"Circumcision in Turkey is generally practiced on young boys, typically ranging in age from three to eleven. Previously, the procedure would be carried out by itinerant circumcisers who traveled from village to village, using traditional practices to operate and help the healing after that. As Turkey modernized from the 1960s through the 1980s, state health workers usually carried out the procedure. They became known as scientific circumcisers because they used modern medical techniques to perform the operation and manage physical pain and healing afterward, even while traditional operators tried to adopt similar methods. By the 1980s, the developing neoliberal state created a market-oriented professional identity for health workers who became concerned with the patients psychological and physical pain. Hospitals became the setting of choice for the circumcision, instead of private homes or local parks, and the patients comfort became paramount. Although the state agents tried to incorporate this psychologization of pain into their services, they were eventually driven out of business just as they had previously replaced the itinerant circumcisers. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Basaran presents the first book-length examination of male circumcision in a predominantly Muslim country.

He traces the history of the practice in the 20th and 21st centuries, following the shift from itinerant circumcisers to state-connected health agents to professional healthcare workers and the changing concepts of managing pain that accompanied these transitions. Wrapped up in this are questions of tradition vs. modernization and class, wealth, and prestige, not just of the families involved but also the practitioners themselves. The medical professionals have to move across negotiated and contested spaces with conflicting demands, values, and ideas. Further, Basaran ties his study into global discussions about the ethics and politics of male circumcision as more countries question the practice"--.