~ CYNTHIA KEPPLEY MAHMOOD ~

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Contents

Contact Information

Biography

Current Research Projects

Courses and Teaching

Consulting

Full Text of Selected Articles

Contact Information

Mailing Address: Department of Anthropology

Flanner Hall, 6^th Floor

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, IN 46556 - 5611

Office telephone: (574) 631-4744 fax: (574) 631-5760

Biography

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood was born in Reading, Pennsylvania to a family of mixed German and Hungarian ancestry. Her mother and father were active in labor and union causes, and she grew up in an environment alive to social conscience. Travel to the Netherlands as a high school exchange student brought an international dimension to Dr. Mahmood’s early education, otherwise restricted by family circumstance to a narrower area. Neither her mother nor her father had finished secondary school, or traveled beyond the U.S. northeast.

Cynthia Mahmood learned Dutch, French and German while studying in Holland, and acquired a taste for independent study. She chose an experimental college for her bachelor’s degree, New College in Sarasota, Florida – which she attended as a fully-funded National Merit Scholar. This intense, highly intellectual experience in which each student was viewed as responsible for his or her own education and learning regarded as its own reward, shaped Dr. Mahmood’s lifelong perspective on pedagogy.

Cynthia’s bachelor’s research at New College consisted of an ethnographic field study in the village of Oostermeer (Eastermar) in the province of Friesland, the Netherlands. She learned the Frisian language in order to complete this case study of linguistic nationalism, which was later published by Waveland Press under the title Frisian and Free: Study of an Ethnic Minority of the Netherlands. She received the B.A. in Anthropology and Psychology in 1977.

Awarded a full graduate fellowship, Cynthia enrolled in Cornell University’s anthropology program in 1977-78. She took a hiatus after a year, however, recognizing that she had as yet no fully developed “area” interest in anthropology. Her geographic focus became clearer during a teaching stint in Sapporo, Japan (1979-80), during which Dr. Mahmood developed a fascination with Zen Buddhism and other aspects of Asian thought. She returned to graduate school at Tulane University after traveling throughout east and southeast Asia, with a firmer idea of an “area” focus on religion in Asia.

Mahmood’s dissertation research in 1983-84 in India, the homeland of Buddhism, resulted in her 1986 doctorate, “Rebellion and Response in Ancient India: Political Dynamics of the Hindu-Buddhist Tradition.” She became interested in the entanglements among collective identities, religious beliefs, and mobilized ethnicity, which she saw as a forming a broad-based pattern that defined South Asian civilization through the ages. In 1983-84, when she was studying ancient Buddhism, upheaval amongst India’s Sikhs was in the news daily. This was a feature of the field environment that Cynthia would later make her signature area of expertise.

After marrying Khalid Mahmood, whom she had met during her field research in India, Cynthia took a job teaching anthropology at a small liberal arts college in Pella, Iowa – Central College. As it turned out, Pella, Iowa was a town of Dutch and Frisian ancestry, and Cynthia not only found herself setting up an anthropology program in what had previous been a combined soc-anth department, but also establishing a summer ethnographic field school back in Friesland, the Netherlands. She directed this field school with colleague Phil Webber, a linguist, and they alternated summers focusing on language and culture as they took small groups of students to Oostermeer (Eastermar).

The intensive teaching loads of small liberal arts colleges often drive research-oriented scholars to larger settings. With regret, in 1991 Cynthia Mahmood made a move to the University of Maine in Orono. Here, she was able to more fully develop her research interest in religious conflict and South Asia. The Sikh unrest in Punjab had now reached the level of civil war, and Kashmir to the north was also seething at this point. Hindus and Muslims were agitating over the holy site of Ayodhya. Tribals were quarreling in the northeast. There was a lot of attention on India, and in 1992 Dr. Mahmood made a trip there.

This was the start of the project that resulted in the ethnography, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants, which led to Dr. Mahmood’s tenure at the University of Maine in 1996. (She was elected to the University’s honor society as an outstanding faculty member shortly thereafter.) Although the expedition in 1992 focused on the Sauria Paharia tribe of Bihar, the radically declining autonomy of these indigenous people in the face of Indian nationalism led Cynthia further into the area of center-periphery relations in India. She began talking with human rights activists in Punjab, and recognized that there was an untold story of oppression and resistance behind the sensationalist headlines that emphasized “terrorism” and “fanaticism.”

A decade of participant observation and intensive study in the international Sikh community has made Cynthia Mahmood an expert on the movement for statehood, the Khalistan movement. She became widely known as a speaker, writer, consultant, and expert witness on human rights in Punjab, Sikh religious issues, terrorism and guerilla warfare, and related matters. In 2000, she published a book co-authored with a student, Stacy Brady, on gender equality in the Sikh community, The Guru’s Gift. In 2003 a collection of her articles and speeches on Sikh topics came out under the title A Sea of Orange. She has been frequently recognized for her contributions to Sikh Studies in the form of awards and citations.

Retaining an interest in the broader theory of conflict and violence to which her own ethnographic work might contribute, Dr. Mahmood initiated a book series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She invited four prominent anthropologists to serve on the advisory board of the series: Antonius Robben of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands; Carolyn Nordstrom, then of the University of California, Berkeley (now at Notre Dame); Jeffrey Sluka of Massey University, New Zealand; and Kevin Avruch of George Mason University. These scholars wanted to establish a pioneering publishing venue through which the growing subfield of the anthropology of violence (sometimes called the anthropology of war and peace) could find a legitimate voice. Mahmood has directed this series, The Ethnography of Political Violence, from 1995 to the present.

In 2001 Cynthia Mahmood left the University of Maine to join the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. She also became Senior Fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, serving first as Undergraduate Director, then as Graduate Director, at the Institute. She led the Kroc in an expansion of its M.A. program to include a six-month field semester during which graduate students would experience hands-on training in peacebuilding at sites in Jerusalem, Mindanao, Kampala, and Capetown. The integration of theory and practice, and a perspective global in scope, is characteristic of all of Dr. Mahmood’s ventures.

Her own research has now expanded from Punjab to the neighboring conflict in Kashmir, including wider interests in the Islamic world since September 11, 2001. Mahmood was appointed a Core Faculty Member at Notre Dame’s Center for Asian Studies in 2004. She remains fascinated by religious motivations for militancy and the issues religious and ethnic collectivities face in an unequal world.

Cynthia currently lives in Mishawaka, Indiana with her daughter, Naintara. She continues to work as an “engaged scholar,” a committed teacher, and a dedicated writer. She is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and a member of the American Civil Liberties Union. (a.c.)

Current Research and Writing Projects

Special Subjects: Topographies of Identity and Violence in Kashmir.

This is a collection of papers co-edited with Haley Duschinski of Ohio University. Anthropologists and others working on the ground in Kashmir interrogate concepts of nation, boundary, war and peace against the complex realities of day-to-day life in a zone of ambiguity.

Reduced to Ashes: Disappearances, Cremations, and the Human Rights Question in Punjab.

Why has the world as yet not paid attention to the thousands of extrajudicial executions, abductions, custodial rapes, and cases of torture emanating from the Indian state of Punjab? In this book I outline the known facts of the contested human rights situation in Punjab and question the cultural and political contexts in which such rights get discussed or ignored. I said in my 1996 book that we hear more about Sikh separatist terrorism that Indian state terror and queried, why? This volume is an attempt to answer that question.

“The Jihadist Imaginary in South Asian Islam.”

We speak of radical Islam as if there is only one sort; even those cognizant of theological differences most often ignore the various cultural strands of Muslim life that shape how jihad is conceived and expressed. In this piece I look at the idiosyncratic form of Islamic militancy that emerged against the South Asian background in Afghanistan and Pakistan, urging that local knowledge as well as global awareness is key to understanding and strategy.

“The Air India Bombing and the Politics of Truth.”

Canadian Sikhs accused of the Air India bombing that killed over three hundred people were acquitted this year after the most expensive and longest-running investigation in that nation’s history. Yet the image of Sikhs as terrorists persists beyond court verdicts. I review the ups and downs of this infamous case against the concurrent history of Sikh, Indian and Canadian politics in this article in progress.

Courses and Teaching

Notre Dame Courses Currently Taught:

Gender and Violence

This seminar interrogates the intersections among male, female, violence, and nonviolence. How is gender related to war and peace across cultures? We explore the biological, psychological, ritual, spiritual, social, political, and military entanglements of sex, gender and aggression in this course. We examine the lived realities of women and men in zones of conflict as both survivors and perpetrators of violence, and consider the potential of each as peacebuilders

(This is an anthropology course, cross-listed with peace studies and women’s studies.)

Major texts:

Fauziya Kazinga, Do They Hear You When You Cry?

Nawal el Saadawi, Memoirs From the Womens’ Prison

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

Kamla Basu and Rita Menon, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition

Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

Note: evaluation based on three essay examinations and participation in class discussions and projects.

Ethnographic Method and Writing for Change

The notion that a written text can itself be a “site of resistance,” a location where political commitment and rigorous scholarship intersect, undergirds this course on ethnographic method. We study the construction and interpretation of field notes, subjectivity and objectivity in research, ethical issues in fieldwork, feminist and postcolonial critiques of ethnographic practice, “voice” and oral history, and aspects of ethnographic inquiry that impact on change processes. Students engage in field projects in the local community and produce experimental ethnographic text as a central part of coursework. We also examine the writing process, rhetorical style, the responsibilities of the author, and polyvocalism and inclusivity. Ethnography as a nexus of theory and practice, of scholarship and action, emerges from our work in the course.

(This is an upper level anthropology course; cross-listed as a graduate peace studies course. It requires local field research and writing.)

Major texts:

Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: Anthropologists as Authors

Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism and Ethnographic

Responsibility

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart

Robert Emerson et al., Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes

H.L. Goodall, Writing the New Ethnography

Cynthia Mahmood and Stacy Brady, The Guru’s Gift: Exploring Gender Equality with

North American Sikh Women

(plus readings packet)

Note: This course requires hands-on research and a significant amount of writing.

Genocide, Witness and Memory

How are episodes of mass killing experienced, survived, and remembered? In this course we consider political, social and cultural trauma as expressed in memoir, documentary, fiction, and academic text. Witness as an ethical stance is examined; the role of memory in shaping morality is questioned. (Does "Never Again" actually work?) We also look at the perpetrators of genocidal killing: who are they? What prompts their actions? Moreover: are any of us incapable of this kind of violence?

(This is an upper level anthropology course; cross-listed to peace studies and sociology.)

Major texts:

Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the

Holocaust

Beatriz Manz, Paradize in Ashes: A Guatemalan Journey of Courage, Terror and

Hope

Horacio Verbitsky, Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior

Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah

Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and

The Genocide in Rwanda

Chuck Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance: One Family’s History of the War in Bosnia

Alexander Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide

(plus readings packet)

Note: This course requires the production of a major research paper.

“Terrorism”

Looking at terrorism through the anthropological lens means studying violent actors close

up and face to face. It also means exploring the culture of counter-terrorism, with its own

discourse, belief system and rituals. In this seminar we question basic assumptions of

the “war on terror,” using ethnographic literature to challenge conceptions and policies on

terrorism today. Is “terrorism” in fact a definable term? How can we use the experience-

near methods of anthropology to study people cognitively and politically placed as irretrievably distant?

(This is an upper-level anthropology course, cross-listed to peace studies and American studies)

Major texts:

Joseba Zulaika and William Douglass, Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Faces and

Fables of Terrorism

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh

Militants

Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror

And Healing

Eamon Collins, Killing Rage

Deborah Scroggins, Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in Sudan

Emran Qureshi and Michael Sells, The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim

Enemy

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the

Roots of Terror

Consulting

Expert witness testimony and government consultation on the following topics:

1. Sikh separatism and the Khalistan movement
2. the Sikh diaspora
3. Sikh social practices and culture
4. human rights in Indian Punjab, 1980’s to present
5. women’s status in India
6. assessing security risks relative to Sikh terrorism

Further information available upon request.

last revised 15 January 2006

SELECTED ARTICLES

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Anthropological Compulsions in a World in Crisis

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

published in Anthropology Today

June 2002, vol. 18, no. 3 (guest editorial)

We have seen, as recent editorialists in these pages have noted, a rapid deepening and widening of our discipline’s concern with the study of violence, war and terror that could best be called an explosion, were the metaphor not so unfortunately concrete in this context. The days appear to be behind us when leaving the field once bullets started flying seemed a logically simple and morally certain step to take; now anthropologists wonder just how far they are expected to go in solidarity with the people they learn from. Or to put it another way, how far they may go and still be anthropologists and not advocates or partisans. Or, perhaps, martyrs to the cause of anthropology.

I will not attempt here to review or summarize any of the rapidly accumulating literature in this sub-field of the anthropological study of violence, war and terror. Rather, I choose to explore the notion that despite our attachment to the grassroots, to the ground level, and to human reality per se it is anthropology’s deep impulse toward the transcendent that has naturally located our field, at this turn of the common era millennium, in places where human lives and deaths are at stake. I also suggest – as a faculty member not only of an anthropology department but also of a peace studies institute – that our disciplinary compulsions may offer special kinds of insights toward healing of the crises our world now faces.

Every ethnographer knows that however muted by academic discourse, fieldwork is for many of us a deeply – often wrenchingly – emotional and philosophical experience. Why do so many of us risk life and limb to venture to the ends of the earth, suffer enormous privation and delays of career and family, collect tropical diseases as other people collect stamps, all for salaries that often barely support us and a field whose value is barely recognizable by the outside world? Reflection on our motivation, by African campfire or Arctic starlight, shows it is surely not the adventure nor the intellectual curiosity alone. There is more to the enthographic enterprise: I believe a sort of – dare I say it – spiritual impulse, that was recognized in the early days of our discipline but now lies unlabelled beneath the determined demeanours of those young students bravely going off to Palestine or to Colombia, to face new kinds of fieldwork and new kinds of dangers.

Despite the fact that anthropologists and missionaries have most often found themselves on utterly divergent paths (not to say, at daggers drawn), it is worth thinking about why both found themselves the first Europeans to visit those ‘savages’ at the fringes of empire, and still today are frequently the only lonely souls staying on in a place when the ‘non-essential personnel’ are withdrawn and humanitarian agencies depart for lack of runways or water. I suggest that it is the impulse toward the other, an overriding and in some ways further undefinable impulse, that pushes ethnographers to the field and makes fieldwork such a momentous experience in the lives of many of them. The risks of the face-to-face, as Levinas calls it, are surely heightened a thousandfold when that face-to-face is taking place across a chasm of cultural difference. Nordstrom and Robben, in the introduction to their fine collection Fieldwork Under Fire, note that the all-to-familiar phenomenon of culture shock is complemented by what they label ‘existential shock’ (1995), highlighting the philosophical depth as well as the psychological dynamics of the field experience. Karl Rahner, a Catholic thinker, writes unashamedly of a ‘transcendental anthropology’ in which humans as agents compelled toward transcending their own boundaries are recognized, explored, and celebrated as such (1975).

But there is more. Beyond this undeniable, if little discussed, drive toward naked confrontation with the alter is, I believe, the impulse toward – again, I push boundaries in this secular academic culture that embraces irony over idealism – love. Edith Turner dared to write, in her account of her earlier years with the Ndembu, of ‘speaking on behalf of a culture as a lover or a mother’ (1987:x). Sikh militants with whom I work, who describe their own path of self-surrender as ‘playing a game of love,’ poetically defined an ethnographic moment in which the radical risk they took in admitting me to their circle was reciprocated by the radical risk I took in making myself vulnerable to them as ‘placing our heads in each other’s hands.” I am sure this resonates with ethnographic moments other colleagues have experienced. It is taking that leap of trust where one has no real empirical reason to be confident it will be vindicated. What is that but some kind of faith?

And I dare say that the fact that we keep engaging in such encounters means that theologians are correct who point to the ‘grace’ (however you want to define this) of these moments of freely given trust. We anthropologists do not use this language and in fact many of us bristle at it. But as one who does do ethnography in conflict zones and works among others who also pursue this enterprise, I am increasingly unable to deny that there is a radically spiritual component to our labours and to those of scholars around us and ancestral to us.

I write about the motivations of anthropology in this way because today we are faced with some very dangerous ‘cultural others’ that I think we can be professionally helpful in coming to terms with: the operatives of al-Qaeda and similar organizations who are the current demons of Western society. These have been virtually written off the screen – even of many in the intellectual and academic world who are otherwise interested in the dynamics of religious violence – as utterly beyond intelligibility. Since the attacks of September 11, we have seen a flurry of conferences, seminars, and quickly-put-together book collections that focus on the necessity of encouraging ‘moderate voices’ in Islam as well as a strong tendency in the Western academy to stamp a certain kind of Islam as acceptable and correct and other kinds as ‘distorted,’ or, better yet, ‘hijacked’ versions. Very rarely has there been any attempt to delve into what might be the world view, social structure, or cultural context of the transnational radical Islamist world out of which sprang Osama bin Laden and his (not insignificant) circle of supporters. Anthropology has not been a prominent voice in these post-9/11 dialogues, but I would like to suggest that it could and should be.

As one who has studied and written about religious militants of another sort (Sikh separatists in Punjab), I know well the problems that face an anthropologist committed to the ethnographic understanding of militancy. But I believe that the skepticism we face about our motives in willingly suspending judgment ot grasp the mores of a culture in which violence forms a central part will always be far outweighed by the practical benefits of pursuing this type of research. In my view my own current role in public policy arenas in several countries where Sikh issues are at stake speaks to the benefits of this work; in such arenas, if ethnographic acumen is not present, mythic projections will reign. Useful policy that serves to create conditions of justice, to sustain the 99% of Sikhs who are uninvolved in any violence, and to resolve conflict effectively for those who would otherwise pick up AK’s or worse, depends on actual knowledge – the kind we gather – not on the ideologies of anti-terrorism that often spur further cycles of violence (Mahmood 2001).

Contrary to mainstream thinking in peace studies arenas, it may not be encouragement of moderates that provides the best or only opportunity for solid peacebuilding. The conventional wisdom is that the moderate community willing to engage in civil dialogue will, with encouragement, expand, and the extreme fringe with then simply fade away. But there may not be real evidence to suggest that this scenario is in fact plausible. And while ‘conventional wisdom’ has it that the extremists cannot be spoken to or engaged in fruitful dialogue, some of us know that this is simply not the case. As an anthropologist committed to peacebuilding, I have worked directly with Sikh militants of six different guerilla organizations and with Islamic militants of three. John Paul Lederach, a well known peacebuilding practitioner in the Mennonite tradition, notes that sometimes the extremists are actually more approachable than the moderates (1997). They are often the most committed members of their societies with the strongest interest in resolving the conflict in which they are enmeshed. (One interlocutor challenged Lederach, when he explained the conventional model of beginning a dialogue with ‘moderate’ elements, ‘You don’t build a bridge starting in the middle.’) In the current crisis one may also note that it is not military but political leaders who are at the forefront of calls for further escalation of armed conflict.

I think that anthropologists are well suited, both by training and temperament, to be able to begin a dialogue with those who appear to have given up on dialogue. The proportions of crisis right now are such that it is important to try. Let us use our professional training to explore whether dialogue may be possible along avenues political leaders have closed off in favour of military options. Let us follow Zulaika and Douglass in their insightful call for serious anthropological exploration of the ‘tabooed’ topic of terrorism (1996). This means not only those movements that may more legitimately be defined as resistance movements or national liberation struggles, but also those we may be unable to sympathize with on any level but are still demanding of understanding if we are to avoid further war and bloodshed.

Intellectuals in the world Islamic community are going through a period of intense reflection and conversation as they grapple with the fact of September 11 and now the US and allied ‘war on terrorism,’ with its reverberating effects in Afghanistan and beyond. The Muslim renaissance that so challenges Western secularism in its ‘fundamentalism’ is one strand of that interior conversation that especially calls for the kind of cultural bridging at which anthropologists excel. In the current political climate of the United States, talking about the full diversity of the House of Islam and the real issues that face Muslims today is becoming increasingly difficult. One feels one must constantly re-condemn the WTC event and re-affirm the ultimate peaceableness of Islam; there is an evolving protocol for discussions of the topic that calls for the best of our ethnographic sensitivities. Yet our anthropological commitment to telling it like it really is must carry through to Washington, London, and other power centres where decisions are made that affect the fates of other people we study and care for.

Let us recognize that our compulsion to reach out to others and to share what we experience is of particular moment at this crisis point in which widening wars may be in the offing. Those of us with relevant specializations can use our compulsions to further peace by having the courage to conduct the research that needs to be done, no matter where it takes us, and to speak the truth where it counts.

Lederach, John Paul. 1977. Building Peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace.

Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley. 2001. ‘Terrorism, Myth, and the Power of Ethnographic Praxis.’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30(5): 520-545.

Nordstrom, Carolyn and Robben, Antonius. 1995. Fieldwork under fire: Studies of violence and survival. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rahner, Karl. 1975. A Rahner reader (ed) Gerard A. MCool. New York: Seabury Press.

Turner, Edith. 1987. The Spirit and the drum: A Memoir of Africa. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Zulaika, Joseba and Douglass, William. 1996. Terror and taboo: The follies, fables and faces of terrorism. London: Routledge.

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Senior Fellow at Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. A social anthropologist with special interests in war and peace, conflict resolution, and the cultural contexts of violence, she is the author of Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues With Sikh Militants (1996). She is found and director of the book series The Ethnography of Political Violence, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Why I Believe We Need To Talk To Extremists

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

published in The Times of London, Higher Education Supplement

12 July 2002

(invited opinion piece)

Popular support for the "war on terror" being led by the US and Britain is beginning to show signs of fraying. After ten months, people are catching on to the fact that traditional means of dealing with terrorists – through isolation and eradication tactics – will simply not work.

According to traditional anti-terrorist approaches, terrorists should be isolated from their potential bases of support to prevent them spearheading a revolution. Techniques include "never negotiating with terrorists" and portraying violent activists as monsters. But this approach is no longer relevant. The idea that extreme groups are dangerous only if their ideas "catch on" in a wider forum is based on a world view centered on older weaponry and politics. Today, numbers matter less than technology in terms of the havoc a group is capable of wreaking. The penetration of mass media and the internet also makes isolation almost impossible.

Once isolated, the second traditional tactic is to wipe out the extremists. But his military doctrine evolved in a world in which political units were firmly territorially based. This is the major problem with the way the response to the events of September 11 is unfolding. Although contemporary strategists know well that Al Qaida is a globally dispersed and mobile enemy, they are choosing to fight a war as if the enemy were geographically constrained. The truth is that military might cannot work against this kind of enemy.

Despite these realities, the US, with Britain by its side, has taken this traditional approach. We have increased homeland security while not daring to say publicly that ultimately security is impossible in the current situation, just as the war as now framed is ultimately unwinnable.

Heretical as it may be in the climate of patriotic machismo that has developed around our response to September 11, the proposal that dialogue with radical Islamists may provide an effective alternative to classic anti-terror reactions deserves a fair hearing.

Dialogue with extremists is not in fact impossible, as the work of many anthropologists, sociologists, missionaries and peacebuilders in field settings indicates. This possibility often gets lost in the adrenaline-charged commentary of mainstream media coverage of "war" and in political analysis that excludes such interaction implicitly. Burgeoning areas of research exist that rely on face-to-face interlocution with radical activists across a range of ideological groupings in various parts of the world. Deconstructing myths about who these people are and what they want is essential for a peaceful global coexistence.

Whatever we may find it convenient to believe, it is not true that enemies of the US, Britain and their allies in this conflict have no political agenda. The fact that their grievances are coded in apocalyptic rhetoric and that their military psychology takes forms we fail to comprehend does not negate the basic fact that this is a war around specific politics and policies. And being eminently a matter of politics, it is eminently a matter that can be discussed in rational terms.

Unthinkable to talk to the likes of Osama bin Laden? Perhaps. More unthinkable, however, is real biological, chemical or nuclear warfare in the cities and countryside of western countries.

It is time to change our notions of what is thinkable and unthinkable. It is time for our leaders, and we who elect them, to come forward with the real courage to calmly assess this very new situation and not treat it as if it were a replay on a larger scale of some other battle in some other time. Nor is it a mythical battle between good and evil. It is an argument among men. Let us get them to sit down and talk about it. If they will not, let us elect others who have cooler heads in a world that is already too hot to handle.

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood is a cultural anthropologist and senior fellow at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.

Agenda for an Anthropology of Peace

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

published in Anthropology News

May 2003 (invited commentary)

This year’s AAA Annual Meeting is to focus on “peace” – we know, hard to think about now in the shadows of war. But then, this same land, the names of whose cities resonate in anthropological minds with history and grandeur, has been fought over, bloodied, blasphemed and hallowed so many times before. We, of all people, must know that publics (since the rise of our proud “civilizations” anyway) have always lived in the shadows of war, and have always thought about peace in those shadows.

Ethnographic Study

While the archaeological study of the causes of war on the macroscopic level has provided much depth to contemporary analysis of intergroup violence, social and cultural anthropology complements this focus with new kinds of ethnographic exploration. Of course, anthropologists have always tried to draw inferences from pacific societies they encountered to point out that it might not be “human nature” to act aggressively, or to pursue ways in which social institutions may constrain the escalation of conflict to the point of deadly force. But the new interest in war and peace also takes the form of anthropologists doing their work in conflict arenas per se, work that is gradually eliciting not only more complex methodologies and ethics regarding such perilous fieldwork, but also a much richer understanding of how human beings experience violence. This includes how people come to the moment of engaging in violence, how as victims they suffer it, how society memorializes it, and what cascading effects the violence and counter-violence of war actually have.

At the same time, anthropological scholars in the violent field are also unraveling the complexities of the human yearning for peace and the deep creativity and resilience with which people in fact meet the unbearable situations in which they are enmeshed. So Carolyn Nordstrom illuminates in her harrowing, but perhaps ultimately inspiring, work on Mozambique, A Different Kind of War Story (1997). We can hardly imagine that villagers who have suffered such brutality – often, from both sides of the armed struggle – can find any room for healing or for love. Nevertheless, they do, and contribute from the ground up to the eventual resolution of hostilities. This kind of anthropological research, and t his kind of anthropological writing, call for a new sensibility about what anthropology is. For some, it is one deeply imbued with not only politics, but with philosophy as well.

Working with Policymakers

The pragmatic side of anthropology’s interest in war and peace has always searched industriously for bridges between the academic and the world of policy. Ruth Benedict’s flawed by classic Chrysanthemum and the Sword, which played a role in the US decision not to destroy Kyoto during World War II, stands as one example of a successful influence in this country. Other leading lights in our field have stood for human rights, against racism, and been otherwise involved in peace-minded causes. The most effective of these, I believe, are able to affect the course of policy when their expertise (“culture”) rather than their moral passions are front and center. By whatever unfortunate means, the fact is that “culture” is now a recognized concept in Washington and in other capitals. It is an opening that bodes well for anthropologists able to think strategically enough to bring their research into the world of policy.

The area of conflict resolution is one professional realm that has rather successfully worked to bring insights on culture to theoretical models on negotiation, mediation and reconciliation. Kevin Avruch describes the many ways in which anthropology’s recognition of culturally local forms of discourse on argument, bargaining, settlement, and coexistence can fruitfully complement the rational-choice models prominent in many models of conflict resolution (Culture and Conflict Resolution, US Institute of Peace, 1998). The fact that such work is now being put into practice by people working on conflict transformation in various parts of the world should inspire those who hope to bring anthropology to bear on other arenas as well. It is a matter of bridging the world of the academy and the world in which conflicts erupt and decisions are made.

Interdisciplinary Dialogue

There is a more critical nexus between anthropology and academic peace studies too, however, which has not fully played itself out. Academic peace studies grew out of, and maintains an integral relationship with, the “peace community” of citizen-activists. In the universities, peace studies programs are usually closely tied to departments of political science and international relations – a holdover, I suggest, from the Cold War era when states were the major players in scenarios of war and peace. Today we know that most bloodletting going on is happening at the substate, transstate, ethnic, religious, add-your-label level, one particularly difficult for classically defined states with traditional military structures to deal with. (The ‘war on terrorism” is the obvious example.) Anthropology is already a key interlocutor here as peace studies moves into new ways of thinking about a sustainable world order in which all kinds of units might viably coexist.

But even an uncritical acceptance of so innocuous a noun as “peace,” can be, as relativity-conscious anthropologists know, wrongheaded in certain contexts. For communities living in environments of state terror, for example, the language of rights and justices may be the more appropriate one, pacification and security frequently being tropes used by repressive governments themselves. “Peace” as a calling card can be received as a call to capitulate, a call to cease resistance. Indeed, since “peace” and “war” are concept evolved in a state-based world order, they may not be the best poles at all through which to view this more complex world in which violence and nonviolence interpenetrate without clear-cut geographic or chronological boundaries. Our discipline can usefully bring these kinds of explorations to colleagues in the academy now seeking, as most of us are, glimmers of hope for humanity in this all-too-dark warscape in which we now live.

In this brief article I’ve offered, then, three areas that form an agenda for work in a social/cultural anthropology concerned with peace: 1) the ethnography study of war and peace; 2) pragmatic involvement with policy making toward coexistence and sustainable peace; and 3) purpose attempts at critical dialogue with cognate academic fields working on peace issues.

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood directs the book series on The Ethnography of Political Violence at the University of Pennsylvania Press, and conducts field research on Sikh and Islamic militancy. She consults with policy makers on issues of terrorism, security and human rights.