa. Opposition to could only be given up by degrees" (Little FGM is now part of American human rights 1899:152). Yet footbinding ended, for the policy (U.S. Department of State 1994:xvi), most part, in a single generation. I will show and the U.S. Agency for International Devel- that footbinding and infibulation are closely opment is assisting the African organizations equivalent practices, and thus that the suc- working to eradicate it (Mann 1994). cessful campaign to end footbinding in China Rather than diminishing with moderniza- has lessons for the efforts to end infibulation tion, the practice is spreading. Many observ- in Africa. ers, especially those indigenous, predict that Footbinding and infibulation correspond as ending infibulation will be slow-taking up follows: Both customs are nearly universal where practiced; they ..re persistent and are * Direct correspondence to Gerry Mackie, St. practiced even by those who oppose them. John's College, Oxford OX1 3JP, United King- Both control sexual access to females and dom ([email protected]). I especially ensure female chastity and fidelity. Both are thank James Fearon, Russell Hardin, David necessary for proper marriage and family Laitin, and also Gary Cox, Hill Gates, Michael honor. Both are believed to be sanctioned by Munger, John Padgett, Lynn Sanders, the ASR tradition. Both are said to be ethnic markers, Editor and reviewers, and others for advice and comments. This work was started while I was and distinct ethnic minorities may lack the supported by a Searle Fellowship at the Univer- practices. Both seem to have a past of conta- sity of Chicago. [Reviewers acknowledged by the gious diffusion. Both are exaggerated over author are Elise Boulding, Margo Wilson, and time and both increase with status. Both are Michael W. Macy. -ED.] supported and transmitted by women, are American Sociological Review, 1996, Vol. 61 (December999-1017) 999 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW performed on girls about six to eight years paternity-confidence mechanisms under con- old, and are generally not initiation rites. ditions of imperial female slavery. The stron- Both are believed to promote health and fer- gest alternative theory-ascribing female tility. Both are defined as aesthetically pleas- mutilation to patriarchy-does not explain ing compared with the natural alternative. the nonuniversality of the practices under Both are said to properly exaggerate the universal patriarchy, maintenance beyond complementarity of the sexes, and both are originating conditions, or the end of claimed to make intercourse more pleasur- footbinding. I use a Schelling coordination able for the male. Important general differ- diagram to show that the end of footbinding ences between imperial China and Sudanic was a convention shift in direct response to Africa are elite concubinage in China versus the three methods of the abolition cam- commonplace polygyny in Africa, exogamy paigns. The major alternative theory of ces- versus endogamy, and agrarian and commer- sation-generalized modernization-does cial versus pastoral and horticultural produc- not seem to apply to footbinding or infibula- tion.' Important similarities between Impe- tion. Therefore the methods used to end rial China and Sudanic Africa are their histo- footbinding in China might well work to end ries of imperial female slavery and their rules FGM in Africa. of emancipation for the children of concu- bines. FOOTBINDING As far as I know. Ortner (1978) was the first on record with a theoiy relating the Beginning at about age six to eight, the fe- complex of female purity, family honor, se- male child's four smaller toes were bent un- clusion, chastity, and fidelity (with reference der the foot, the sole was forced to the heel, to footbinding and female genital mutilation) and then the foot was wrapped in a tight ban- to a past of highly stratified empires. Ex- dage day and night in order to mold a bowed treme resource polygyny and consequent and pointed four-inch-long appendage. Foot- hypergynous competition in an imperial past binding was extremely painful in the first 6 elicited the complex of honor and modesty, to 10 years of formative treatment. Compli- which persists beyond the originating condi- cations included ulceration, paralysis, gan- tion~.~Stacey (1983:40-43) applied Ortner's grene, and mortification of the lower limbs theory to the case of footbinding. Dickemann (Drucker 1981); perhaps 10 percent of girls (1979, 1981) presented a similar theory of did not survive the treatment (Fairbank paternity confidence in much greater detail, 1992). The saying was: A mother can't love but with a strongly sociobiological bent. I both her daughter and her daughter's feet at borrow and modify the paternity-confidence the same time (Blake 1994:682). Bound feet hypothesis and, with the help of simple game were malodorous, and treated women were theory, supplement it with an explicit theory crippled and largely housebound. The cus- of the endurance and demise of mutilating tom was defended even by women and was practices. I use Schelling's (1960, 1978) ac- transmitted by them. count of conventions as solutions to recur- Footbinding appeared in the Sung Dynasty rent coordination problems to explain the lo- (960-1279), a time of strong urbanization, cal universality and persistence of foot- expanding bureaucracy, commercialization binding and infibulation, which originated as of agriculture, monetization, and thriving trade. The respective imperial capitals at the I In this article, Sudanic refers to the region opposite ends of the Grand Canal were the across Africa, and Sudan refers to the country in largest and richest cities in the world Northeast Africa. (Fairbafik and Reischauer 1978:116-51). The For the periods under discussion, a man in status of women declined in the Sung: Con- China could have one wife and additional concu- cubinage expanded, upper-class dowries in- bines, in non-Islamic Sudanic Africa many wives and concubines, and under Islam four wives and creased, and a neo-Confucian ideology in- additional slave concubines: All are termed po- cluding tenets of female chastity, seclusion, lygyny for the purposes of this article. Hypergyny and subordination, emerged and came to is when women marry up-that is, a pattern of reign (Ebrey 1991). The first unequivocal females marrying into higher ranking families. record of footbinding is praise by an elev- ENDING FOOTBINDING AND INFIBULATION enth-century poet of a dancer in "the palace by the American prohibitionist pledge to ab- style." A late fourteenth-century document stain from alcohol, the society introduced the quotes an early twelfth-century discussion of effective technique of pledging members not the recent origin of footbinding.
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