Mediality and materiality in religious performance: religion as heritage in Mauritius

In Mauritius, religious performance often doubles as officially recognized diasporic heritage, institutionalized as a component of Mauritians' "ancestral cultures." Such forms of religious expression not only point to a source of authority outside Mauritius but also play a key role in...

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Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Eisenlohr, Patrick 1967- (Auteur)
Type de support: Électronique Article
Langue:Anglais
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Publié: Taylor & Francis [2013]
Dans: Material religion
Année: 2013, Volume: 9, Numéro: 3, Pages: 328-348
Sujets non-standardisés:B Islam
B Rituel
B religious authority
B Diaspora
B Media
B Hinduism
Accès en ligne: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Résumé:In Mauritius, religious performance often doubles as officially recognized diasporic heritage, institutionalized as a component of Mauritians' "ancestral cultures." Such forms of religious expression not only point to a source of authority outside Mauritius but also play a key role in legitimizing claims on Mauritian citizenship. In this article, I examine two kinds of practices that help to instantiate religious links as heritage: ritual performance combined with the cultivation of "ancestral language" in the context of a Hindu pilgrimage and the role of sound reproduction techniques in popularizing a particular genre of Islamic devotional poetry. I argue that these embodied and material practices illustrate two contrasting modes of engaging with spatially and temporally removed sources of authenticity. While the pilgrimage aims at naturalizing diasporic links through their objectification and iconization, uses of sound reproduction technology in Islamic devotional contexts establish links to sources of religious authority under the assumption that the medium used is relatively transparent. Ultimately, the modalities of materiality presupposed in the ethnographic examples account for the authenticating effect of religion as heritage.
ISSN:1751-8342
Contient:Enthalten in: Material religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.2752/175183413X13730330868997