The Situation of the Interface: Pashto master copies and data migration in Sharjah

Abstract

A master copy is an artifact whose quality or value carries over to the copies it engenders. In the United Arab Emirates, home to a marketplace trade in Pashto-language film and music, master copy also refers to the context of the artifact’s accessibility; it describes a print made from a medium—such as a celluloid film, an audiocassette, or a vinyl record—considered to hold the earliest or highest-quality recording. Situated at a narrowing analog-to-digital bottleneck, a master copy is not an original but an interface between the social circumstances afforded by storage and communication media. Thus, as distinct from the formats that manifest content or preserve data, bottlenecks and interfaces ought to be studied on their own terms, as is shown in ethnographic research on master copies that travel between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and beyond, throughout the Pashtun diaspora.