Janice A. Boddy, Civilizing Women: British crusades in colonial Sudan. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press (pb $24.95/£15.95 – 978 0 691 12305 9). 2007, 432 pp.

Janice Boddy's insightful history of colonial Sudan is framed by the question of how female genital mutilation (FGM) became a lens through which both Sudanese and non-Sudanese publics came to define the nation, the relationship between the sexes and modernity. In interrogating the reasons why the exclamation, ‘You know they circumcise women there?’ (p. 1) could appear to be an equally appropriate response to a European traveller journeying to Sudan in the 1930s as it was to a young anthropologist starting out on her fieldwork in 1976, Boddy moves away from questions about the morality of the practice, in an attempt to probe the shifting meaning of FGM from both the Sudanese and the Anglophone perspectives.

Here Boddy notably succeeds. She illustrates the distinction which exists between the post-sexual revolution conceptions of the individual, which emphasized sexual freedom as a marker of self-fulfilment, and the inter-war British understanding of women primarily as mothers. Her rationale for making this distinction is to show that the measures that the British officials took to curb Pharaonic circumcision were born initially not out of a desire to protect Sudanese women from cruelty, but rather out of a largely misguided concern about the effects of FGM on women's reproductive capabilities. The fear of reduced reproductive capacity took on new importance during the inter-war period, as the British search for a stable labour force intensified and, as a result, the British increasingly came to see Sudan as underpopulated. Boddy traces how the interest of the completely male Sudan Political Service (SPS) in the problem of FGM waxed and waned according to the demand for labour. Generally, the British men of the SPS were reluctant to intervene in the domestic lives of their northern Sudanese subjects. This is something Boddy attributes to the patriarchal bargain, which she claims underlined the relationship of collaboration.

Eschewing a purely colonial history, perhaps Boddy makes her most important contribution to the literature through her ability to marshal extensive anthropological fieldwork in combination with a rereading of the colonial sources to reconstruct competing Sudanese viewpoints about FGM. Adding to the work of historians like Heather Sharkey, who emphasizes the importance of the development of a shared cultural space in the creation of a northern identity amongst the Sudanese elite, Boddy describes how the recasting of FGM as a marker of difference between the north and the south allowed the effendyia, who had previously rejected the practice as a sign of backwardness, to support it as part of the cultural codes marking northern Muslims as a corporate group.

However, the primary ambition of Boddy's work is not simply to recount the views of various male protagonists about how the female body should be regulated; instead, she sets herself the task of bringing to light the ways in which women related to the practices of circumcision. Relying on a re-examination of zâr ceremonies, in addition to archival information about the practices of Sudanese midwives, Boddy convincingly shows how integral circumcision practices and infibulation itself were to the construction of ‘moral motherhood’. For Boddy, the true tragedy is that despite the shared goal of increased fertility, the British failure to understand the cultural significance of fertility within Sudanese society prevented them from achieving their shared goals. The British measured success as simply reducing infant mortality rates and increasing the numbers of live births; however, for the Arab women whom they hoped to persuade using the logic of public health, fertility meant the ability to reproduce socially. Social reproduction required the creation of morally gendered male and female selves. In Hofriyat, one of the sites of Boddy's fieldwork, anatomical ‘sex’ dictated nothing. Instead it only indicated a potential, which must be socially clarified and refined. Boddy goes on to assert that the reason that there is a controversy concerning particular operations, which involve the removal of the ‘clitoris’, is that they challenge the idea of a ‘socially unmediated Western body’. Therefore, relating to FGM through a fixation on the horrors of amputation mistakes ‘a moral and cosmological statement about collective and personal identity for poor scientific observation, and social complementarity for physiological equivalence’ (p. 112).

At times the shift in tone between the description of the Sudanese women – whose voices appear in recollections of zâr ceremonies, in the reconstruction of their cosmologies, and in snippets about the lives and actions of Sudanese midwives found in the records of the Midwives Training School – and the unmediated sense of frustration which surrounds the reconstruction of the lives of women like the Wolffs, Elaine Hills-Young and the Duchess of Atholl felt jarring. The tenderness with which Boddy treated the Sudanese women was not evident in her descriptions of Elaine Hills-Young and the Duchess of Atholl, and as a result they came across as rather flat characters moved solely by social anxiety and discontent at home to champion misguided reform movements abroad. Perhaps the contrast was made stark as a result of the source material, which, despite being handled with expertise, did not allow for any of the Arab midwives to be characterized in vignettes similar to those describing the British women.

However, Civilizing Women will surely be read as a masterwork. Not only does it tackle the thorny question of why FGM continues to capture our collective imaginations, it is at an even more basic level an excellent account of colonial Sudan from a refreshing vantage point.