Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices

Abstract

One afternoon in July 2010, I was sitting in Shareef's living room in a village in central Mauritius. Shareef is a schoolteacher and was also the president (mutawalli) of the local mosque. He is widely known in Mauritius as a reciter of na't, a genre of Urdu devotional poetry that honors the Prophet Muhammad. In collaboration with other Mauritian reciters of na't (na't khwan), he has released nine collections of na't audio-CD recordings, and he has more recently also published na't recordings on YouTube. At the beginning of our conversation I had asked him for an example of what he thought was an appropriate way of reciting na't.As we were talking about events that had happened in our lives since our first encounter some seven years earlier, Shareef switched from Mauritian Creole, the predominant French-lexifier vernacular language of Mauritius in which we conversed, 1 to Urdu and suddenly started reciting. I had reached his house just before a heavy rain set in, darkening the sky, and now the hissing sounds of car and bus tires rolling on wet asphalt entered through the window from the nearby main road that passed along the edge of the village. In a slow, elegiac air, Shareef recited two lines of na't poetry:

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

“…These works are linked to a related question of publics and audience, as Shankman () explored through an analysis of the public anthropology of Margaret Mead. Several broke new ground in engaging directly with sound as an object of ethnographic inquiry, either as a means to analyze democratic protest and the “roar of the crowd” in Nepal (Kunreuther ), devotional poetry in Mauritius (Eisenlohr ), and state power through noise ordinances in urban Brazil (Cardoso ).…”

Voices of masculinity: Men’s talk in Hungarian university dormitories

“…As an analytic concept, voicing makes it possible to draw a distinction between the speaker and the identities represented through his or her contribution to the interaction (Gal, 2016: 119; Eisenlohr, 2018). With respect to gender and sexuality research, it means that the presence of a ‘masculine’ voice in a discourse is not essentially linked to the interactant’s gender.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2018: Signifying Movement

“…For example, several studies that appeared in 2018 attend to the embodied materiality of voice to highlight the political and phenomenological consequences that derive from ideological conceptions of sound and the body. Kunreuther's () account of participatory democracy amidst the vibrant soundscapes of Kathmandu critiques the liberal notion of political voice that excludes from itself the embodied and the sonic, while Eisenlohr's () work on the performance of Muslim devotional prayers in the South Asian diaspora in Mauritius calls us to consider the phenomenologically felt body as a site for questioning the dichotomy of discursive signification and sonic materiality. Others pay attention to the interdiscursive processes that may take place cross‐medially and their effects on the constitution and reproduction of institutional power.…”