Daromir Rudnyckyj

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

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.

Assembling Islam and Liberalism: Market Freedom and the Moral Project of Islamic Finance

On March 1, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Doing Gods Work,” which highlighted the impressive growth of Islamic banking and finance and some of the challenges that faced the industry as it expanded at unprecedented rates. Before presenting data on the proliferation of Islamic bonds and an array of statistical indicators for the achievements of Islamic finance at large, the article opened with a suggestive vignette that highlighted some of the moral questions raised by Islamic finance: At a party in Karachi a young man cradles a glass of whiskey and laughs when asked why he is in the Islamic banking industry. “It is the fastest-growing sector in Pakistan,” he says. “I want to make money, so this is where I need to be. Who cares about religion?” A corporate-finance lawyer, who is a devout Muslim, gives a very different answer: “If you do not believe that Islam and its teachings can bring about positive change to the world, then you should not be in the business.” (Phillips 2010) The contrasting vignettes presented starkly different moral orientations toward managing Islamic money. On one hand, an Islamic banker is violating one of Islams central prohibitions and attributing his motivation to market forces; on the other is an industry player who saw Islamic finance as a moral project capable of social change. The central question that these contrasting vignettes raised was, How Islamic is Islamic finance? In other words, to what extent can Islamic finance, as a project simultaneously dedicated toward enacting Islamic values and facilitating capitalist economic action, successfully fulfill both mandates? Indeed this is a central question that animates many of those engaged in Islamic finance today and is a recurring problem for most practitioners. This problem was evident several weeks later when I attended a public forum at the ultramodern headquarters of Malaysias Securities Commission in the Bukit Kiara section of Kuala Lumpur. The meeting, jointly organized with the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, was titled “The Contribution of Islamic Finance, Post-Global Financial Crisis” and was headlined by a number of famous scholars and practitioners with international reputations in Islamic finance.

Islamizing finance: From magical capitalism to a spiritual economy

Anthropological analyses of the assemblage of religious practice and economic action have often been viewed as evidence of mystification and have focused on the ‘occult’ dimensions of late capitalism. In contrast, this article approaches the magic of capitalism not in terms of occult or millennial practices, but rather as the tricks and sleight of hand techniques deployed by economic experts. The article describes how the initial iteration of Islamic finance in Malaysia relied on what experts refer to as ‘tricks’ (hiyal) – legal stratagems that transformed impermissible contracts into ones capable of being deemed permissible by Islamic scholars. The article describes how today, experts are seeking to reform Islamic finance in Malaysia by creating a spiritual economy that moves away from a regime based on tricks to one based on eliciting the ethical practices conducive to neoliberalism: entrepreneurship, risk calculation, and cost-benefit analysis. In so doing, the article argues that the spiritual economy of Islamic finance seeks to create a regime of production and capital circulation grounded in the ethical principles and ascetic pieties of neoliberal Islam.