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    Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey

    Oyman Basaran (Author)

    9781477327029, University of Texas Press

    Hardback, published 18 April 2023

    232 pages, 1 b&w image
    22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.481 kg

    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, Başaran offers an alternate approach to the study of what is a central part of the Turkish male experience.
    (Bowdoin)
    Sociologist Başaran (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)
    [This book] is beautifully written and edited. The clarity of prose will make the book’s rich ideas accessible to broad audiences...The book clearly shows that medicine is a social practice, one that cannot be separated from its broader contexts.
    (Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association)

    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 sÜnnetÇi (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 Başaran’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, Başaran offers a psychoanalytically informed alternate approach to the standard sociological arguments surrounding medicalization and male circumcision.

    • Acknowledgments
    • Prologue
    • Introduction: SÜ
      nnetÇ
      i, Pain, and Medicine
    • 1. Itinerant Circumcisers
    • 2. Fenni SÜ
      nnetÇ
      i
    • 3. Mass Circumcision
    • 4. Fear of Circumcison
    • 5. “
      Deceitful Child”
      and “
      Bad Parents”
    • Conclusion: The Ethics and Politics of Male Circumcision
    • Appendix: Research Methodology
    • Notes
    • References
    • Index

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