Episode 23. The Recorded and the Live, by Timothy Cooper

Camthropod

With the arrival of home recording technology in the early 1980s, many Shi’i Muslims in Pakistan started to record the majlis mourning assemblies and processions that are central to their faith. Soon after, some established family-run religious media stores beside Muslim shrines or in Shi’a-majority neighbourhoods. In this episode, Dr Timothy Cooper (Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology) examines the distinct sonic aesthetic of Shi’i religious media in Pakistan through interviews with his interlocutors in Lahore, as well as through extracts from their personal archives of Shi’i majlis assemblies, rituals, and recitations. He is joined by Karen Ruffle from the University of Toronto and Charles Hirschkind from the University of California, Berkeley, who help to put Shi’i relationships with sound in a wider geographic and disciplinary context. This podcast forms the final part of a three-part multi-platform sound essay titled The Recorded and the Live that examines Shi’i faith, ritual, and recording media in Pakistan. It was produced through the support of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (ES/V011669/1). Part 1 is an ethnographic film titled This is a Majlis: A Sound Essay co-directed with Abeera Arif-Bashir that was screened at the 2021 Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival. https://festival.raifilm.org.uk/film/decolonising-the-archive-shorts-2/ Part 2 is an hour-long collection of laments and elegies from the collections of Shi’i media traders in Pakistan titled Recitations for Muharram and Ashura, broadcast and archived on NTS Radio. https://www.nts.live/shows/pirate-modernity/episodes/pirate-modernity-2nd-august-2021 Acknowledgements: My immense gratitude goes to Karen Ruffle, Charles Hirschkind, and Abeera Arif-Bashir for taking the time to work with me on this podcast, and to my interlocutors in Lahore, Muhammad Shehzad, Muhammad Ashiq, Ali Raza, Hurr Abbas, whose patience and intellectual generosity knows no bounds. The interviews featured in this podcast were conducted in Lahore between January and February 2020.