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Book Launch: 'Moral Atmospheres'
20 November 2024, 5:30 pm鈥�7:30 pm
With author Timothy Cooper and respondents Chris Moffat and Vincent Hasselbach. Chaired by Dr Ammara Maqsoud.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
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IAS Common GroundG11, ground floor, South Wing果冻影院, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
Moral Atmospheres:听Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace (Columbia University Press, 2024)
Lahore鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渁tmosphere鈥� (mahaul) that can cling to film and media. Timothy 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,听Moral Atmospheres听explores varied views on what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan鈥檚 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鈥檚 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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The 果冻影院 Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World (CSSA) promotes research and teaching related to the geographical region of South Asia and its intersections with the wider world, including the South Asian diaspora.听Prof Tariq Jazeel and Dr Jagjeet Lally, CSSA Directors
About the Speakers
Timothy Cooper
Timothy Cooper is an anthropologist of ethics and comparative media whose work is driven by a set of interrelated questions: What shapes public understandings of ethical life? How do media infrastructures foster relations across different religious and moral communities? What happens to core concepts in the digital, sonic, and moving-image arts when lived or interpreted through theological frameworks? His first book听听(Columbia University Press, 2024) won the 2022 Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion and has been described as a ground-breaking intervention in media studies of the global South. His next book听project,听Live Mourning: The Arts and Ethics of听Islamic Videography听aims to rethink the relationship between theology and media theory. He is currently a Leverhulme Trust/Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Chris Moffat
Chris Moffat听is Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of听India鈥檚 Revolutionary Inheritance听(2019), editor of听The Time of Building听(2023) and co-editor (with Ammara Maqsood and Fizzah Sajjad) of听Lahore in Motion听(2025). Chris is currently completing a book on architecture and the politics of the past in Pakistan.听
Vincent Hasselbach
Vincent Hasselbach听is a听PhD candidate in anthropology at 果冻影院,听working on and around photography and archival practices.听Building on an almost ten-year relationship with photographic communities in Bangladesh, his听current听AHRC-funded research focuses on听everyday life and political imagination at a photographic archive in Dhaka, the Drik Picture Library. The project ethnographically explores archival work alongside archival images, considering their relationships to questions of time, memory, and divergent conceptualizations of the Bangladesh state.
He previously studied Social Anthropology (BA) and Modern South Asian Studies (MPhil) at the University of Cambridge. Also active as a curator, Vincent听collaborates with artists, photographers, and publishers on exhibitions and talks programming, as well as teaching workshops, delivering guest lectures, and conducting portfolio reviews for a diverse range of photographic organizations and institutions.
Ammara Maqsood
Ammara Maqsood is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at 果冻影院. Her research centres on middle-class religiosity, kinship, upward mobility and intimate aspirations in urban Pakistan. Her current work focuses on questions of religious difference in non-secular contexts and is funded by the ERC grant 鈥楳ulti-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings鈥�. Ammara鈥檚 work has appeared in various leading journals, such as American Ethnologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and her book, The New Pakistani Middle Class听(Harvard University Press), was awarded the 2019 AIPS Book Prize.