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10 CULTURE, RESISTANCE, AND DIALOGUE UK 1DFA OF ETHNOGRAPHY as a kind of conversation is now common in anthropology, as common as the idea of ethnography as a kind oi natural science once was. Some people misinterpret the presence of ethnographers in their texts as a form of narcissism and condemn what they see as the "navel-gazing" quality of current ethnographic narrative. Those critics will not be happy with this effort. But I see the reflexivity of contemporary ethnography as an honesty about the limitations of our vision that has too long been suppressed in the interests of creating a false aura of authority about our work. Relinquishing that authority is not easy, and it is particularly not easy to share authority with one's interlocutors without denying one's ownultimate responsibilityfor a text. Dialogical ethnography with a community in struggle is even more fraught with difficulties—moral, methodological, and literary —than usual. Extraordinary circumstances create extraordinary demands for anthropology. Who knows whether I did it right, in a way that is enlightening rather than mystifying, in a way that will help rather than hurt, or, at least, in a waythat will do minimum harm to those on whose welcome this work was predicated? With other scholars—and perhaps particularlywith other women scholars'—I believe we have to reflect carefully on these matters, too long neglected in the name of academic freedom and scientific hegemony. While I cogitated on these questions toward the end of 1994 as transcriptions of interviewswith Sikh militants were proceeding apace, a debate broke out among the Sikh communitywith regard to a new book on Sikhism by Harjot Oberoi, holder of a chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies at the Universityof British Columbia in Vancouver. I watched this interaction with great interest , and I found myself weighing my own relationships withSikhs T against those of Oberoi and discussing both with them. The dialogue between myself and the Sikhs intersected with the dialogue between myself and other scholars at this criticalpoint, expressed in the publication of an academic volume that excited vehement argument in the community under study. I therefore go into this juncture in some detail as a means of bringing together the complex point at which author, subjects, and academic audience arejoined in somewhat dissonant conversation. Since it is into this nexus that the present book will be inserted, it seems necessary to flesh out this context in order to convey to the reader the fuller meaning of this book, whose political and academic context makes it more than the words typed on these pages and the meanings construed from them by individual readers. WEAPONS AT THE DOOR One of my first encounters with militant Sikhs, at San Pedro prison, is described in the first chapter of thisbook. At the main gates of the prison I, Amarjit, and the other Sikh were asked to remove all metal objects from our persons, including the swords of the two Sikhs.They were loath to part with their swords, and Amarjit indeed had tears in his eyes as the guard explained to us that even the tiny one-inch version of the kirpan, often used in emergencies such as this one, was not allowed. In the end, we had to put all our things (my jewelry, their swords) by a pole at the gate; the guard did not want to even claim responsibility for their safekeeping while we visited the prison. Thus denuded, we went in to interview Sikh prisoners. I came to see this initial encounter as a metaphor for much of what passes for dialogue in contemporary ethnography, which I have attempted to move beyond in this volume. In his address to the American Anthropological Association in 1987, Edward Said pointed to the salonlike qualityof many current conceptions of anthropology's interlocution with its subjects, possibly stemming from the roots of these conceptions in literary criticism. "The interlocutor is someone who has perhaps been found clamoring on the doorstep, where from outside a discipline or field he or she has made so unseemly a disturbance as to be let in, guns or stones checked in with the porter, for further discussion," he writes.'2 The gentle civility implied by this image of the exchange of ideas across divides of culture and power is as artificial and misleading as the nondialogic scientism of another anthropology, now critici/ed vehemently. In the messy, sometimes bloody real world the swords on the hips of contemporary interlocutors won't...

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