Culture & human rights -- narratives of Ethiopian identity: Neha Reddy at TEDxNorthwesternU 2014

Neha Reddy, a sophomore at Northwestern University studying anthropology and global health, completed a research project on female circumcision in Ethiopia and discovered the cultural disparities surrounding human rights issues.

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>> REDDY: So it wasn't too hot outside,

which is actually surprisingly common on my trip thus far.

When I first decided I would be traveling

to the eastern region of Harare, Ethiopia this past summer

to conduct research on the cultural perceptions of female circumcision,

I was bracing myself for what I was sure would be an encounter with extreme heat.

I mean, I've been to India during its rainy season, and even its winter,

which still corresponded to near 90 degree weather,

and I figured that my experience in Ethiopia would have to be just as hot if not worse.

But most days were actually very pleasant.
70s and 80s.

It was really rather unexpected.

But it definitely wasn't the only time

that my preconceived notions were really muddled by my trip this past summer.

Um, so to begin my entire research experience,

I had the opportunity to speak with a head police officer in the local town of Haramaya.

Now, female circumcision was criminalized in Ethiopia back in 2004,

and a lot of the brunt of this enforcement

has really fallen on to local head police chiefs,

just like the one I spoke with.

And when I spoke with him,

he really emphasized the role of partnerships

between local community members and local militia,

in which community members would be able to report

possible cases of female circumcision happening in the home

to these police officers, who would then step in

and make arrests and other forms of intervention.

And from the passion with which he spoke,

I really felt as though networks were really in place, these partnerships,

to really try to begin the disintegration process of this cultural practice

that has played such an integral role of these,

has played such an integral role in the lives of these young girls for so long.

And after my interview was over,

the police officer told me that he was going to step out

and have someone else come and bring me some tea.

So a few minutes later, another police officer walked in,
and he brought me some chai.

Sorry, I am not good at clickers.

Um, which is actually nothing at all like Indian chai,
but I happily drank it anyway.

After he brought me some chai,

he turned to me and decided to ask me a few questions in his broken English.

Why I was there, who I was, essentially.

And then he kind of paused and hesitated a little bit.

And really slowly, he proceeded to tell me

that the same head police officer who I had just been speaking with

had taken his own 10-year-old daughter to a nearby village

to have her circumcised only one week earlier.

And then he stepped out.

And it took me a moment to really realize the implications of his words,

and what they might mean for the entire rest of my research experience.

And I then gathered my own things and I went outside

to rejoin Professor Tiglu and Dean Richard to return to Haramaya University

where I'd been staying during my time in the area.

And I tell this story because it was the first time during my research experience

that things suddenly felt very real, and not abstract or removed,

the way they felt when I was planning things in a classroom,

or trying to write a proposal for a Northwestern summer research grant.

I realized I was going to be talking with people whose lives were not simplistic,

and not one-dimensional, and definitely not predictable,

but were actually really complex and multi-faceted.

And it was also the first time that I got insight

into the idea that culture and human rights are really profoundly related,

ultimately defined from one another, and intertwined,

specifically in the impacts that they can both have in the lives of everyday people.

So if we think that a police officer, just because he wears a badge,

is somehow exempt from the cultural values

that he grew up learning about and believing in,

and will put those aside to instead uphold legislation,

that maybe he doesn't really understand,

or maybe really isn't applicable to his local lifestyles,

then we really might be missing out on a much larger idea.

So I wanted to go into my entire research experience as unbiased as possible,

really trying to understand the full discourse

surrounding this practice of female circumcision.

So for those of you who don't know,

female circumcision is also coined

as female genital mutilation and female genital cutting.

And it's a process of the partial or the total removal

of the female external genitalia, specifically, the clitoris.

Now it's often performed as a means to prepare a young girl

for adulthood and the prospects of marriage.

It's concentrated mostly in countries in Africa,

and UNICEF estimates that there are about 125 million women and girls alive today

who have been circumcised,

though these numbers are obviously pretty difficult to actually garner.

UNICEF and the UN and many other large scale organizations

have begun to pass resolutions and declarations

really trying to speak out against this issue.

But through my own conversations with these people,

I started to realize that the situation is a lot more complex than this.

I left with stories of local Ethiopians

who are really caught at a crossroads between these larger structures

that are trying to act in the name of promoting human rights,

and local ancestral values that have been passed on to them through time.

Stories of young girls around my own age,

elderly male community leaders, mothers, grandmothers, college students.

Time and time again,

I realized that it really didn't seem to matter

that it was large scale organizations like the UN that were passing these resolutions,

because it didn't really have much relevance to their everyday lives.

To the rural Ethiopian woman I spoke with

who had very little understanding of how their own government functioned,

let alone larger international policy.

So it was rather paradoxical to me

that it was their lives who were supposed to be the most impacted

by these campaigns to stop the cutting.

I remember speaking with one particular group of women

who worked in a court in the same small town of Haramaya.

And one of the girls, who we'll call Martha, she must have been around my own age.

She told me her story.

Martha was circumcised when she was 11 years old,

married at thirteen, and pregnant with her first child when she was only 15 years old.

Now due to complications surrounding her pregnancy,

she ended up having a miscarriage and suffered from obstetric fistula.

Today, Martha works in the courts,

working to advocate for other young girls who might undergo a similar fate.

Specifically, she tries to prosecute families

who are planning to have their young girls married off at young ages,

which is also illegal in the country.

And I was really inspired by her story and a lot of the stories that I heard that day,

of women who were really trying to fight back against systems

that were meant to hold them in their place.

So after I asked my standard questions,

the girls turned to me and they wanted to know a little bit about my own life,

and I told them that I'm a college student from the United States,

and then they proceeded to ask me,

well what are the perceptions of female circumcision in the US,

and I told them that, you know, I can't really broadly answer that question,

but a lot of people view it as a pretty extreme violation of the rights of a woman.

And the girls kind of looked around at each other.

They nodded a little bit.

And then one of them asked me, "but why do people feel so strongly?"

And that's when I realized that these young girls and women,

in their attempts to do good for their community,

they didn't really seem to have the full picture.

Or at least what I considered to be the full picture.

The human rights discourse that I've grown up learning about,

believing in, that a lot of us have grown up learning about,

really wasn't applicable to their everyday lifestyles.

I asked Martha why she works so hard to dedicate her life to advocating for these girls,

and she told me that it's because she lost her child.

She understood the associated health risks.

But she didn't say anything about being a minor when she was circumcised,

about not giving consent,

or even about feeling like her rights had been violated at all.

Martha and these other women were simply doing what they felt they needed to do

to act in the best interests of their community based on their firsthand experiences.

And that's really how a lot of us go about our things, isn't it?

But people have really inherently different opinions

about what is actually good for their community,

and that's a notion that I heard time and time again.

I remember speaking with another woman, Nadia.

I spoke with her in the outskirts of Haramaya, in a local village,

while she was chewing on khat.

Now khat is a native Ethiopian plant

whose leaves are dried and then chewed as a stimulant, pretty similar to tobacco.

It's illegal here in the US, but it's a pretty common cultural tradition over there.

And Nadia actually spoke really passionately about the benefits of female circumcision.

She told me that girls who haven't been circumcised today are "too hot,"

as she would call it.

And she described the clitoris sort of like a sexual engine,

one that persuaded girls to be sexually deviant and promiscuous.

So maybe these girls would go out and choose multiple partners,

or even bring home a man that they wanted to marry,

instead of consulting their families.

Nadia continued that female,

that criminalizing the practice of female circumcision

has really changed the fabric of her community.

As today, families are a little bit more hesitant to have their girls circumcised,

not because they don't agree with the practice,

but rather because they fear punishment.

And Nadia stressed that this was really moving society away

from one that was safe and proper for girls.

And as she continued to speak,

I realized that from her perspective,

all she was doing was advocating for the best interests of these girls.

Just as the girls I had spoke with in the court felt,

she just wanted to make their lives better.

And that's when I realized that these stories, these women,

were really representing two sides of the very same coin.

Interpreting and appreciating this practice very differently,

but based solely on their own experiences.

But oftentimes when interventions are made by foreign organizations,

the perspective seems to be that cultures somehow need fixing,

and we start to toss around terms like trying to progress cultures,

and trying to modernize cultures.

I'm reminded of the work of author and anthropologist Sally Mary,

who says that culture is seen as an opposition to human rights,

but this depends on a very narrow understanding and political misuse of the concept.

She suggests that ideas of human rights

really need to be framed within local contexts to actually have impact.

But all we do when we frame things in these international lights is we simplify things.

Because as humans, we really love turning to dichotomies.

The civilized and uncivilized.

The cruel and the barbaric; we do it all the time.

Heartstrings get tugged and people become really impassioned

to fight for girls halfway around the world

who exist in cultures that don't value them and don't value their health.

But I'd argue, and I think that most of you would agree with me,

that a culture that's thousands of miles away is almost impossible to really understand.

If culture can be viewed as fixed, as dynamic and unsteady,

rather than fixed and impenetrable,

than local cultural practices and the struggles that accompany them

are really powerful tools for change.

If we can instead capitalize on these differences,

then we might actually be able to spur progress.

In his book, "The Argumentative Indian,"

author and economist Amartya Sen argues that the public voice

is actually a really, really powerful tool,

because we can pull out dissenting opinions,

and if we capitalize on when individuals themselves feel mobilized,

then that's when we can actually push for change.

Now one of the most powerful models of community-led empowerment

has been the establishment of different women's watch groups.

And this is a model I saw firsthand when I visited a village,

a local village called Kombolcha.

I talked to these women,

and it's their role to facilitate discussions in their community,

to spread awareness, to really act as resources for change

and support systems for other women who just really need someone to talk to.

And they stressed to me that nobody in their community wants to ever see girls harmed,

but that the reason that these practices

like female circumcision and early marriage still exist today

is simply because people don't understand any alternatives

from what has always been their norm.

These women work with religious and community leaders,

underlying the idea that when they can garner support from those leaders,

that's when they can really work to reach the other community members.

And in this respect,

these women really seem to be the most ideal intersection of culture and human rights,

because they work within existing frameworks,

not adversely challenging the norms or suggesting that anyone is to blame,

and it was really profoundly powerful for me to speak with these women.

And through time, and the process is definitely slow,

these women, they garner support of community leaders,

they engage other community members,

and that's when they overall push for community-level change.

So my experience abroad was not even a full summer's worth,

and the stories I heard and the few that I've shared today

certainly don't cover the multitude of voices and opinions

that exist pertaining to this topic, but I think that's kind of the point.

It's the multiplicity of voices, the Nadias chewing Khat,

the Marthas working in the court,

the elderly circumcisers,

that give names and faces to ideas that otherwise seem so abstract.

Now their voices may lack the gravitas of pronouncements from organizations like the UN.

I mean, they're definitely not official voices.

They're just everyday people.

But it's these local players that actually resonate with the people

and the cultures on the ground

in a way that the human rights discourse that I grew up believing in

and being really invested in hasn't really been able to do,

in the hopes that maybe one day a police officer doesn't just have to act the part,

because him and the other members in his community might actually be able to embrace it.

Thank you.