Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds: The Politics of Visual Representation of the Parsi Community in Mumbai

帕西族是一个传统上生活在古吉拉特邦的少数族裔，但主要分布在孟买。他们是琐罗亚斯德教的追随者和流亡海外的S，他们在8世纪因伊斯兰征服的威胁而逃离波斯。由于低婚姻率、严格的内婚制和高移民率，该社区经历了有史以来欧洲以外人口最戏剧性的下降之一。探索视觉表征的政治，我的研究试图理解孟买帕西族社区内的个人身份、集体记忆和社会关系是如何通过视觉意象，特别是通过照片来调节和构建的。这个项目注意到摄影、记忆和身份政治以多种方式交织在一起，旨在为一个濒临消失的社区捕捉身份构建的细微差别。事实上，帕西人生存的复杂困境为紧急研究社区的生存斗争提供了动力，并批判性地理解帕西人公共自我和私人自我在社会形态和表现上的差异。此外，鉴于当今迅速发展的印度民族主义叙事，及时记录少数民族帕西族社区越来越重要，这有助于围绕印度少数民族群体的视觉代表性展开更广泛的辩论。以照片为出发点，可以对归属、国家和社区的政治情感如何通过视觉图像进行调解进行分析。我的研究还旨在利用帕西族社区的例子，在人们越来越担心认识性被抹杀的情况下，促进围绕保护少数群体的文化习俗和遗产的更广泛的批判性分析。例如，博物馆和档案馆是探索保存少数群体文化习俗和集体记忆的关键场所，特别是通过对殖民和后殖民身份的清算。该项目将推进一种身临其境的人种学方法，结合一些深入的定性方法，如参与者观察以及通过摄影和胶片进行视觉记录，以了解帕西族社区的社会生活，并提取关于身份建构的见解。这种人种学方法提供了发展对帕西族身份的主要理解的具体机会。因此，这项博士研究的首要目标是批判性地探索嵌入在照片中的社区隐藏的和更广泛的文化关切，以及在过去和现在、记忆和现实之间产生的后续关系。

The Parsis are a small ethnic minority traditionally living in Gujarat, but primarily located in Mumbai. They are adherents of the Zoroastrian faith and emigrés who fled Persia in the eighth century due to the threat of Islamic conquest. The community has experienced one of the most dramatic declines in population ever recorded outside of Europe, due to low nuptiality, strict endogamy and high emigration. Exploring the politics of visual representation, my research seeks to understand how individual identity, collective memory and social relations within the Parsi community in Mumbai are mediated and constructed through visual imagery, in particular, through photographs. Noting the manifold ways in which photography, memory and identity politics are interwoven, this project aims to capture the nuances of identity construction for a community on the brink of disappearance. Indeed, the complex predicament of Parsi survival provides an impetus to urgently research community struggles for survival and to critically understand the differences in the social configuration and representation of Parsi public and private selves. Further, given today's rapidly advancing Indian nationalistic narrative, timely documentation of the minority Parsi community is increasingly vital, lending itself to broader debates around the visual representation of minority groups in India. Using photographs as a point of departure, analysis can be undertaken on the ways in which political sentiments of belonging, nationhood and community are mediated through visual imagery. My research further aims to use the example of the Parsi community to facilitate wider critical analysis around the preservation of cultural practices and heritage for minority groups amidst growing fears of epistemic erasure. Museums and archives, for instance, are key sites in which to explore the preservation of minority cultural practices and collective memory, especially through reckonings with colonial and post-colonial identities. This project will advance an immersive ethnographic methodology combining a number of in-depth qualitative approaches such as participant observation, as well as visual documentation through photography and film, to understand the social life of the Parsi community and extract insights on identity construction. Such an ethnographic approach offers specific opportunities to develop an emic understanding of Parsi identity. This doctoral research therefore has an overarching aim to critically explore the hidden and wider cultural concerns of the community as embedded within photographs and the subsequent relationship engendered between past and present, memory and reality.