Timothy Cooper
Timothy Cooper is a Leverhulme Trust & Isaac Newton Trust Early-Career Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is also affiliated with the Max-Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change and King’s College, Cambridge. He received his PhD in Anthropology from University College London (UCL).
His book, Public Demand: Film, Islam, and Atmosphere in a Pakistani Marketplace centres on Lahore’s Hall Road, the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the centre of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specializes in smartphones and mobile accessories. Yet the economic promises and moral dangers of film continue to loom large. Caught between their economic base in secular media and their responsibilities as devoted Muslims, Hall Road’s traders frequently defer agency to the force of “public demand”. This investment in the virtues of public morality is rooted in a long tradition of inquiry into what the relationship between film and faith should look, sound, and feel like for Pakistan’s religiously diverse population. When theology cannot account for ambiguous affects and competing moral stakes, many look to adjudicate the good or bad māḥaul that can cling to film and media, using a word commonly translated into English as atmosphere. The book examines the environmental media and mediations that give sense to these felt forces through examples that emerge from Hall Road’s economic, moral, and urban form. These include 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 Shiʿi Islamic minority. Situated ethnographically among traders, consumers, collectors, archivists, cinephiles, and cinephobes, Public Demand argues that the atmospheric conditions of media in Pakistan provide ways of conceiving of moral thresholds that are mutable and affective, rather than fixed ethical standpoints.