Moral Atmospheres

Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace

Timothy P. A. Cooper

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English

Columbia University Press
27 February 2024

Asian history; Religious ethics; Islam; Media studies; Social & cultural anthropology

Series: Religion, Culture, and Public Life

"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."

By: Timothy P. A. Cooper
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 51
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780231210409
ISBN 10: 023121040X
Series: Religion, Culture, and Public Life
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 27 February 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Notes on the Text Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction 1. Cinema Itself: Film and Faith in Pakistan 2. Public Demand: Interpreting Atmospheres 3. Feeling the Threshold 4. Atmospheres of Moral Exception 5. The Absorptive City: Hall Road’s Urban Form 6. The Master Copy: Atmospheres in Circulation Epilogue Glossary of Frequently Used Terms Notes Bibliography Index

Timothy P. A. Cooper is an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Reviews for Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace

Convincingly bringing together the anthropology of ethics and morality with the aesthetic experiences engendered by the consumption and circulation of various genres of Pakistani film and video, Moral Atmospheres is a sophisticated and extraordinarily rich study. -- Patrick Eisenlohr, author of <i>Sounding Islam: Voice, Media, and Sonic Atmospheres in an Indian Ocean World</i>