Cynthia Keppley Mahmood

Cynthia Keppley Mahmood is an American anthropologist who studies why people take up arms and how they understand suffering, killing and martyrdom. Notre Dame Magazine (Summer 2009) calls her a leading expert on India’s Sikhs and their push for independence in the 1980s and 1990s. It says her book Fighting for Faith and Nation: Dialogues with Sikh Militants grew out of years of recording the accounts of both victims and fighters. The word “militants” is in her book’s title.

Key moments

• 1996: Fighting for Faith and Nation appeared. A bookseller’s listing describes it as built on her interviews with Sikh fighters, who describe the human rights abuses they say the Indian state inflicted on them, and as an account of the Sikh tradition of martyrdom and meaningful death. It argues that shared human values could support a practical settlement of the conflict in Punjab. At the time she was associate professor of anthropology at the University of Maine, Orono.
• Spring 2001: BC Studies carried a review of The Guru’s Gift: An Ethnography Exploring Gender Equality with North American Sikh Women, which she wrote with Stacy Brady.
• 2009: she was associate professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, with her graduate students based at its Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Notre Dame Magazine says she has served as an expert witness in refugee, asylum and national security cases in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
• March 2014: Central College, where she had earlier taught, hosted her as its Frank Moore Visiting Anthropologist-in-Residence. It described her as a fellow of the Kroc Institute and of Notre Dame’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

How she works: She interviews armed fighters face to face and sets judgment aside. In the magazine’s words she says, “Talking to people doesn’t mean you agree with them.” She also set herself an information threshold: she would not hide details of planned or past violent acts if she were asked to testify in court.

What she is remembered for: Her book sets down the accounts of Sikh fighters and of victims as she recorded them over years of interviews. She is an outside scholar rather than a Sikh voice, and her work should be read as an ethnographer’s record of what her interviewees told her.