P Eisenlohr
Biographic Data
| ID | 14507 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Eisenlohr |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Eisenlohr |
| SIGNATURE | EISENLOHR P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Göttingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4843-4169 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 349 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Afterword
Afterword
Afterword
Ressonância atmosférica
Devido às suas características materiais, o sônico representa um desafio para o influente paradigma da religião como mediação. Este ensaio defende uma análise neofenomenológica das atmosferas para fazer justiça ao sônico nas abordagens antropológicas da religião. Abordando o sônico como semi-coisas atmosféricas, proponho uma compreensão diferente da mediação religiosa daquela desenvolvida em contextos em que predominam imagens, objetos e mídias t…
Atmospheres
In this essay, I introduce an analytic of atmosphere as a way to bridge the gap between the phenomenology of the felt-body and the anthropology of the senses. This analytic of atmospheres as multisensoriality partially aligns with, but also differs from other anthropological approaches to multisensoriality or the anthropology of the senses. Examining the meaningfulness of atmospheres as spatially extended emotions from a neo-phenomenological pers…
Latent Cosmologies, Latent Media
In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a tempo- ral figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins techni- cal processes of storing and reproducing sounds and moving images in a broad sense, while analyzing mediatic latency in Twelver Shi‘i media prac- tices i…
Introduction
In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of "material temporalities" with an eye to the collection's impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate "material temporalities" in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalitie…
From Race to Religion in a Creole Society
Mauritian Muslims have undergone a long process of religious standardization and sectarian segmentation. How have sharp religious boundaries such as those that separate Muslims from Hindus and Christians, as well as those that divide Muslims internally along sectarian lines emerged in a creole society such as Mauritius? This article traces how religionization has supplanted race as the chief category of incorporation of people of Indian origins i…
Atmospheric resonance
Because of its material characteristics, the sonic poses a challenge to the influential paradigm of religion as mediation. This article makes a case for a neo-phenomenological analytic of atmospheres in order to do justice to the sonic in anthropological approaches to religion. Approaching the sonic as atmospheric half-things, I propose a different understanding of religious mediation from the one developed in contexts where images, objects, and …
Book forum on Charles Hirschkind, The Feeling of History
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Candace B. LukasikCharles Hirschkind begins his new book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, by stating his argument simply: ‘medieval Muslim Iberia d
Atmospheric Citizenship
In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place-making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi'i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, this essay draws on an analytic of atmospheres in order to …
Sounding Islam
Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of rel…
Media, Urban Aspirations, and Religious Mobilization among Twelver Shiʻites in Mumbai
Sounding Islam
Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of rel…
Diaspora, temporality, and politics
In this contribution, I take up Michael Nijhawan's focus on the embodied aspects of memory and time he elaborates so insightfully in "The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations", specifically his invocation of, via Veena Das's work, of Bergson's distinction between translational and rotational time. Drawing on examples from my own work on Hindu diasporas in Mauritius and the ways in which processes of diasporization in Mauritius h…
Suggestions of Movement
In this essay I make a case for the analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable, yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to sonic atmospheres with recent anthropological research on the voice that seeks to overcome the oppositio…
Reconsidering mediatization of religion
This article proposes a rethinking of religion and mediatization by differentiating between two intersections of religion and media, public religion and religious mediation. I argue that whenever religious change that can be usefully described as mediatization occurs it can best be captured as an effect resulting from the interaction of these two dimensions. Extending the debate on religion and mediatization beyond Christian North Atlantic contex…
Religion and Diaspora
Orientation towards a point of political and historical allegiance outside the boundaries of the nation-state is often taken to be a defining quality of diasporas, and this aligns with the ubiquitous tendency of Islamic practice to engage with sources of long-distance, or indeed global, religious authority. In this article, I shall investigate the dimensions of religious and political long-distance allegiances by analysing Mauritian Muslims as a …
Media, Citizenship, and Religious Mobilization
The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi'ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its …
Mediating Disjunctures of Time
In this article, I approach regimes of time as a medial question, examining the interplay of different temporalities in ritual and media practices among Hindus in Mauritius and Twelver Shi'ite Muslims in Mumbai. These interactions consist of fluctuations between modernist linear modes of time and suspensions of the distinctions of past, present, and future as the performative outcome of certain ritual practices. Drawing on a broad notion of media…
Religion publique et médiation religieuse chez les musulmans mauriciens
The uses of sound reproduction among Mauritian Muslims illustrate the links between public religion and religious mediation. These two dimensions of religion rely on material objects and media technologies, coalescing in what are frequently the same media practices. In this essay I investigate the ambiguous relationships between these two mediated forms of religion, tracing their mutually supporting and conflictual relationships. Their articulati…
Mediality and materiality in religious performance
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 perform…
Media and Religious Diversity
This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious diversity and difference, the second strand of research looks at the interaction of religious difference and …
Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, and Islamic Piety Movements in Mauritius
For many Mauritian Muslims the participation in transnational piety movements is inseparably linked to what they consider to be modern and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Taking the growth of Islamic idioms and movements among Mauritian Muslims as an example, in this paper I argue for a more complex understanding of the links between contemporary Islamic piety movements and current trends of globalization. Moreover, the Mauritian state also encourages t…
The anthropology of media and the question of ethnic and religious pluralism
This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and their functioning also require more comparative analysis, as they impact public spheres and claims to aut…
Language Revitalization and New Technologies
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 p…
Technologies of the spirit
Users of contemporary media technology in religious settings often oscillate between immediacy in spiritual interaction and the increasing complexity and visibility of media technology as human artifacts. Drawing on approaches to mediation from philosophy and media theory, I examine Mauritian Muslims' uses of sound reproduction in performing a devotional genre to show how theological assumptions about mediation shape the domestication of media te…
Temporalities of Community
Temporal indexicality is deeply involved in the production of imagined communities. This article shows how the cultivation of Hindi as an "ancestral language" among Hindus in Mauritius mediates between two different modes of temporality while shaping diasporic identities. Diasporic ideologies of ancestral language are further shown to articulate with the creation of sacred geographies in the context of an annual Hindu pilgrimage
As Makkah is sweet and beloved, so is Madina
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 s…
Materialities of Entextualization
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 shap…
The politics of diaspora and the morality of secularism
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 religi…
Suggestions of Movement
In this essay I make a case for the analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable, yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an Islamic setting. Focusing on the recitation of devotional poetry in honor of the Prophet Muhammad among Mauritian Muslims, I seek to bring together neo-phenomenological approaches to sonic atmospheres with recent anthropological research on the voice that seeks to overcome the oppositio…
Creole Publics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Register levels of ethno-national purity
Language is involved in processes of group identification in that it provides a focus for explicit discourses of identity and constitutes a field of less overt practices for creating groupness. Drawing on examples from Mauritian television broadcasting, this study traces the ethnicization of Mauritian Bhojpuri as a “Hindu language” through the hierarchization and subsuming of linguistic practices under larger language labels with ethno-national s…
Mediating Disjunctures of Time
In this article, I approach regimes of time as a medial question, examining the interplay of different temporalities in ritual and media practices among Hindus in Mauritius and Twelver Shi'ite Muslims in Mumbai. These interactions consist of fluctuations between modernist linear modes of time and suspensions of the distinctions of past, present, and future as the performative outcome of certain ritual practices. Drawing on a broad notion of media…
Atmospheric resonance
Because of its material characteristics, the sonic poses a challenge to the influential paradigm of religion as mediation. This article makes a case for a neo-phenomenological analytic of atmospheres in order to do justice to the sonic in anthropological approaches to religion. Approaching the sonic as atmospheric half-things, I propose a different understanding of religious mediation from the one developed in contexts where images, objects, and …
Atmospheric Citizenship
In Mumbai the sonic dimensions of place-making and religious life are deeply connected to the right to the city. For Twelver Shi'i Muslims, who are marginal to both the city and the nation, public religious rituals and processions have long played very important roles in staging claims to the city. Investigating the sonic aspects of urban place-making, including its religious dimensions, this essay draws on an analytic of atmospheres in order to …
Atmospheres
In this essay, I introduce an analytic of atmosphere as a way to bridge the gap between the phenomenology of the felt-body and the anthropology of the senses. This analytic of atmospheres as multisensoriality partially aligns with, but also differs from other anthropological approaches to multisensoriality or the anthropology of the senses. Examining the meaningfulness of atmospheres as spatially extended emotions from a neo-phenomenological pers…
Religious Media, Devotional Islam, and the Morality of Ethnic Pluralism in Mauritius
Media, Citizenship, and Religious Mobilization
The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi'ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its …
Reconsidering mediatization of religion
This article proposes a rethinking of religion and mediatization by differentiating between two intersections of religion and media, public religion and religious mediation. I argue that whenever religious change that can be usefully described as mediatization occurs it can best be captured as an effect resulting from the interaction of these two dimensions. Extending the debate on religion and mediatization beyond Christian North Atlantic contex…
Media authenticity and authority in Mauritius
Religion and Diaspora
Orientation towards a point of political and historical allegiance outside the boundaries of the nation-state is often taken to be a defining quality of diasporas, and this aligns with the ubiquitous tendency of Islamic practice to engage with sources of long-distance, or indeed global, religious authority. In this article, I shall investigate the dimensions of religious and political long-distance allegiances by analysing Mauritian Muslims as a …
Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, and Islamic Piety Movements in Mauritius
For many Mauritian Muslims the participation in transnational piety movements is inseparably linked to what they consider to be modern and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Taking the growth of Islamic idioms and movements among Mauritian Muslims as an example, in this paper I argue for a more complex understanding of the links between contemporary Islamic piety movements and current trends of globalization. Moreover, the Mauritian state also encourages t…
Latent Cosmologies, Latent Media
In this essay, I argue that the temporal figure of latency is central for an understanding of the material temporalities of media. Latency as a tempo- ral figure is built into the material functioning of sound reproduction and audiovisual media. The discussion shows how latency underpins techni- cal processes of storing and reproducing sounds and moving images in a broad sense, while analyzing mediatic latency in Twelver Shi‘i media prac- tices i…
Introduction
In this introduction to our special collection, we discuss the theoretical forebears that inform our guiding concept of "material temporalities" with an eye to the collection's impact on contemporary debates in anthropology and beyond. To begin, we situate "material temporalities" in relation to the temporal and material turns that have reoriented anthropology in recent years. In particular, we emphasize the dual property of material temporalitie…
From Race to Religion in a Creole Society
Mauritian Muslims have undergone a long process of religious standardization and sectarian segmentation. How have sharp religious boundaries such as those that separate Muslims from Hindus and Christians, as well as those that divide Muslims internally along sectarian lines emerged in a creole society such as Mauritius? This article traces how religionization has supplanted race as the chief category of incorporation of people of Indian origins i…
Diaspora, temporality, and politics
In this contribution, I take up Michael Nijhawan's focus on the embodied aspects of memory and time he elaborates so insightfully in "The Precarious Diasporas of Sikh and Ahmadiyya Generations", specifically his invocation of, via Veena Das's work, of Bergson's distinction between translational and rotational time. Drawing on examples from my own work on Hindu diasporas in Mauritius and the ways in which processes of diasporization in Mauritius h…
Mediality and materiality in religious performance
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 perform…
Neil DeVotta, Blowback
Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 204. Hb $55.00, Pb $22.95. In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism …
Language Ideological Debates
Language Ideological Debates. Jan Blommaert. ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. viii. 447 pp., photographs, index
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic Anthropology:. Reader. Alessandro Duranti. ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 493 pp
Language Revitalization and New Technologies
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 p…
Register levels of ethno-national purity
Language is involved in processes of group identification in that it provides a focus for explicit discourses of identity and constitutes a field of less overt practices for creating groupness. Drawing on examples from Mauritian television broadcasting, this study traces the ethnicization of Mauritian Bhojpuri as a “Hindu language” through the hierarchization and subsuming of linguistic practices under larger language labels with ethno-national s…
Temporalities of Community
Temporal indexicality is deeply involved in the production of imagined communities. This article shows how the cultivation of Hindi as an "ancestral language" among Hindus in Mauritius mediates between two different modes of temporality while shaping diasporic identities. Diasporic ideologies of ancestral language are further shown to articulate with the creation of sacred geographies in the context of an annual Hindu pilgrimage
Neil DeVotta, Blowback
Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 204. Hb $55.00, Pb $22.95. In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism …
As Makkah is sweet and beloved, so is Madina
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 s…
The politics of diaspora and the morality of secularism
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 religi…
Creole Publics
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Creating the Creole Island
Technologies of the spirit
Users of contemporary media technology in religious settings often oscillate between immediacy in spiritual interaction and the increasing complexity and visibility of media technology as human artifacts. Drawing on approaches to mediation from philosophy and media theory, I examine Mauritian Muslims' uses of sound reproduction in performing a devotional genre to show how theological assumptions about mediation shape the domestication of media te…
Religious Media, Devotional Islam, and the Morality of Ethnic Pluralism in Mauritius
Materialities of Entextualization
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 shap…
The anthropology of media and the question of ethnic and religious pluralism
This essay discusses anthropological approaches to the study of media interacting with contexts of ethnic and religious diversity. The main argument is that not only issues of access to and exclusion from public spheres are relevant for an understanding of media and pluralism. Background assumptions and ideologies about media technologies and their functioning also require more comparative analysis, as they impact public spheres and claims to aut…
Introduction
Anybody posing the question 'What is a medium?' has to confront the great multiplicity and broad range of the items and phenomena that have been considered a medium in the scholarly literature. Certainly, for many authors the field of media vastly exceeds the realm of communication technology in an everyday sense. To give an impression, in a recent survey of the field, the following objects and phenomena were listed as having been labelled a medi…
Media authenticity and authority in Mauritius
Media and Religious Diversity
This review addresses recent work on media practices in situations of religious diversity. I hereby distinguish three approaches in this literature: the media politics of diversity, religious diversity and the public sphere, and the diversity of religious mediations. Whereas the first focuses on the control of representations of religious diversity and difference, the second strand of research looks at the interaction of religious difference and …
Cosmopolitanism, Globalization, and Islamic Piety Movements in Mauritius
For many Mauritian Muslims the participation in transnational piety movements is inseparably linked to what they consider to be modern and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Taking the growth of Islamic idioms and movements among Mauritian Muslims as an example, in this paper I argue for a more complex understanding of the links between contemporary Islamic piety movements and current trends of globalization. Moreover, the Mauritian state also encourages t…
Mediality and materiality in religious performance
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 perform…
Religion publique et médiation religieuse chez les musulmans mauriciens
The uses of sound reproduction among Mauritian Muslims illustrate the links between public religion and religious mediation. These two dimensions of religion rely on material objects and media technologies, coalescing in what are frequently the same media practices. In this essay I investigate the ambiguous relationships between these two mediated forms of religion, tracing their mutually supporting and conflictual relationships. Their articulati…
Media, Citizenship, and Religious Mobilization
The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi'ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its …
Mediating Disjunctures of Time
In this article, I approach regimes of time as a medial question, examining the interplay of different temporalities in ritual and media practices among Hindus in Mauritius and Twelver Shi'ite Muslims in Mumbai. These interactions consist of fluctuations between modernist linear modes of time and suspensions of the distinctions of past, present, and future as the performative outcome of certain ritual practices. Drawing on a broad notion of media…
Religion and Diaspora
Orientation towards a point of political and historical allegiance outside the boundaries of the nation-state is often taken to be a defining quality of diasporas, and this aligns with the ubiquitous tendency of Islamic practice to engage with sources of long-distance, or indeed global, religious authority. In this article, I shall investigate the dimensions of religious and political long-distance allegiances by analysing Mauritian Muslims as a …
Reconsidering mediatization of religion
This article proposes a rethinking of religion and mediatization by differentiating between two intersections of religion and media, public religion and religious mediation. I argue that whenever religious change that can be usefully described as mediatization occurs it can best be captured as an effect resulting from the interaction of these two dimensions. Extending the debate on religion and mediatization beyond Christian North Atlantic contex…
Sounding Islam
Sounding Islam provides a provocative account of the sonic dimensions of religion, combining perspectives from the anthropology of media and sound studies, as well as drawing on neo-phenomenological approaches to atmospheres. Using long-term ethnographic research on devotional Islam in Mauritius, Patrick Eisenlohr explores how the voice, as a site of divine manifestation, becomes refracted in media practices that have become integral parts of rel…
Sociology (32 works) · Philosophy (27 works) · Law (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Aesthetics (15 works) · Islam (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works)