ASA Globalog

I agree with David Price’s position on the involvement of anthropologists in the military projects. However, I take part in the current debate to raise different (albeit related) questions. Aware that war is not synonymous with ‘normal’ times, I think the ethical issue is not limited to the warfront alone. Drawing on my fieldwork conducted in India in the shadow of War on Terror, I focus, as Kriti Kapila’s and Anjan Ghosh’s posts do somewhat, on the ‘non warfront zones’. I aim to underscore the complexity of ethics in the contemporary global scenario. My proposition is that to maintain holistic ethicality is quite difficult, if not impossible. This is so because while anthropologists are largely identified with the state/power, the people they work with are often suspicious of the state and vice versa. In current climate, the society anthropologists visit is the ‘society of suspicion’ (cf. Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’). To speak of ethics is, therefore, to interrogate the structure of the society of suspicion. Arguably, suspicion has existed in every society. But the suspicion I speak of here is radically different; aligned as it is to new configuration of power.

When the UK Foreign Office, in 2006, sought to induct anthropologists in its worldwide (India included) research ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’ many protested arguing, inter alia, that their involvement will mar anthropology’s reputation and physically may harm fieldworkers. Clearly, such concerns are selfish. In my view, anthropologists’ participation in imperial war and the related initiatives is unethical even if it didn’t risk their lives and defamed their discipline. It is simply because by our participation we not only legitimize the wars, including the bellum justum (have not most wars and violence been justified under the flag of ‘just war’?) but, more importantly, this can tantamount to a breach of trust and ethical ties with the people we work with. Thus far the issue looks pretty simple. However, it is far more complex. It is this complexity about which I wish to say a word or two.

As a PhD candidate in anthropology at Amsterdam University, I had planned my fieldwork on India’s Jamaat-e-Islami (hereafter Jamaat) well before the tragedy of 9/11. When I landed in Aligarh (India) in October 2001, what greeted me was abject suspicion and severe hostility from my subjects. Only two weeks before my arrival, the BJP Government had banned SIMI, a radical offshoot of Jamaat, on the charges of ‘sedition’. Consequently, SIMI leaders were arrested. The Indian state had also launched a campaign against Islamic seminaries (madrasas), the alleged hotbed of terrorism. My plan to study a Jamaat school thus also met with suspicion. As I wrote in Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs ‘They [SIMI and Jamaat) thought that I was part of the Western conspiracy to harm Islam and thus an agent of the West deputed to collect information about them’ (2005: 281). The web of suspicion, if it can be called such, was much wider. Hostlers of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) told me that many of their colleagues worked as informants to the Local Intelligence Officer (LIO). Once at a tea stall, a stranger began talking to me. He inquired about my academic career and background. Later some hostlers told me that he was an LIO (It is worth noting that, in 2000, the police had arrested two hostlers suspected as militants). At a paan shop in the old town of Aligarh, a person introduced himself to me. He proudly told me that he knew ‘all about me’. My friends told me that he too was an LIO.

The web of suspicion did not end with Jamaat-SIMI’s suspicion of me, AMU hostlers’ suspicion of each other as informants to LIO, and LIO knowing ‘all about me’. A few of my friends who happen to be Hindu held that my research somehow shielded ‘Islamic fundamentalists/terrorists’. After the serial blasts in Mumbai in 2006, allegedly engineered by SIMI, a journalist from an English weekly contacted me (I was then in India). Knowing about my research, he asked me if I could give him the contacts of SIMI activists. Finding me unmusical about his request, he solicited my comments on SIMI. I stated that unless it was established that SIMI engineered the blasts, it is premature to comment. I clarified to him that my research dealt with SIMI’s radicalization in the 1990s, which could not be understood without Hindu nationalists’ violent hate campaigns against Muslims. The journalist told me, not too implicitly, that my stance was sympathetic to SIMI. Clearly, he suspected my research. I have encountered such suspicion from a few colleagues in the West during conferences while making a presentation on SIMI’s radicalization. The society of suspicion comes to its full play with a new feature of conferences in the post-9/11 world. Filippo and Caroline Ossella’s ‘Introduction: Islamic reformism in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, notes perceptively how Intelligence officials appear in every conference whose theme bears ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslims’.

To discuss the issue of ethics is thus to address the society of suspicion anthropologists inhabit. When the State’s penetration into society is so pervasive, it is perhaps more meaningful to link ethics with the ways in which power –domestic as well as global –plays itself out, for instance, in relation to Indian Muslim minority with which anthropologists like me work. Shouldn’t we also talk –after Geertz’s ‘theatre state’, Dirks’ ‘ethnographic state’, Messick’s ‘calligraphic state’ –about the ‘state of suspicion’ (in a double sense) that defines contemporary times and anthropologists interactions therewith?

Irfan Ahmad
ISIM-Leiden University