Flexible Piety:Middle Class Consumption and Islamic Value(s) in Urban Indonesia

Carla Jones, University of Colorado

The rise in Indonesian Islamic public culture in urban Indonesia over the past decade is a source of discussion not only by scholars and observers outside the country, but by cultural, religious and political actors within Indonesia. In this paper, I will situate Indonesian debates about the popularity of Islamic public culture in the context of theoretical treatments of consumption and mass culture. While much recent work on the new Islamicism in Indonesia addresses the political or global security aspects of the phenomenon, I argue that attention to conversations about faith through the lens of things, specifically religiously-identified commodities, reveals national tensions that are classed and gendered. Rather than reducing objects to mute tools in the service of human agency, or animated fetishes that occlude the banality and brutality of capital, I will discuss suspicion of the rise of busana Muslim as "mere fashion," and by extension ask how we might better understand the borders among the sensory, materiality and piety.

Carla Jones is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2001. Her research interests are in the areas of cultural anthropology, gender and middle-class subjectivity, mass media and consumption, visual culture, globalization, governmentality and modernity, southeast Asia and Indonesia.

For current Yale SEAS Seminars and Events schedule, see: http://www.yale.edu/seas/Seminars.htm