Mediating Disjunctures of Time: Ancestral Chronotopes in Ritual and Media Practices

Abstract

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 and mediality, I trace the links between shifting states in the functioning of media and the oscillation between the different notions of temporality examined. Analyzing their interconnectedness in ancestral politics and religious mobilizations, I show how media practices provide ways to navigate the heterochronies that characterize such politics and activism.

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