Menstrual seclusion was once about giving
women a safe space – hunter gatherer cultures can teach us how women’s blood is
potent, not polluting
Dr Camilla Power
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Indian Hindu sadhvis
(holy women) take part in a religious procession
on the eve of the annual
Ambubachi festival at the Kamakhya temple
in Guwahati Photograph:
Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images
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These days we tend to assume that menstrual
seclusion, menstrual taboos, menstrual huts and pollution beliefs, which are
prevalent in some developing countries, are all examples of sexist practices
that undermine women’s rights and freedoms.
But what if seclusion once gave women a safe
space, where they could find solidarity with other women? Suppose those taboos
were first invented by women for reasons of their own?
Social anthropologists are never content with
the way things are seen in their own culture. We try to abandon our
preconceptions, in order to understand other ways of seeing. And so it needs to
be said that there are two sides to menstrual taboos. Yes, they can become
expressions of patriarchal oppression, but look deeper into their origins and
we discover a different world.
Among many hunter-gatherers to this day,
menstrual blood connotes potency, not pollution. Menstruating women and girls
have privileged shamanic access to the spirit world, often imagined as
connection to the Moon, “women’s biggest husband”. This potency demands such
respect that women are inviolable and no man dares infringe these taboos for
fear of destroying his hunting luck.
Could menstruation and its observances in
fact be experienced as empowering for women? Take the menstrual traditions of
the Yurok Indians who live in north-western California. Here, a woman would go
on strike once a month for 10 whole days, declaring herself “on her Moontime”.
It was her time off. She didn’t cook for her husband or do household chores. It
was believed that a woman should seclude herself during her flow because “she
is at the height of her powers”. Such time should not be wasted in mundane
tasks, distractions or worries about the opposite sex. Rather, all her energies
should be applied in concentrated meditation “to find out the purpose of your
life”.
In the old days, menstruating Yurok women
would communally bathe and perform rituals in a “sacred Moontime pond” up in
the nearby mountains. In belief, all the fertile women in a household who were
not pregnant menstruated “at the same time, a time dictated by the Moon”, when
they practised their bathing rituals together. If a woman fell out of phase
with the Moon, breaking synchrony with her sisters, she could “get back in by
sitting in the moonlight and talking to the Moon asking it to balance her”.
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Three Kalasha sisters
sitting together Rumbur Valley, Chitral, Pakistan
Photograph: Alamy Stock
Photo
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Anthropologists have described how withdrawal
of sexual and domestic services was in many cultures on women’s terms. Far from
being oppressive, so-called “seclusion” could be experienced as special time.
In 2001, Wynne Maggi described what happens regularly to this day inside the
bashali, a communal menstrual house used by women among the Kalasha people of
north-west Pakistan.
In this community, there are no isolated
menstrual huts. Instead, there is a large sacred building serving as a communal
meeting house for the women, who see it as the physical centre for their
solidarity and freedom. Women congregate here when menstruating or giving
birth, so that at any one time there may be as many as 20 women inside,
gossiping, laughing and singing together, many with babies and toddlers. During
their stay in what they call their “most holy place”, women compare notes on
the duration of their menstrual flows.
The men express pride that in this society,
“our women are free”, despite the fact that the bashali building is off-limits
to them. Women who want to escape their husbands for a few days can use it as a
refuge. Maggi describes graphically how women enjoy the intimacy of sleeping
overnight in the bashali, arms and legs wrapped closely together. What happens
in the bashali is women’s secret, so much so that men don’t even have the words
to ask what happens there. The special house for women is the biggest building
in the village. Like so many men’s houses or temples in patriarchal societies,
but the other way round, it is one from which half the population is excluded.
Among African hunter-gatherers, where gender
egalitarianism is strong, a girl’s first menstruation triggers special
celebrations embracing the entire community. For hunter-gatherers of the Ituri
Forest in the eastern part of the Congo, the elima ritual is a collective and
joyous affair. Lasting several moons, activities centre on an elima hut, which
is in fact the most impressive structure ever used – more like a temple at the
centre of the community.
Girls who have recently begun menstruating go
inside with older women to be given practical lessons about boys and sex, but
mainly to learn ancient, polyphonic songs and the hut resounds with their
singing. The girls emerge “on the warpath” to playfully hunt out boys with big
whippy sticks. Festivities revolve around this sexual wargame of girls
laughingly chasing boys and the boys countering and teasing back. If any boy
gets whipped, he must try to enter the elima hut, assuming he can get past the
mums and aunties guarding the entrance. In this way elima becomes a type of
initiation for both sexes, very much on the girls’ terms.
In Blood Relations, his classic work on the
anthropology of menstruation, Chris Knight argues that women invented culture.
He traces the origins of sexual morality to female self-organisation and
collective resistance toward bad behaviour in males. Knight argues convincingly
that women could not command respect if they allowed men to take sexual access
to them for granted. The way to get men to be helpful was to make clear that
sex was conditional on good behaviour. To make this work, women had to
establish, at least periodically, the most fundamental rule of all, that “No
means No”. As Knight puts it: “If the body is not sacred, nothing is.”
Dr Camilla Power is senior lecturer in
anthropology at the University of East London and a member of the Radical
Anthropology Group which discusses these questions in Central London on Tuesday
evenings. All welcome.