Premium
Censorship and Ethnographic Film: Confronting State Bureaucracies, Cultural Regulation, and Institutionalized Homophobia in India
Author(s) -
Gill Harjant S.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
visual anthropology review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.346
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1548-7458
pISSN - 1058-7187
DOI - 10.1111/var.12122
Subject(s) - scholarship , censorship , bureaucracy , dissent , conversation , state (computer science) , media studies , sociology , political dissent , political science , politics , ethnography , political economy , law , anthropology , communication , algorithm , computer science
Based on my encounters with the Indian censor board while trying to get my films approved for broadcast on Indian television, I explore how bureaucratic institutions such as the Indian Central Board of Film Certification ( CBFC ) operate as instruments of the nation‐state to control speech, regulate culture, and stifle dissent in the interest of advancing the Indian government's nationalist, paternalist, heteronormative agendas and policies. I also look briefly at how nongovernmental actors like special interest religious and political groups attempt to regulate even the transnational domains of media circulation online, which offer some possibilities for transcending the regulatory mechanisms of the nation‐state. Citing my experiences to show how ethnographic films and scholarship are continuously shaped by the various mediascapes within which they circulate, this article opens up a conversation about what it means to submit our scholarship for sanctioning by the nation‐state in which we carry out our research.