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

帕西人是传统上居住在古吉拉特邦的少数民族，但主要居住在孟买。他们是琐罗亚斯德教（Zoroastrian）信仰的信徒和在8世纪因伊斯兰教征服的威胁而逃离波斯的移民。由于结婚率低、严格的内婚制和大量移民，该社区经历了欧洲以外有记录以来最急剧的人口下降之一。通过探索视觉表现的政治，我的研究试图理解孟买帕西人社区内的个人身份、集体记忆和社会关系是如何通过视觉图像，特别是通过照片来调解和构建的。注意到摄影、记忆和身份政治交织在一起的多种方式，该项目旨在捕捉一个处于消失边缘的社区身份建构的细微差别。的确，帕西人的复杂生存困境为迫切研究帕西人的生存斗争和批判性地理解帕西人公共和私人自我的社会结构和表现的差异提供了动力。此外，考虑到今天印度民族主义叙事的迅速发展，及时记录帕西族社区的少数群体变得越来越重要，这有助于围绕印度少数群体的视觉表现展开更广泛的辩论。以照片为出发点，可以分析归属、国家和社区的政治情绪是如何通过视觉图像进行调解的。我的研究进一步旨在使用帕西社区的例子，以促进更广泛的批判性分析，围绕少数群体的文化习俗和遗产的保护，在日益增长的对认知消除的恐惧中。例如，博物馆和档案馆是探索保存少数民族文化习俗和集体记忆的重要场所，特别是通过对殖民和后殖民身份的考量。该项目将推进一种沉浸式民族志方法论，结合一些深入的定性方法，如参与观察，以及通过摄影和电影的视觉记录，以了解帕西社区的社会生活，并提取对身份建构的见解。这样的人种学方法为发展对帕西人身份的emic理解提供了具体的机会。因此，这项博士研究的总体目标是批判性地探索隐藏在照片中的更广泛的社区文化问题，以及过去与现在，记忆与现实之间的后续关系。

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.