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OF NIGHTMARES AND CONTACTS ASl NlCilll I w;tj> awakened by a nightmare, the same recurring drrani 1 have been sulTering for the past year or so. I wasin Cambodia , a Cambodia I know only through TV images of Vietnam War vintage. It was hot, humid; the air was heavy with tropical smells but vibrating with danger. I was climbing a long stone stairway in a kind of tower, looking down through crumbling windows at a busy marketplace below. People carrying baskets of fruit on their heads; bald-headed monks begging for alms. Suddenly , I heard shots, the rat-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire, and men in camouflage suits started running here and there in the crowd. I stood on the steps, frozen in fear and horror. People in the marketplace were screaming and falling down, but I was too far away to see blood. Gathering my wits about me, I ran, breathless, out of the tower and away from the market square. After running for some time, I looked back to see the entire area blow up in a sudden inferno of flame. I fell to the ground and woke up, bolt upright, in a cold sweat. The story of my research on Sikh militancyis also a story about my personal confrontation with violence. To mask it here as more neutral, more distanced than it is would be to deny the nights of terror, displaced to another, safer, venue, that I experienced off and on since I began this project. And to write about Sikh militantsas if I had riot become personally, existentially entangled with them and their quest would be an inexcusable hypocrisy . As a scholar, I know what it means to look for all sides of a question, to be critical of sources, to be "objective." As an anthropologist, I arn familiar with the peculiar inside-outside stance of the ethnographer, which allows glimpses into other realities while retaining a quintessentially Western academic outlook . In trying to understand what militantSikhs are doing, however , I find that the anthropology of another era is also useful, 1 L not the anthropology claiming to be science but the one that sees the confrontation of "man with man" in all his naked mysteryas the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Like many anthropologists of my generation , I find myself questioning some of the basic axioms of my field, which, however stimulating intellectually,seem somehow inadequate to the task of understanding real human beings. Immanuel Kant, a forgotten ancestor of contemporary anthropology, took the traditional "What is man?" question to be the heart of what an academic discipline of anthropology should be. But for Kant this question subsumed three subsidiary issues that have been largely ignored: "What can I know?" "What ought I to do?" and "What may I hope?" It is this last query in particular that is rather jarringly out of place in the modern academic climate, though Edward Burnett Tylor, too, author of our classic 1871 definition of culture, emphasized not only the "habits" of human beings but their "capabilities" as well.1 Is it not part of the anthropologist's enterprise to ask what heights humans are capable of reaching? Our discipline'sinsistence on the value of the everyday,so important in countering neglect of the ordinary in other areas of scholarship , also has the effect of somewhateclipsingthe realityof the out-of-the ordinary, the truly heroic, in human endeavor. Taken as a whole, the picture painted of humankind by the collectionsof ethnographic literature many of us have on our bookshelvesis sadlyinadequate. True, most human beings live quotidian, habituated, ordinary lives most of the time. But what about when they don't? What are people capable of when the everyday is disrupted by famine, by war or pestilence, when they are called upon to do more than fetch water and grow crops and make love and rear children, to be more than "just human?" Our literature doesn't contain many portraits of people in extraordinary, rather than ordinary, circumstances. Sikh militants in the northwestern state of Punjab in India have been engaged in an armed insurgency for the past decade and a half. Their ultimate aim is the formation of a sovereign nation of Khalistan, "land of the pure." It is not clear what percentage these militants and their supporters form of the total Sikh population; there are many others who would like to see an independent nation emerge but reject violence as a means of achieving it...

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