[Linganth] Timothy Cooper on CaMP anthropology blog

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today, Timothy Cooper discusses his research on how films circulate in
Pakistani markets with Patrick Eisenlohr on the CaMP blog.

campanthropology.org

All the best,
Ilana

Press blurb: Lahore’s Hall Road is the largest electronics market in
Pakistan. Once the center of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now
specializes in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road’s traders,
conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom
large. To reconcile their secular trade with their responsibilities as
devoted Muslims, they often look to adjudicate the good or bad moral
“atmosphere” (*mahaul*) that can cling to film and media.

Timothy P. A. Cooper examines the diverse and coexisting moral atmospheres
that surround media in Pakistan, tracing public understandings of ethical
life and showing how they influence economic behavior. Drawing on extensive
ethnographic work among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists,
cinephiles, and cinephobes, *Moral Atmospheres* explores varied views on
what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel
like for Pakistan’s Muslim-majority public. Cooper considers the
preservation and censorship of film in and outside of the state
bureaucracy, contestations surrounding heritage and urban infrastructure,
and the production and circulation of sound and video recordings among the
country’s religious minorities. He argues that a focus on atmosphere
provides ways of seeing moral thresholds as mutable and affective, rather
than as fixed ethical standpoints. At once a vivid ethnography of a market
street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh
perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion and
media.
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