Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account

Abstract

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 interdependent 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 polygyny 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 Chinese 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 associations would help bring female genital mutilation to an end.

Frequency-Dependent Social Transmission and the Interethnic Transfer of Female Genital Modification in the African Diaspora and Indigenous Populations of Colombia

“…The models advanced by Ross et al (2015) demonstrate how frequencydependent cultural dynamics can account for the persistence of FGMo in populations despite the fact that the FGMo equilibrium is suboptimal for all women in terms of health and reproductive outcomes. Frequency-dependent maintenance of cultural traits is similar to what Mackie (1996) calls "belief traps"-self-reinforcing cultural norms that are hard to attenuate because the perceived costs of testing the beliefs by not participating are too high to risk. For example, Mackie (1996Mackie ( :1009 cites ethnographic accounts of infibulation in Nigeria being practiced because of a belief that "a baby will die if its head touches the clitoris during delivery" (Lightfoot-Klein 1989:38-39).…”

“…Frequency-dependent maintenance of cultural traits is similar to what Mackie (1996) calls "belief traps"-self-reinforcing cultural norms that are hard to attenuate because the perceived costs of testing the beliefs by not participating are too high to risk. For example, Mackie (1996Mackie ( :1009 cites ethnographic accounts of infibulation in Nigeria being practiced because of a belief that "a baby will die if its head touches the clitoris during delivery" (Lightfoot-Klein 1989:38-39). Once such a belief becomes widespread, few individuals will choose to challenge it owing to the severe costs associated with error.…”

“…When we found no evidence of an ethnic group listed by Cantor, but did find reasonable evidence (e.g., in SwissAid 2007) that the name listed made reference to a geographical Cantor (2000), with prevalence rates of more than 75% in 5 contemporary populations (Table 1). Data on the time depth of FGMo in Africa are not easy to find (Mackie 1996), but there is solid evidence that FGMo was practiced in Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade, especially in Egypt (Kouba and Muasher 1985). There is also evidence that FGMo was linked to the intra-African and Arab slave trades prior to the peak of the Atlantic slave trade.…”

“…In its more extreme forms, such as infibulation or clitorectomy, FGMo can endanger the lives of women, hinder their reproductive potential, and increase the risk of maternal complications during childbirth (Mackie 1996). In the indigenous Embera Chamí of Colombia, FGMo in the form of clitoral excision is sometimes practiced on the very young, frequently leading to infection and sometimes mortality (MDG-F 2010).…”

“…As Mackie (1996) demonstrated in his research on Chinese footbinding, once the dynamics underpinning the persistence of a costly cultural trait are empirically understood, effective, non-putative interventions become possible, along with the possibility that damaging cultural practices can be ended rapidly.…”