Description
An investigation of how the expansion of modern medicine in Turkey transformed young boys' experiences of circumcision.
In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet the procedure is a potentially painful and traumatic ordeal. With the expansion of modern medicine, the social position of sunnetci (male circumcisers) became subject to the institutional arrangements of Turkey's evolving health care and welfare system. In the transition from traditional itinerant circumcisers to low-ranking health officers in the 1960s and hospital doctors in the 1990s, the medicalization of male circumcision has become entangled with state formation, market fetishism, and class inequalities.
Based on Oyman Basaran's extensive ethnographic and historical research, Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey is a close examination of the socioreligious practice of circumcision in twenty-five cities and their outlying towns and villages in Turkey. By analyzing the changing subjectivity of medical actors who seek to alleviate suffering in male circumcision, Basaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.
About the Author
Oyman Basaran is an assistant professor of sociology at Bowdoin College.
Reviews
Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey closely examines the experiences of twenty-five cities and their outlying towns across Turkey. By analyzing the changing characteristics of the medical actors, Basaran offers an alternate approach to the study of what is a central part of the Turkish male experience. * Bowdoin *
Sociologist Bas aran (Bowdoin College) uses the seemingly mundane topic of male circumcision as a point of entry into a very well-integrated historical and ethnographic examination of modernization, medicine, religion, family, rural-to-urban migration, economics, and municipal and state politics in Turkey. . . . Highly insightful and illuminating. * CHOICE *
Book Information
ISBN 9781477327029
Author Oyman Basaran
Format Hardback
Page Count 232
Imprint University of Texas Press
Publisher University of Texas Press
Weight(grams) 481g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 18mm