to be surprised. It surprised me to discover, for example, that youths from refugee resettlement villages had also become involved in jihadist organizations. I became increasingly uncomfortable with the assumed “deterrent effect of public exposure” in the anthropological literature of political violence.4 I also discovered that public exposure—breaking the silences that obscure political violence—rather than charting a path toward peace actually underpins the social reproduction of political violence as a jihād in Kashmir.
Over several years of fieldwork, I began to understand that “victim” is an unstable political category. It is an easier moral category—and a much more comfortable place to locate compassion than “perpetrator”—but the long history of conflict in the Kashmir region has made many victims and many perpetrators, and many who are both victims and perpetrators. Peacemaking will have to deal not only with the pasts of all of them, but also with all of the parts of their pasts. Peacemaking will also have to engage the transformations of political culture, including the democratization of violence, that are the outcomes of decades of people grappling with normalized violence in the disputed borderlands.
Conduct and Confidentiality in the Ethnography of Armed Conflict
I am often asked how it was possible to conduct research among Islamic militants as a female scholar. In many ways, my gender has been an asset rather an impediment. Azad Jammu and Kashmir is a high-surveillance society and the frontier of an active conflict zone. No one can object to political vigilance in a security zone without bringing suspicion upon himself, but harassment of women is not socially acceptable in a context explicitly circumscribed as “Islamic.” It was possible, therefore, for my interlocutors to critique political surveillance as a transgression of gender propriety and to include me in domestic spaces that are resistant to state oversight. It was in part because I could move in family networks that I was able to learn how Kashmiri refugees negotiate public and domestic spaces and how much the legitimacy of the practice of jihād depends on the family.
Many female anthropologists describe being treated as an “honorary man” in such situations, but I was never an honorary man. My presence as a female researcher was always explicitly discussed, balanced with the fact that I was going to be “a professor” and write “a book.” Several influential elder men and religious leaders who generally do not meet with non-kin women publicly announced that they had decided to speak with me out of a shared “seeking-after-truth,” even if the kinds of knowledge we sought were quite different. I do not, however, wish to imply that the gender of a researcher conveys a right to access. I found that the more my Kashmiri hosts negotiated me into the circumscribed domain of the family, the more a critique of my morality became a part of the state’s political project of surveillance. Eventually, the security agencies’ surveillance of my conduct as a researcher came to focus on “discovering” whether I was providing sexual favors to AJK government officials or local hosts in exchange for their assistance in my field research. That line of investigation illustrated that gender surveillance and political surveillance can each be transmogrified into the other . It also meant that my efforts to conduct myself in a way that was socially acceptable by my host communities’ standards, rather than my gender per se, was what allowed me a continued place in their homes.
There were other ways that my identity allowed me to cultivate ethnographic access in a wide variety of contexts. I did not inherit the restrictions on sociality that come with having a presumed position in the social order, because I don’t have a natal kinship network in Pakistan or Jammu and Kashmir. I found that people were eager to speak with me, because in me they saw access to a broader international public. So, being a non-Muslim Euro-American woman, on the one hand, helped me initiate relationships that granted ethnographic access to the diverse social worlds of Kashmiri refugees in Pakistan. On the other hand, anthropologists sometimes overestimate the extent to which our interlocutors replicate the markers through which we recognize ourselves. I have actually on several occasions during fieldwork been assumed to be a person of South Asian descent. For example, I had difficulty convincing residents of one refugee village that I was angrez (a white foreigner) because someone had seen me in the market and had determined from my bodily comportment that I was likely Muslim, perhaps from an overseas Kashmiri family. Another time, I was detained by the Rawalpindi police on suspicion of being an Afghan prostitute; the evidence against me was that I was “obviously” Afghan and driving an automobile without a male escort.
Unlike discussions of my gender, discussions about other aspects of my identity were rarely conducted in my presence, and I know less about how people resolved their anxieties about who I was. I was told on several occasions by members of militant organizations that they had used their networks to confirm that I had in fact visited members of their organization in Indian prisons when I was doing humanitarian work. Some of my interlocutors expressed a fear that I might not be a real scholar, but rather an intelligence agent for my government. The idea that the hand of the U.S. government might knock on the door of a village in the mountains of Kashmir might sound far-fetched to some readers, but for many Kashmiri refugees the presence of the state in their lives has been felt on their bodies. After 2002 particularly, the visible U.S. military presence in South Asia and the cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistani governments on practices of rendition has made the possibility that the U.S. government is now a part of the surveillance network in AJK a commonly accepted belief. These were mere hints that people were worried about how I would use their stories and, thus, also a testament to how much people were willing to risk to be in dialogue with a global public about who they are and who they hope to become.
To members of the various communities in which I worked, some of the stories recounted in this book are well known, and their tellers will be easily recognizable. I also assume that the places and groups with whom I worked are a part of any records that the state’s intelligence services might have made of my research activities. The political situation, however, changes continuously, making it impossible to predict how people will be affected by the future use of their accounts. Markers like where people come from, where they resided when I met them, and where they are now may currently be transparent to some state authorities and obscure to others. Many of the refugees, and militants, whose stories I recount or reference explicitly, declared their intentions to return to their home properties in parts of Jammu and Kashmir administered by India. Several of my interlocutors now live in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Some organizations of which people were members when I met them are now on the terrorist watch lists of various countries. A number of former jihadists now work for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in postearthquake reconstruction efforts or as policy analysts overseas. For these reasons, I have changed all names and most of the specific places mentioned in this text, even though many people said they wanted their names and their stories to be explicitly linked in the publications that would result from my research.
Lies, Secrets, and Conflict Ethnography
In the practice of jihād as an armed struggle, the normative prescription is that it must be organized, conducted, and evaluated publicly; being a mujāhid is an honorable, if difficult, undertaking. On the other hand, people in AJK are well aware of the international equation of jihād and terrorism; the international disapprobation of religiously legitimated violence and the state of insecurity and paranoia about spies made its secretive practice at least potentially legitimate. Certain forms of knowledge production (such as surveys or interviews conducted independently of participant observation) are not good research methods in contexts where dissimulating about one’s objectives, activities, or beliefs is necessary to one’s survival or an integral part of the production of political society. Working in a conflict zone or high-surveillance society makes explicit that which is an inherent part of all ethnographic research—the recognition of both conscious and unconscious misrepresentation as an integral part of social and political life.5 Ethnographic observations of and participation in social processes and relationships makes available to anthropological analysis the production of social and political power through conflict and even dissimulation.
Anthropologists recognize that, when conducting ethnographic research in
