Paper short abstract:

The paper explores in which ways a collective video night in an Indian village is embedded and signified within everyday culture. It is outlined then in how far a “cultural margin” in form of a net of cultural practices is part of letting Santali Video-CD films to travel into the village.

Paper long abstract:

VideoCD films in Santali, the language of the Santal people, are commercially produced, popular films with a high circulation in rural areas of Odisha, Jharkhand and West-Bengal. The emerging of the VideoCD circulation could be explained by economic and technological factors like a pre-existing Video-CD distribution infrastructure of the manyfold larger film industries of India. An ethnographic analysis of mine on collective video nights in the village Durdura in Odisha, however, hints at the importance of the cultural practice of film watching there. Moreover, I will complement the above techno-economical understanding of the video circulation by suggesting a "cultural margin" effecting VideoCD outreach in the village.

In the paper I will explore how the event is embedded in the cultural space of joint pleasures, and village inhabitants go there as they intend to create a common timeframe of enjoyment with kins and peers, bonding these relationships (Hindi: rishta). Likewise, video nights carry the flavour of dance nights, which are within Birhor and Santal society "traditional" occasions for the youth to flirt, and thus are signified with the illicit attraction to provide a space for courting. Consequently, I will argue that there is a multiplicity present of differing everyday practices of engaging with video and also their reciprocal references to practices consisting far beyond video - like village dances - which are continuously building a "cultural margin" to let VideoCDs enter the village, and thereby, are part of shaping media routes.