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

Abstract

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.

Spirits in a Material World

“…The woodcarving is about experience and experiencing: about relating, bodies, touching, sensing, dreaming, thinking, being, becoming, and materializing in ways that we cannot capture adequately by viewing "heritage" and "religion" simply as a gaze, a discourse, or an institutional practice. 5 This view is fruitful in seeking to revise the concept of heritage as not solely a secular practice that can be viewed and appreciated as representing the cultural essence of a people, but situated dynamically as entangled with "spirits" and "gods" as part of the texture of the social fabric based on experience (Meyer and De Witte 2013;Brosius and Polit 2011;Adams 2006;Karlström 2005;Eisenlohr 2013). Heritage, therefore I suggest, is never fully the ideal representation of a singular idea -either institutional or otherwise -but involves a myriad of partners (see also sides of the relationship with heritage and religion: that of the heritagization of the sacred (the process whereby religious traditions are either recognized, rejected or contested) and the sacralisation of heritage (how certain heritage forms become sacred, imbued with authenticity and power) (Meyer and De Witte 2013: 277).…”

Rethinking non-traditional resistance at work: The case of the Indian Diaspora in Mauritius

“…In context of the Indian Diaspora, existing studies have focussed on foreign investment (Anwar and Mughal 2013;Buckley et al 2012;Contractor et al 2015;Tung et al 2011), knowledge transfer within the Information Technology and Software sectors (Dhume 2002;Kapur 2001;Pandey et al 2004;Pande 2014;Saxenian 1999), home-making of expatriate female Indians (Panday and Srivastava 2012) and Diaspora entrepreneurship (Chand 2012;Vemuri 2014). While these concentrated on the 'new' Diaspora, studies on the first wave of Indian emigration have in part or wholly concentrated on the relationship between the homeland and identity (Dickinson 2015;Premdas 2011;Sinha 2014), consumption of symbolic goods and material continuities (Sambajee 2011;Sinha 2014), religion and ethnicity (Eisenlohr 2013;Kumar 2012;Lal 2015;Vertovec 2000), gender (Hiralal 2014;Raghunandan 2012) and cultural behaviours (Eisenlohr 2013;Sinha 2014). These studies suggest that maintaining a connection with India has never ceased to be a fundamental feature of this diasporic community despite generations from leaving India.…”