Market Demand and Moral “Atmosphere” in Urban Pakistan
Written by Tim Cooper
In May 2024 I launched my first book Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace at an E-Lab event at King’s College, Cambridge. As I often do, I began by grounding this work in methodology.
One way I would initiate conversations with traders on Lahore’s Hall Road, Pakistan's largest electronics and informal media market, was by inquiring about a film I believed to be lost and irretrievable.
I was conducting ethnographic research among those whose trade in pirated film and music – mostly from Lahore's Lollywood film industry – depended on appearing trustworthy and honourable in a highly saturated marketplace. I say pirated, but the distinction was far from clear-cut. Producers used to sell celluloid reels to marketplace traders for a one-off payment, who would then make copies that were distributed across the country. This economy was one of speed and spread rather than licences or royalties. Getting hold of one of these copies and making further duplicates was reliant on the hardware one had at their disposal, leading to a proliferation of material as the means of reproduction – VHS, optical disk, SD card, YouTube – changed. Transfer quality was determined by whether the copy was derived from a master-copy (the highest-quality version believed to exist) or a camera-print (a copy of a copy). Copies were priced according to this distinction rather than whether they were “official” or pirated. Master-copies and camera-prints are not correlative to the distinction between originals and fakes. Rather, they are a record of their valuation in the present, in their recent history, and possible futures.
By the time I arrived, Hall Road’s role as a hub for selling films was already diminishing. Smartphones, televisions, Internet data, digital storage, and various computer accessories had come to dominate the market during my time conducting research in 2017-2018. Yet two important principles, derived from the days when film, video, and music delineated the contours of electronic media, continued to hold sway. These were “demand” and “mahaul” a Hindustani term meaning atmosphere. Both these terms and their deployment show how the entrepreneurial mindset of my trader-interlocutors can help us think differently about moral experience.
People have been speaking about the “atmosphere” of film since the earliest days of cinematography; in the coming together of light, the bodies of strangers in a confined space, real and imagined movement, and the intermittence between sound and silence. While usually a judgement that refers to negative influences, mahaul is moral because one defines values, behaviours, and attitudes in relation to it. If I wanted to understand the relationship between film, Islam, and public morality, my interlocutors told me, I had to come to grips with its mahaul, its moral atmospheres that gives the book its name.
Despite the shifts in the market, two types of film trader remained. Some catered to those who couldn’t access the Internet, selling films readily available on video-hosting sites. Others specialised in sourcing rare films, drawing on their connections, collections, or expertise to find titles unavailable online. By asking for films I presumed were lost to the market, I gained valuable insights into how traders located rare materials, transferred content from videocassettes to discs or digital formats, and navigated the absence of state support or a national film archive. In short, I learned about how they fulfilled what they termed in English “public demand”.
Demand, as an expression of the entrepreneurial mindset of my trader-interlocutors, is a collective wish emanating from an undefined collective, as well as the displacement of responsibility onto this collective. It becomes both an ethical and an economic principle that determines both what is desired and what is permissible among the public at large.
My fellow panellists at this launch event with the E-Lab, who read the book and gave short presentations about its salience in relation to their own work, not only helped me gauge how the book might be received but also helped me reflect on how analysis would have changed if I had foregrounded the economic and the entrepreneurial rather than religious and the ethical.
I had been thinking about this for some time, having also been a Research Associate at the Max-Planck Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change where members work on topics such as taxation, management expertise, and venture capital. But my fellow panellists brought this analysis to bear. Mike Degani, who works on energy and infrastructure in Tanzania; Garima Jaju, who works on work and labour in post-liberalisation India, and Naveeda Khan who works on the experience of crisis in aesthetic, theological, and ecological forms, as well as the event’s chair Christina Woolner, who works on the circulation of love poetry in Somaliland, helped crystallise important aspect of the book I had hitherto overlooked.
On Hall Road, demand is both censorial and commercial, shaped by moods and needs that economists often overlook. Among traders, public demand not only imagines a collective will but also attempts to define that most slippery of economic concepts, “atmosphere”, as a quality of containment that works to keep ambiguous moral forces within limits. Put another way, atmosphere was the condition of the marketplace trade in film and media, or the animating factors affecting the market. “Demand” responded to the context of the marketplace. That is, the ambient but powerfully influential backdrop to transactions. Understanding how local distinctions between conditions and contexts play out can provide a clearer sense of how public understandings of ethical life influence economic behaviour.
About the speakers
Mike Degani is Assistant Professor of Environmental Anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. His research concerns the way infrastructures and the vital flows they channel animate or call into question social orders. He is the author of The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Post socialist Tanzania (Duke University Press, 2022), an ethnography of a national power grid.
Garima Jaju is a Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is interested in the anthropological study of the economy, paying attention to the everyday experiences and expressions of labour, care, and politics, with a regional focus on post-liberalisation India.
Naveeda Khan is professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (2012), River Life and the Upspring of Nature (2022) and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (2023) and editor of Beyond Crisis: Reevaluating Pakistan (2010).
Christina Woolner is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland (2023).
Tim Cooper
Timothy P.A. Cooper is a Leverhulme Trust and Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a College Research Associate at King’s College, Cambridge. His first book, Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace, was awarded the 2022 Claremont Prize in the Study of Religion.