Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-259) and index.

Introduction -- 1. Cinema Itself: Film and Faith in Pakistan -- 2. Public Demand: Interpreting Atmospheres -- 3. Feeling the Threshold -- 4. Atmospheres of Moral Exception -- 5. The Absorptive City: Hall Road's Urban Form -- 6. The Master-Copy: Atmospheres in Circulation -- Epilogue -- Glossary of Frequently-used Terms -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

"For Sunni Muslims, moral permissibility can be complicated when it concerns matters that fall outside the norms set by either the scriptural tradition of the Qur'an or the Hadith, the body of literature that compiles the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and the prototypical Islamic community. The moral and religious acceptability of new media--film and popular music in particular--can vary widely. In a time of shifting public demand and a rapidly evolving media landscape, how do film distributors, video recorders, politicians, religious preachers, Islamic scholars, and ordinary people in Pakistan make decisions about the moral and social qualities of films and other forms of media? In Moral Atmospheres, Timothy P.A. Cooper argues that decisions about the moral acceptability of new media are made through the creation, interpretation, and public understanding of a moral "atmosphere" that surrounds them. Based on his extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted with sellers, buyers, and browsers in a large electronics market street in Lahore, Pakistan, Cooper makes the case that this sense of moral atmosphere and, importantly, how people encounter and access it, wields a powerful influence on local views of moral perception and reception. Public Demand is an empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated analysis of how public morality is constructed through the interaction of the religious and the secular in everyday life"-- Provided by publisher.