Surge Protectors: Cultural Regulation in Contemporary India

这个项目从两个方面修正了我们对审查制度作为一种文化监管形式的看法：首先，通过分析正式（国家认可的）审查制度实践以及与非正式（自发，激进和/或暴力）公共文化监管模式的关系;其次，通过探索世界上最大的民主国家印度的审查制度与文化全球化之间的关系。从人种学的角度来看，这项研究的重点是当代对大众媒体中“淫秽”图像和文本的斗争。但是，这样做的同时，它也提出了将英国殖民统治下建立的法律的规范和定义适用于后殖民环境的问题，后殖民环境的特点不仅是民主政治机构，而且是主要的新的跨国媒体网络。 以前的审查制度研究，特别是在所谓的发展中国家，已经理解审查制度主要是沉默或阻止国家的行动，并减少了审查制度的社会领域的做法之间的斗争“现代”和“传统”的议程。相反，本研究的出发点是这样一个命题，即这种解释模型无法解释在当代非西方社会中监管媒体的文化和政治含义。通过档案研究和对印度活动家、文化生产者和政府官员的深入访谈，该研究探讨了一个假设，即审查制度主要不是阻止信息流动本身，而是通过管理影响密集型图像和文本的公开传播，挑战阶级、种姓、宗教和公民身份的可接受界限。 这项工作是紧迫和及时的，因为它提供了一个详细和严格的审查问题，今天是至关重要的利益，社会科学家和决策者一样：媒体审查与民主的兼容性，媒体内容消费与参与公民生活之间的关系，国家政治公民身份与参与全球化消费市场之间的紧张关系，以及视觉图像的不稳定的公共生活，尤其是在普遍文盲的背景下。

This project revises the way we think about censorship as a form of cultural regulation in two ways: first, by analyzing formal (state-sanctioned) censorship practices alongside and in relation to informal (spontaneous, activist and/or violent) modes of public cultural regulation; second, by exploring the relation between censorship and cultural globalization in the world's largest democracy, India. Ethnographically, the study focuses on contemporary struggles over "obscene" images and texts in the mass media. But in so doing, it also calls into question the implications of applying legal norms and definitions established under British colonial rule to a postcolonial context characterized not only by democratic political institutions but also by major new transnational media networks. Previous studies of censorship, particularly in the so-called developing world, have understood censorship primarily as the silencing or blocking action of states, and have reduced the social field of censorship practices to struggles between "modern" and "traditional" agendas. This study, in contrast, starts from the proposition that such interpretive models cannot make sense of the cultural and political implications of regulating the media in contemporary non-Western societies. Through archival research and in-depth interviews with activists, cultural producers and government officials in India, the study explores the hypothesis that censorship is not primarily about blocking information flows per se but rather about contesting acceptable boundaries of class, caste, religion and citizenship by managing the public circulation of affect-intensive images and texts. This work is urgent and timely because it offers a detailed and rigorous examination of problems that are today of crucial interest to social scientists and policy makers alike: the compatibility of media censorship and democracy, the relationship between the consumption of media content and participation in civic life, the tension between the national political citizenship and participation in globalizing consumer markets, and the volatile public life of visual images, not least in contexts of widespread illiteracy.