Recently, language activists and linguists have begun using new technologies in projects aimed at revitalizing the practice of lesser-used languages. This review explores related work, emphasizing how practices of electronic mediation enabled by such technologies both shape and are informed by linguistic ideologies, which in turn crucially influence the possible revived use or abandonment of linguistic varieties. New technologies are treated as part of cultures of electronic mediation, connecting sociocultural valuations to mediated discourse. Their use often has important political implications, given that projects of language revitalization are often linked to claims of ethnolinguistic recognition. Finally, because documentation of lesser-used languages using digital technologies also results in the production of new cultural objects to be stored, displayed, and circulated, attention is also focused on the forms of sociality sustained by the creation and exchange of such electronic artifacts.

Previous work on inter-ethnic coexistence in Mauritius has portrayed secularism as the only possible site of the national, which is at the same time described as clearly separated from religious traditions. In contrast, focusing on understandings of secularism among Mauritian Muslims in the context of a politics of diasporic 'ancestral cultures', this article analyses secularism as a field of morality which is inseparable from questions of religious reform and authenticity. The discussion of ethnographic material from Mauritius suggests that the opposition between secularity and religiosity should be treated as a productive tension rather than a liberal antinomy.Recent anthropological studies of diasporas have highlighted their transnational orientation towards multiple political locations, which frequently places diasporas at odds with a prevailing global political order. Diasporic identifications do not, however, always stand in tension with national belonging. Indeed, the public performance of such identifications in ethnic holidays, religious festivals, ethnic cultural centres, and the state-sponsored cultivation of ancestral languages is one of the ways in which full membership in a Mauritian nation is claimed and demonstrated (cf. Eriksen ). Mauritians, who publicly celebrate a continuing memory of their origins in another part of the world through such activities, often experience diasporic belonging through the prism of purist, clearly demarcated, and officially recognized 'ancestral cultures' . These two themes come together in a hegemonic sense of cultural citizenship according to which Mauritians are primarily conceived as subjects with origins elsewhere and ongoing commitments to traditions whose diasporic character is highlighted (Eisenlohr in press). Although in the s and early s a political movement promoted a new Mauritian nationalism privileging locally created cultural forms, in particular the dominant local vernacular language Mauritian Creole as a base for Mauritian postcolonial nation-building, Mauritian state institutions clearly emphasize support and recognition of cultural traditions perceived as diasporic. 1 That is, the cultural politics of the Mauritian state privileges 'ancestral cultures' , experienced as diasporic insofar as their origins elsewhere are publicly emphasized, over those traditions which can be constructed as indigenous, such as the practice of Mauritian Creole. 2 At the same time,

Mauritian Muslims profoundly disagree over the legitimacy of the devotional genre na't, as audition of audiocassette and audio‐CD recordings of the genre has become more popular. In this article, I suggest a close articulation between critiques of textual and spiritual mediation in South Asian Islamic traditions practiced in Mauritius and certain uses of electronic voice mediation, such as the circulation of audiocassette and audio‐CD na't. The significance of electronically mediated devotional discourse emerges in the ways in which media practices become part of genealogical forms of Islamic authority centered on ensuring authentic textual and performative transmission through long chains of reliable interlocutors.

Mauritian Muslims have recently come to treat sound reproduction as enhancing and authorizing the transnational circulation of devotional discourse and poetry. In this article, I investigate the alternation between the storing of signs through media and their performative recontextualization as a practice that straddles the boundary between signification and materiality. The argument is that particular theological assumptions about mediation shape the deployment of media technology in religious settings. Such assumptions also influence the processes of entextualizing authoritative religious discourse. In the article I analyze how a sense of immediacy between religious performers and spiritual authorities emerges though the combination of uses of sound reproduction informed by a semiotic ideology of recitational logocentrism with particular deictic markers in discourse. [media, Islam, sound reproduction, entextualization, Mauritius]

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