Aadamkhor Haseena (The Man-Eating Beauty) and the anthropology of a moment

Abstract

In this article I trace certain related trajectories: the emergence and possible disappearance of the cinematic form of the soft-porn ‘morning show’; the waxing and waning arrangements of certain spaces in the city of Delhi, in particular cinema halls in Old Delhi; and lives enmeshed in this unstable itinerant matrix of cinema and the city. In confronting these situations of permanent mobility, we are led to the conceptual issue of time. Do the hands of a clock describe units of experience? Does time privilege movement or rest? How do we understand time in terms of both materiality and subjectivity? How do cinematic affects relate to durational experience? I address these questions by setting out the anthropology of a ‘moment’ as a way of understanding durational experience. The moment is conceptualised in two distinct but related forms: as a chronograph (that tracks trajectories of movement and matter) and as a crystal (that follows varying states of mind). Understanding the issue of time as a philosophical problem through the writings of Gilles Deleuze, I also consider what kind of relationship exists, or might exist, between anthropology and philosophy.