Nudity is in the eye of the beholder
In his elegant, witty lecture for the annual Know Kenya course at the Kenya Museum Society titled Perceptions of Nudity: The Cultural Divide, he drew our attention to some research he had done amongst his own university classes on notions of nudity.
Whereas many dictionary definitions refer to the absence of clothing, his female students thought that nudity had rather to do with women, not men, while the male students defined it as "over-exposure of prominent body parts" (i.e. female rears and breasts.)
Prof Munene has been studying the Dassanech tribe near Lake Turkana for the past four years, having previously researched the Maasai of the Kajiado area for more than 10 years when he was still at the University of Nairobi.
The cultural divide of his title refers in particular to the differing attitudes to the body in the West compared to Africa, nowhere more sharply delineated than in the current schism in the Anglican church worldwide as a result of the consecration of an openly gay bishop in the USA.
Using the very same Bible, each side selects what suits it best according to cultural influences. Thus a picture of young bare-breasted Dassanech women isn�t considered an example of nudity at all because in that tribe, breasts aren�t regarded as sexual objects. To use the professor�s words, they are "innocent".
Dress and adornment draw attention to the roundness of the female form, and the colour of the beads worn indicates marital status.
In many parts of this continent, though not in cities, women carrying babies on their backs merely switch them forward in order to breast-feed. This is taken for granted, since the biological purpose of the breast is to feed the infant.
In Western countries, however, only recently have women felt free to feed their babies in public, as a result of pressure from the womens� movement, though they still do it far more nervously than their African counterparts (and generally for a much shorter period of the child�s life.)
Here a woman�s loins are considered the most erotic area, and so they must be discreetly covered so as not to provoke the male into losing control.
Of course, in Muslim areas, particularly on the coast, the whole of her body must be covered for this same reason. What interests me most is the way in various cultures split up the female body, but not the male.
In dancing, the difference becomes very obvious: here, Prof Munene points out, the gyrations of the pelvis and the lower half of the body are common, whereas in the West the upper part is more active.
With cultural mixing and increasingly widespread exposure to the media, they are merging far more, but taboos still linger.
In Zanzibar, female tourists clad in shorts and revealing bare arms have recently been confronted with hostility in what has always been regarded as one of the most relaxed of places. Yet isn�t it a logical contradiction that young Dassanech women can bare their breasts but tourists can�t sunbathe topless in Mombasa?
Here I think the answer is very much to do with context; in her own community, the Dassanech maiden�s identity is unambiguous, whereas the topless tourist�s behaviour isn�t.
Does she have a culture? If so, what is it, and where does male control fit in? In any case, shouldn�t she respect the values of those who live in the place she is visiting?
There is also a question of the public versus the private: the Muslim woman can reveal her private parts to her husband who has an official claim on her and has completed a process to prove it, whereas the Western woman looks somehow to be enticingly free and unattached.
Notice that the discussion is so far limited to the female anatomy because ultimately, wherever you are, the rules are dictated by men.
In the West, breasts are a prime object of arousal. Many British tabloid newspapers sport a Page 3 girl � a picture of a buxom blonde with large breasts, engorged with male desire rather than milk.
Why isn�t she on page 1, you might ask. That is because there has to be something of a surprise element. Pornographic magazines also have to be a little hidden so that there is effort involved in searching for them.
But the contradictions about women's bodies don�t end there; the model held up for universal imitation is a girlish, almost androgynous body like the one parading up and down the catwalks. She can never have big breasts because she is like the little girl who never grew up, a female version of Peter Pan.
To return to the controversy of the gay bishop, it strikes me that Gene Robinson�s greatest crime is the fact that he � a man of the church who is meant to set an example � has very publicly rejected the holy union of heterosexual marriage and procreation for one of sexual pleasure. Had he kept his preferences to himself, there wouldn�t have been a problem, but he wanted to test the water and see how far he could go.
His action has thrown everything into confusion. In such relationships, one is playing man and the other woman, it would seem, but this is no joking matter.
Yet when it comes to dress, the higher echelons of the church wear elaborate robes, frocks rather than trousers, which symbolise their prestige and status but which also hark back to a much earlier phase in the history of religion.
Prof Munene drew attention to yet another division: once she has given birth, the body of a woman changes into an object of fear and awe. She has fulfilled her duty in perpetuating the species, and shared the mystery of life. This gives her great power � so much so that nothing causes more panic than a group of mature women shedding their clothes to make a statement.
He gave us the example of the mothers of political detainees who stripped naked during a 1991 rally in Uhuru Park because they wanted to complain about their harassment by security forces.
When a man goes naked, he is just dismissed as a madman, but a woman? Never.
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Ms Caplan is an author and freelance journalist
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