 
PATRICK EISENLOHR Assistant Professor, Linguistic Anthropology Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001 314-935-6607 Vita peisenlo[at]artsci.wustl.edu |
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PATRICK EISENLOHR Assistant Professor, Linguistic Anthropology Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2001 314-935-6607 Vita peisenlo[at]artsci.wustl.edu |
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My research is about linguistic and media practices in transnational settings, especially their role in the making of religious authority and subjectivity. I study how social relations emerge through the interaction of politically charged ideas about language and media with the formal and material properties of language and media technologies.
My work on Mauritius traces the ways in which the social and political world of Indo-Mauritians is constituted and transformed by linguistic images and practices, in particular through links between language and temporality. In order to illustrate these transformations, I analyze language shift, register differentiation, creolization, as well as competing forms of citizenship in Mauritius, stressing how these phenomena are mediated and driven by a preoccupation with the ancestral quality of language. In this way, my research aims at the integration of insights and methods derived from linguistic anthropology with approaches to nationalism and diasporization developed in other disciplinary fields.
More recently, I have begun to research the intersection of electronic media and religious tradition among Muslims in Mauritius and India, especially their uses of sound reproduction. I am interested in how media practices articulate with other modes of circulating and recontextualizing religious discourse, and how they have become part of the production of religious subjects.
Language, Culture and Society, Religion and Media, Language and Politics, Language and Gender, Diasporas and Transnationalism, Anthropology of Nationalism
Eisenlohr, Patrick
2006 Little India: Diaspora, Time and Ethnolinguistic Belonging in Hindu Mauritius. Berkeley: University of California Press.
2006 The politics of diaspora and the morality of secularism: Muslim identities and Islamic authority in Mauritius. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(2)
2006 As Makkah is sweet and beloved, so is Madina: Islam, devotional genres and electronic mediation in Mauritius. American Ethnologist 33(2)
2004 Language Revitalization and New Technologies: Cultures of Electronic Mediation and the Refiguring of Communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:21-45
2004 Temporalities of Community: 'Ancestral Language,' Pilgrimage and Diasporic Belonging in Mauritius. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14(1): 81-98
2004 Register levels of ethno-national purity: The ethnicization of language and community in Mauritius. Language in Society 33(1): 59-80.
2003 Die indische Diaspora. In: Indien heute. Brennpunkte seiner Innenpolitik. Subratra K. Mitra and Bernd Rill, eds. pp. 183-191. München, Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung.
2002 Language and identity in an Indian diaspora: 'Multiculturalism' and ethno-linguistic communities in Mauritius. Internationales Asienforum/International Quarterly of Asian Studies 33(1-2): 101-114.
