EL SEBOU': THE EGYPTIAN BIRTH RITUAL

27 minutes Colour 1986 
Film maker: F. El Guindi

El Sebou' makes a basic contribution to the contemporary cultural anthropology of Egypt and deserves a wide screening in ethnographic courses on the Middle East and on the status of women. R. Lobban Jr

27 minutes Colour 1986

Film-maker: F. El Guindi

This film is an ethnographic record of the birth ritual in Egypt called el Sebou' (meaning the seventh), which is celebrated on the seventh day following the birth of a child of either sex by Coptic and Muslim families from all status-groups, rural and urban. Traditionally, this was the occasion for naming newborn children, circumcising boys and piercing the ears of girls. Today these practices are deritualized in the urban centres and in most cases take place separately from the Sebou' ceremony on the seventh day, the latter continuing to function as a key ritual for initiating newborn children into the Egyptian social and cultural world. Interestingly, the seventh day after birth is celebrated throughout the Arab world with variation in ritual objects and events, and in acculturated form among Arab immigrants in the USA.

Characteristic of the Egyptian ritual depicted in the film is the gender-linked imagery reflected in the ceremonial clay pot and the cosmological symbolism embedded in the numerical value "seven". The ceremony is presented as a key rite-de-passage with its three universal phases of transition (separation-liminality-incorporation) as newborn children cross the threshold into gender and status.

The film links Egyptian birth to gender symbolism, to traditional crafts, to folk beliefs, to strong womanhood, and to the importance of the family. It takes us on a journey with the ritual leader to the old bazaar in Cairo to purchase Sebou'-specific herbs and spices, to the 150-year-old pottery village in Fustat (Old Cairo) to see the Sebou' clay pots crafted, and to al-Ghouriyya (Cairo) to see the Sebou' candles being made and Sebou' pots decorated.

The particular Sebou' ceremony depicted in this film is that of a pair of newborn twins, a boy and a girl, celebrated by an upwardly mobile lower middle class Muslim family in urban Egypt. Catalogue number (16mm): 4RA175 £18.

L. Abu Lughod, 1988. Review of the film in Visual Anthropology Vol.1, No.4, pp.497-499.

W.S. Blackman, 1968 (1927). The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. Frank Cass, London.

C. Callender and F. El Guindi, 1971. Life-Crisis Rituals Among the Kenuz. Case Western Reserve University Press, Cleveland.

E. Cooper, 1914. The Women of Egypt. Frederick A Stokes, New York.

F. El Guindi, 1988. Film Guide. El Nil Research Publication, Los Angeles.

F. El Guindi, 1988. `The Making of El Sebou'. Visual Anthropology, Vol.1, No.4, pp.499-507.

E. Lane, 1908. The Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. Dutton, New York.

R.A. Lobban, jr., 1988. Review of the film. American Anthropologist, Vol. 90, pp. 242-43.