The Deictics of Authenticity in Religious Performance

Mediality and materiality in religious performance: Religion as heritage in Mauritius Patrick Eisenlohr Centre for Modern Indian Studies University of Göttingen [Forthcoming in Material Religion] 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 paper 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. Key words: Diaspora, Hinduism, Islam, media, ritual, religious authority Frequently, the notions of heritage and religion stand in tension with each other, and the convergence of both might seem to require much explanation. In Mauritius, however, the two fields are widely regarded, by both state authorities and the broader public alike, as inseparably linked. Mauritius, as a former plantation colony with no precolonial population has adopted a nation-building strategy that not only highlights the fact that all Mauritians have origins in other parts of the world, but also makes the ongoing cultivation of links to diasporic origins central to membership in the Mauritian nation. The majority of Mauritians are therefore expected to adhere to officially designated “ancestral cultures” and also to study associated “ancestral languages” at school. Almost 70 per cent of the Mauritian population is of Indian origin. The large majority are descendants of indentured laborers who were brought to Mauritius to work in the sugar industry after the abolition of slavery in 1834, but they also include the descendants of free migrants who entered Mauritius as merchants with their own capital. 1 According to the constitution, Mauritians of Indian origin are officially classified as either Hindu or Muslim (52% and 17% of the population, respectively), while Hindus can be further subdivided into Hindus of north Indian background (41%) and smaller groups of Tamil, Telugu, and Maharashtrian origin. Middle-class Hindus of north Indian origin dominate the Mauritian government and state apparatus. Not only does religion play a decisive role in defining and delineating “communities” of Indo-Mauritians according to the constitution, but also the Mauritian state apparatus as well as most Mauritians in everyday contexts roundly identify their “ancestral cultures” and “ancestral languages” with religious traditions, different strands of Hinduism and Islam, respectively. Thus, a discourse according to which the production of heritage out of religious traditions might profanize religion and dilute the sacred quality of religious traditions does not seem to be very relevant to the issue of Mauritian “ancestral cultures.”1 In Mauritius the production of diasporic heritage officially referred to as ancestral cultures, a mode of non- homogenizing nation-building that intensifies “communal” boundaries between citizens, and Mauritians´ religious identifications and practices are tightly interconnected. Nevertheless, this is not to state that Mauritian religion is entirely unaffected by such a politics of heritagization, as the complex of “ancestral culture” is above all a meeting ground of religious traditions and state power. As such, religion as heritage in Mauritius inevitably raises questions of governmentality and the regulation of religion. This is all the more the case since the showcasing of diversity is the dominant nation- building strategy in Mauritius, and because among the different dimensions of diversity, religious difference is perhaps the most important. Not only does association with a recognized ancestral and religious tradition support claims to be part of the Mauritian diasporic mosaic, and therefore the nation defined accordingly. Mauritian state institutions actually place a lot of confidence in religious traditions to turn Mauritians into morally grounded and productive citizens capable of peaceful coexistence. This approach to regulating religion is informed by a Gandhian vision of religion according to which religion should not be sidelined in nation-building under conditions of great diversity. Instead, religion will turn Mauritians into good citizens, and therefore the state should support and encourage the cultivation of “ancestral culture.” Following this discourse and administrative practice, such “true” and supposedly authentic religion needs to be sharply distinguished from the destructive instrumentalization of religion for political ends that in Mauritius as in India is commonly referred to as “communalism.” It is this remarkable trust placed in the cultivation of such “genuine” religion coupled with its entanglement in state regulation due to the definition of religious boundaries, the financing and support of religious organizations and activities, and the enrolment of 2 students in the study of particular “ancestral languages” on a strictly ethno-religious basis that characterizes the production of religion as diasporic heritage in Mauritius. Modern state regulating and governing of religion is in fact a crucial format for the making of religious heritage that is widely identified with diasporic heritage in Mauritius. There, the claiming of diasporic links does not contradict the homogenizing tendencies of the modern nation state. On the contrary, such claims and their recognition actually constitute a predominant modus of nation-building. While the centrality of diasporic links drawing on religious networks is relatively obvious for students of Mauritian ethnic and religious diversity, the question remains how such links come to be produced and instantiated in a manner that appears convincing to many Mauritians. Essentially, this is the question of how the large qualitative, temporal and spatial gaps between the life-worlds of contemporary Mauritians, the world of their Indian ancestors, and centers of religious authority located elsewhere can be bridged. In this paper I analyze two examples of religious performance that aim at minimizing these distinctions. My suggestion is that we need to investigate the processes of mediation accomplishing this creation of plausible links across such substantial gaps in a manner that addresses the interconnected quality of their semiotic and their material dimensions. For this, an approach is needed that does not treat signification and materiality as opposites, but that takes account of the intertwining of both these dimensions of mediating across qualitative and spatio-temporal gaps. In my view, a Peircean approach to semiotics is best suited to overcoming the widely assumed opposition between immaterial signification and material presence of objects, especially through its deployment of the notions of indexicality and iconicity that encompass both (Peirce 1932, Parmentier 1994, Silverstein 1993). The question of religious mediation evokes a new emphasis on studying contemporary media practices in religious settings while being aware of the intrinsic links between religion and media. Such links exist since religion always involves processes of interaction between practitioners and a religious otherworld, however conceived, that are supported by a broad range of media technologies (Lutgendorf, 1995, Morris 2002, Meyer 2006: 302-304, Schulz, 2006, de Vries, 2001: 28). Further, we also need to be particularly attentive to the local conceptualizations and ideologies of the material. The different modes of materiality are especially important in the contexts of religious performance and mediation I am going to analyze here, as in recent critiques of a notion of religion centered on belief, the material dimensions of religion have drawn much scholarly attention (Meyer 2012, Meyer and Houtman 2012). A renewed focus on the material is a much-needed corrective to a 3 situation in which “the study of religion itself has inherited the Enlightenment project of the evolution of religion toward interiority, transcendence, and reason, indeed toward religion´s evaporation" (Meyer and Houtman 2012: 16). One of my goals in this essay is to emphasize the interdependence of the semiotic and material perspectives on religious phenomena, as I seek to account for processes of religious mediation that accomplish a rapprochement of religious practitioners with deities, while at the same time also narrowing a perceived diasporic gap. The forms of religious mediation I analyze in this article also authenticate religion as heritage in the specific setting of Mauritius, where the cultivation of diasporic origins based on religion are an important means of inclusion in the nation.

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