Senior Research Seminar with Dr Timothy Cooper (University of Cambridge)
“Live has an atmosphere of its own”: Co-presence and ethical orientation in Shi’a azadari recordings
Among producers of Shi’a Islamic media in Pakistan, the quality of being live as an atmosphere capable of mediation has gained efficacy along with changes in mediums for religious dispensation. Central to the importance of live recordings are the ways they are perceived to most effectively mediate the ethical, ritual, and transhistorical contours of azadari, a word that describes the ways in which the personages held in esteem by the Shi’a are mourned and commemorated. What are these qualities of being live that speak not only to temporal or spatial presence, but to a kind of moral atmosphere? By building on ethnographic research into the relationship between Shi’a practices of azadari and their technological mediation, this paper aims to provide greater insights into how atmospheric states of ethical attunement relate to changing interfaces for communal worship.