Circulating tears and managing hearts: Governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory

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dc.contributor.authorRudnyckyj, Daromir
dc.date.accessioned2025-06-04T15:55:08Z
dc.date.available2025-06-04T15:55:08Z
dc.date.issued2011
dc.description.abstractThis 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.
dc.description.reviewstatusReviewed
dc.description.scholarlevelFaculty
dc.description.sponsorshiphis research was enabled with material support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council; the United States-Indonesia Society; a University of Victoria Internal Research Grant; and Fulbright-Hays.
dc.identifier.citationRudnyckyj, D. (2011). Circulating tears and managing hearts: Governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory. Anthropological Theory, 11(1), 63–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499610395444
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.1177/1463499610395444
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1828/22340
dc.language.isoen
dc.publisherAnthropological Theory
dc.subjectaffect
dc.subjectglobalization
dc.subjectgovernmentality
dc.subjectIndonesia
dc.subjectIslam
dc.subjectreligious movements
dc.subjectritual
dc.subjectsubjectification
dc.titleCirculating tears and managing hearts: Governing through affect in an Indonesian steel factory
dc.typePostprint

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