SASC Colloquium Series: The Ethics of the Digital: Crowds and Popular Justice in Bangladesh, Nusrat Chowdhury

Event time: 
Thursday, September 20, 2018 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm
Location: 
Henry R. Luce Hall (LUCE ), 202 See map
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

This paper takes crowd politics as symptomatic rather than representative of the ambivalences of mass democracy. The ethnographic object here is the digital footage of incidents of sexual and vigilante violence in Bangladesh. The scenes of violence, at times as raw footage and at others as digitally modified journalistic expose, went viral in 2015. The medicalized metaphor of contagion in the expression “viral” is also emblematic of crowds, or at least, the way it has long been discussed in canonical social theory. The visual evidence I write about caused public uproar in Bangladesh and invoked contradictory responses from the government. These examples help me explore the expansion and retreat of the spaces of critical dissent, what I call the double bind of digital activism in Bangladesh. The visual material brings up the links between crowd behavior (public shaming of alleged molesters, calls for vigilante justice, etc.) and mechanisms of surveillance and sociality, like closed-circuit television and cellular phone camera. I ultimately argue that social media activism, and surveillance technology more broadly, mimics the kind of crowd mentality it incriminates, and in so doing, reproduces certain immanence associated with crowds.

Nusrat Chowdhury, Anthropology, Amherst College

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