Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

Bio: Cynthia Keppley Mahmood is an academic researcher from University of Notre Dame. The author has contributed to research in topics: Human rights & Hinduism. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 22 publications receiving 598 citations. Previous affiliations of Cynthia Keppley Mahmood include University of Maine.

Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival.

Abstract: Fieldwork Under Fire is a path-breaking collection of essays written by anthropologists who have experienced the unpredictability and trauma of political violence firsthand. These essays combine theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological points of view to illuminate the processes and solutions that characterize life in dangerous places. They describe the first, often harrowing, experience of violence, the personal and professional problems that arise as troubles escalate, and the often surprising creative strategies people use to survive. In "writing violence," the authors give voice to all those affected by the conditions of violence: perpetrators as well as victims, civilians and specialists, black marketeers and heroes, jackals and researchers. Focusing on everyday experiences, these essays bring to light the puzzling contradictions of lives disturbed by violence: the simultaneous existence of laughter and suffering, of fear and hope. By doing so, they challenge the narrow conceptualization that associates violence with death and war, arguing that instead it must be considered a dimension of living.

Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants

Abstract: 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

Abstract: “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.

Sikh Rebellion and the Hindu Concept of Order

Abstract: The militancy of the Sikh separatist movement in India and the response of the Hindu majority to it must be understood against a historical background in which multiple ethnic groups have coexisted in large part by virtue of their willingness to accede to the Hindu social order The absorption of previous religious heterodoxies such as Buddhism into the Hindu system has provided a model for modern Hindu expectations of non-Hindu religions, and has served as a negative example for those intent on retaining a separate religious identity, such as the Sikhs Sikhism is a religious tradition that began in South Asia in the fifteenth century and today claims as its adherents approximately 2% of India's total population The historic center of the Sikh faith is the Punjab region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, and over the past five centuries, the religious identity of the Sikhs has become intertwined with the ethnic, linguistic, and regional identity of Punjab In 1984, the fact that this identity had acquired a strongly militant cast became known to the world through the assassination of India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards The proximate cause of anger for the Sikhs was the storming of Sikhism's holiest shrine at Amritsar by Indian troops in the so-called Operation Bluestar The desecration of the Golden Temple was an action that affronted all Sikhs' religious values and served to incite fundamentalists to religious war Furthermore, Operation Bluestar represented to many Sikhs a breach of India's constitutional guarantee of equal protection of all religions, and led to a sudden drop in Sikh confidence in the national government The Hindu backlash following the death of Mrs Gandhi, in which some 3,000 Sikhs were killed and 50,000 fled their homes, further polarized Sikh and Hindu communities in Punjab and across North India

The Mind of the Terrorist A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches

Abstract: This article reviews the state of the art of available theories and data regarding the psychology of terrorism. Data and theoretical material were gathered from the world’s unclassified literature. Multiple theories and some demographic data have been published, but very few controlled empirical studies have been conducted investigating the psychological bases of terrorism. The field is largely characterized by theoretical speculation based on subjective interpretation of anecdotal observations. Moreover, most studies and theories fail to take into account the great heterogeneity of terrorists. Many practical, conceptual, and psychological barriers have slowed progress in this important field. Nonetheless, even at this early stage of terrorism studies, preliminary reports suggest that modifiable social and psychological factors contribute to the genesis of the terrorist mind-set. Psychological scholarship could possibly mitigate the risk of catastrophic attack by initiating the long overdue scientific stu...

New’ and ‘Old’ Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction?

Abstract: This article questions the prevalent argument that civil wars have fundamentally changed since the end of the cold war. According to this argument, “new” civil wars are different from “old” civil wars along at least three related dimensions—they are caused and motivated by private predation rather than collective grievances and ideological concerns; the parties to these conflicts lack popular support and must rely on coercion; and gratuitous, barbaric violence is dispensed against civilian populations. Recent civil wars, therefore, are distinguished as criminal rather than political phenomena. This article traces the origins of this distinction and argues that it is based on an uncritical adoption of categories and labels, combined with deficient information on “new” civil wars and neglect of recent historical research on “old” civil wars. Perceived differences between post—cold war conflicts and previous civil wars may be attributable more to the demise of readily available conceptual categories caused by the end of the cold war than to the end of the cold war per se.

The Ethical Challenges of Field Research in Conflict Zones

Abstract: Drawing on 26 months of field research in El Salvador during the civil war, I analyze some ethical challenges that confront field researchers working in conflict zones. After briefly summarizing the purpose and general methodology of my research, I discuss in detail the research procedures I followed to implement the “do no harm” ethic of empirical research. I first analyze the particular conditions of the Salvadoran civil war during the period of research. I then discuss the procedures meant to ensure that my interviews with people took place with their fully informed consent—what I understood that to mean and how I implemented it. I then turn to the procedures whereby the anonymity of those interviewed and the confidentiality of the data gathered were ensured to the extent possible. Throughout I discuss particular ethical dilemmas that I confronted, including issues of self-presentation and mistaken identity, the emotional challenges of field work in highly polarized settings (which if not well understood may lead to lapse in judgment), and my evolving questions concerning the researcher role and its limitations. I also discuss the dilemmas that arise in the dissemination of research findings and the repatriation of data.

The observation of participation and the emergence of public ethnography

Abstract: Participant observation was created during the late 19th century as an ethnographic field method for the study of small, homogeneous cultures. Ethnographers were expected to live in a society for an extended period of time (2 years, ideally), actively participate in the daily life of its members, and carefully observe their joys and sufferings as a way of obtaining material for social scientific study. This method was widely believed to produce documentary information that not only was “true” but also reflected the native’s own point of view about reality. 1 The privileging of participant observation as a scientific method encouraged ethnographers to demonstrate their observational skills in scholarly monographs and their social participation in personal memoirs. This dualistic approach split public (monographs) from private (memoirs) and objective (ethnographic) from subjective (autobiographical) realms of experience. The opposition created what seems, from a 21st-century perspective, not only improbable but also morally suspect. 2 More recently, ethnographers have modified participant observation by undertaking “the observation of participation” (B. Tedlock, 1991, 2000). During this activity, they reflect on and critically engage with their own participation within the ethnographic frame. A new genre, known as “autoethnography,” emerged from this practice. Authors working in the genre attempt to heal the split between public and private realms by connecting the autobiographical impulse (the gaze inward) with