Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants

The ethnic and religious violence that characterizes the late twentieth century calls for new ways of thinking and writing about politics. Listening to the voices of people who experience political violence - either as victims or as perpetrators - gives new insights into both the sources of violent conflict and the potential for its resolution.--BOOK JACKET. Going beyond such easy labels as fundamentalism and terrorism, Mahmood shows how complex and multifaceted the human experience of political violence actually is. Drawing on her extensive interviews and conversations with Sikh militants, she presents their accounts of the human rights abuses they suffer in India as well as their explanations of the philosophical tradition of martyrdom and meaningful death in the Sikh faith. While demonstrating how divergent the worldviews of participants in a conflict can be, Fighting for Faith and Nation gives reason to hope that our essential common humanity may provide grounds for a pragmatic resolution of conflicts like the one in Punjab, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the past fifteen years.--BOOK JACKET.

Terrorism, Myth, and the Power of Ethnographic Praxis

“Terrorism,” like “witchcraft,” is a concept that anthropology can aid in deconstructing. The mythos of “the terrorist” has become part of the political drama of our time despite a lack of concreteness in its definition. Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research with Sikh separatist militants, this article focuses on how the imagining of terror has replaced the reality of armed conflict among the Sikhs in Western legal and policy settings. Specific examples of anthropological intervention in this arena illustrate how face-to-face knowledge can contribute to greater accuracy in judicial and legislative decisions regarding terrorism. Given the life-and-death importance of these decisions, anthropologists of conscience are called on to offer the very special grassroots perspective they have as policies are developed nationally and internationally, bringing the concrete realism of ethnography into courtrooms, halls of parliaments, and executive offices around the world.