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₨ 8,510
PALACES
THAT CHANGES THE WORLD
₨ 2,500₨ 11,010
In stock
₨ 2,500₨ 11,010
In stock
This authoritative work sheds light on the religious world of the Kalasha people of the Birir valley of the Pakistani district of Chitral, focusing on their winter feasts which culminate in a great winter solstice festival. The Kalasha represent the last example of the pre-Islamic cultures of the Hindu Kush/Karakorum, but are also the only observable example, worldwide, of an archaic Indo-European religion. Cacopardo addresses the historical and cultural context of the area and, referencing an array of relevant literature, offers comparisons with the Indian world and the religious folklore of Europe. Interdisciplinary and based on extensive field research, Pagan Christmas is the first extended ethnographic study devoted to this little known Kalasha community and represents a standard international reference source on the anthropology, ethnography and history of religions of Pakistan and Central South Asia. Augusto S. Cacopardo has conducted anthropological research in Pakistan under the aegis of the Institute Italianoper l’Africa e l’Oriente and is Professor of Ethnography at the University of Florence. His publications include the monograph Gates of Perstian: History, Religion and Society in the Hindu Kush (2001), co-authored with his brother Alberto M.
Cacopardo.
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.
