In the Face of Pain: Circumcision, Class and Medical Authority in Turkey

• In Event: 322 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Healthcare Organizations

Abstract

Male circumcision is a practice that has been widely performed for hygienic and/or religious reasons in Turkey. Along with the rituals of compulsory military service and marriage, circumcision is culturally coded as a rite of passage that prepares and shapes the boys towards manhood. Based on my on-going research on circumcisers in Turkey, this paper aims to draw attention to one of the components of circumcision: Pain. By singling out two ethnographic sites of circumcision in Istanbul, the biggest city of Turkey, I aim to answer two interrelated questions: By focusing on discontinuities between these two settings of circumcision, I discuss how medical care is structured by class inequalities in urban life of Turkey. I ask the following question: If, as medical anthropologist Byron J. Good (1994) argues, the intertwining of the physiological and soteriological is central to the constitution of medicine, how is the moral promise of medicine—the eradication and management of pain—experienced by different classes in the case of circumcision? On the other hand, if the irruption of pain, despite the technical efficacy of medicine, is inevitable in these settings, what does this tell us about the moral sources and limits of medical authority? How is the boundary between medical and non-medical forms of care negotiated in these settings?

Author

• Oyman Basaran, University of Massachusetts