Subjects of debt: Financial subjectification and collaborative risk in Malaysian Islamic finance

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dc.contributor.authorRudnyckyj, Daromir
dc.date.accessioned2025-06-04T15:55:07Z
dc.date.available2025-06-04T15:55:07Z
dc.date.issued2017
dc.description.abstractThis article argues the Malaysian state has developed Islamic finance in conjunction with two distinct strategies of subject formation. In its first phase, in the 1980s, a central objective was the financial inclusion of Malays. Islamic finance was part of an identity-building project and intended to integrate this disadvantaged indigenous majority into the national economy. By the 2000s the state had succeeded in fostering a Malay Muslim middle class through aggressive affirmative action policies. Currently, Islamic finance is being redeployed as a technique for the neoliberal entrepreneurialization of the Malay Muslim population. Empirically, this shift is evident in efforts by experts to move Islamic finance away from a reliance on what they call “debt-based” devices to ones referred to as “equity based.” This entails substituting devices that reformers contend replicate the credit and lending instruments characteristic of “conventional finance” with instruments instead premised on investment, partnership, and risk sharing that they argue more faithfully adhere to the discursive tradition of Islam. [Islam, development, neoliberalism, Islamic finance, debt]
dc.description.reviewstatusReviewed
dc.description.scholarlevelFaculty
dc.description.sponsorshipGenerous material support for this project was provided thorough an Insight Development Grant and a Standard Research Grant, both from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
dc.identifier.citationRudnyckyj, D. (2017). Subjects of Debt: Financial subjectification and collaborative risk in Malaysian Islamic Finance. American Anthropologist, 119(2), 269–283. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12861
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12861
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/22333
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherAmerican Anthropologist
dc.titleSubjects of debt: Financial subjectification and collaborative risk in Malaysian Islamic finance
dc.typePostprint

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