I am an anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker studying ethics and comparative media in contemporary Pakistan. Having first studied film theory and production, I took up anthropology through the study of material, visual, and digital culture at University College London (UCL). My first book, “Public Demand: Film, Islam, and Atmosphere in a Pakistani Marketplace” is under contract with Columbia University Press. The manuscript was awarded the 2022 Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion. It is an ethnography of Lahore’s Hall Road, the largest electronics and media market in Pakistan. 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. The book examines 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. 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 as fixed ethical standpoints.
I joined the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2020 as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow. My current project, for which I hold a Leverhulme / Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Fellowship, centres on the performance of belief among the Shi’i minority in Pakistan. At a fifth of the population, the Shi’a form the largest religious minority in Pakistan where they occupy a precarious position in relation to a Sunni-Islamic majority state. Despite the threat of marginalization and violence, finding new avenues through which to practice publicity has become central to Shi’i groups’ demands for recognition. Examining the affective conditions through which the Shi’a disclose their faith, this project will provide the empirical grounding for a new theory of ethical life through the study of “threshold media”. In these events of mediation, remaining on the middle ground while the poles of order and disorder realign involves heightened attunement not only to how things are but also to the changing boundaries of how they might be.
My work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Material Religion, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. I have also disseminated my research at co-convened panels at international conferences, and in curatorial, journalistic, and impact projects, including the organisation of a major international retrospective on Pakistani film at the British Film Institute, as well as radio documentaries, and the production of four ethnographic films screened at international festivals. My fieldwork methods build on this experience, involving collaborative engagements with filmmaking, live recording, and devotional media.
