UVicSpace | Institutional Repository
UVicSpace is the University of Victoria’s open access scholarship and learning repository. It preserves and provides access to the digital scholarly works of UVic faculty, students, staff, and partners. Items in UVicSpace are organized into collections, each belonging to a community.
For more information about depositing items, see the Submission Guidelines.
Recent Submissions
Economy in practice: Islamic finance and the problem of market reason
(American Ethnologist, 2014) Rudnyckyj, Daromir
Proponents of Islamic finance are working to make Kuala Lumpur the “New York of the Muslim World”: the central node in a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial system. Amidst this ambitious project, I document how Islamic finance experts represent economic rationality as an object of reflection and I examine their responses to the economism intrinsic to market reason. Islamic finance is not wholly opposed to economic rationality, but the market calculations endemic to what experts term “conventional finance” serve as an unavoidable point of reference, comparison, and differentiation. I refer to reflection on economic rationality as “economy in practice,” a conceptualization that seeks to illuminate the various techniques through which humans are made economic subjects.
Circulating tears and managing hearts: Governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory
(Anthropological Theory, 2011) Rudnyckyj, Daromir
This article argues that moderate Islamic spiritual training programs in contemporary Indonesia entail ‘governing through affect’. This formulation captures the embodied dispositions and ritual forms through which affect is mobilized to serve as a modality of government. Based on over two years of ethnographic research in Indonesia, most of which took place at Krakatau Steel in western Java, I examine the affective incitements that took place in ritual settings dedicated toward corporate productivity and self-improvement. The article argues that this process of subjectification took place in three stages. First, what participants referred to as ‘opening the heart’, which involved making participants receptive to the message of work as worship through recourse to affective enactments in Islamic history and discourse. Second, the circulation of tears, which refers to deep collective weeping which simultaneously represented and physically enacted the adoption of a new subjectivity. Finally, ‘managing the heart’ — the ultimate goal of spiritual training — was a form of self-management in which one exercised ‘built-in control’ and acted in ways that were deemed simultaneously conducive to corporate competitiveness and other-worldly salvation. I conclude that affect constitutes the virtuality of ritual insofar as it is the medium through which spiritual reform enters into the vital processes of human life.
Market Islam in Indonesia
(Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2009) Rudnyckyj, Daromir
This paper argues that in contemporary Indonesia development is increasingly being posed as an ethical, rather than a political and economic, problem. I demonstrate this change by describing one of several moderate Islamic ‘spiritual reform’ movements that are active in state-owned enterprises, government offices, and private companies. These initiatives combine business management principles and techniques from popular life-coaching seminars with Muslim practice. I term this assemblage ‘market Islam’ and contrast it with what has been labelled ‘civil Islam’. I argue that market Islam seeks less to create commensurability between Islam and democracy and is instead designed to merge Muslim religious practice and capitalist ethics. Market Islam is thus less concerned with state power and the articulation of politics and religion, and more focused on eliciting the ethical dispositions conducive to economic liberalism. It is thus designed to create a form of effective self-management by making ‘people better from the inside’ and ‘breaking boundaries’ that are seen to afflict Indonesian development, such as those between Indonesia and other countries, between religion and work, and between individuals and the corporations for which they work. I conclude that market Islam is neither fundamentalist nor conservative, but rather involves breaking a series of boundaries that were constitutive of Indonesian modernity. Résumé Le présent article soutient que dans l’Indonésie contemporaine, le développement est de plus en plus présenté comme un problème éthique plus que politique et économique. L’auteur met en évidence ce changement en décrivant l’un des multiples mouvements de « réforme spirituelle » islamiques modérés à l’œuvre dans les entreprises d’État, les administrations et les sociétés privées. Ces initiatives combinent les principes et techniques de gestion d’entreprise issues de séminaires de coaching populaires avec la pratique de l’islam. L’auteur désigne cet assemblage par l’appellation « islam de marché» et le confronte à l’islam dit « civil ». Il affirme que l’islam de marché essaie non pas de créer des repères communs entre l’islam et la démocratie, mais de fusionner pratique religieuse musulmane et éthique capitaliste. L’islam de marché s’intéresse donc moins à la puissance de l’État et à l’articulation de la politique et de la religion qu’à la mise en place des dispositions éthiques conduisant au libéralisme économique. Il est donc conçu pour créer une forme d’autogestion efficace, en « rendant les gens meilleurs de l’intérieur » et en « brisant les barrières » qui grèvent le développement de l’Indonésie : barrières entre l’Indonésie et les autres pays, entre religion et travail, entre les individus et les entreprises pour lesquelles ils travaillent. L’auteur conclut que l’islam de marché n’est ni fondamentaliste ni conservateur, mais vise plutôt à abattre diverses cloisons inhérentes à la modernité en Indonésie.
From Wall Street to "halal" street: Malaysia and the globalization of Islamic finance
(The Journal of Asian Studies, 2013) Rudnyckyj, Daromir
Malaysia's plans to become a transnational hub for Islamic finance represent an effort to mobilize religion to create new global networks for the circulation of capital. This article first contextualizes such efforts within the broader contours of Malaysia's political history, addressing the classification of ethnicity and religion by both the colonial and postcolonial states. The article describes how Islamic finance is defined by practitioners in Malaysia and explains the key features they invoke to distinguish it from what they call "conventional finance". Finally, it identifies the steps undertaken by the state to make the country a global center of Islamic finance. As the recent financial crises have shaken confidence in North Atlantic financial systems, Malaysia is geographically and culturally well-positioned between two emergent economic regions currently at the forefront of global economic growth.
Regimes of self-improvement: Globalization and the will to work
(Social Text, 2014) Rudnyckyj, Daromir
This article examines two projects of subjectification that seek to inculcate a will to work that animates contemporary globalization. Based on ethnographic research at Krakatau Steel, one of Indonesia’s largest state-owned companies, the article contrasts the differing implementation of the American Mormon Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits training program and the Indonesian Muslim Ary Ginanjar’s Emotional and Spiritual Quotient leadership training program. The article focuses on the different ways in which religion is mobilized in each project of subjectification and the opposing manner in which affect is deployed. Both projects seek to create a regime of self-improvement that is simultaneously demanded by, and constitutive of, economic integration and increasing transnational competition. Both of these techniques for work on the will were deployed to resolve the inescapable specter of corporate competitiveness and the calculative rationality upon which it is premised. The broad appeal of these programs lies not so much in their content as in their object: a will to work that is elicited to meet the demands of the day.