Muslim Moralities in Asian Capitalisms - Sponsored by the South Asian Muslim Studies Association (SAMSA)

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

This panel – sponsored by the South Asia Muslim Studies Association – examines the relationship between Muslim moral traditions and advanced capitalisms in South and Southeast Asia. The relationship of morality and economies in Asia has long been the subject of social scientific inquiry. Max Weber theorized Confucian ethics as guiding literati’s pursuit of position over profit, while French sociologist Marcel Mauss found Melanesian gift moralities to be “kernels” of modern markets. Contemporary research by Asianists has built on and complicated understandings of how capitalist economies are both “embedded” in societies and their ethical traditions, and transformative of them. Research on “market cultures” (Hefner 1998), “spiritual economies” (Rudnyckyj 2010), and “enterprise culture” (Osella and Osella 2009; Sloane-White 2006) has greatly facilitated our recognition that capitalism is not singular in its organization or ethical bases, but necessarily plural and “vernacular” (Hamilton 2006; Rudner 1993). Yet, scholars remain divided whether morality is a necessary and important part of capitalist systems, and/or whether “moral economies” are at odds with the expansion of capitalism (e.g. Scott 1976, 1985; Edelman 2005; Sivaramakrishnan 2005; Griffith 2009). The panel opens with remarks on Asianists’ contributions to this theoretical puzzle before the inter-disciplinary, inter-regional presentations. The case studies explore ways in which modern moral traditions extend vernacular capitalisms and, conversely, where they challenge or redirect market-based rationalities. We also examine the ways in which capitalist agencies and power violate or engage local ethical traditions as Asian economies are fast becoming 21st-century hubs of finance and growth.

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Christopher Brennan Taylor, George Mason University

Chair

• Filippo Osella, University of Sussex

Individual Presentations

• Ethics as Performance: Islamic Fund Managers as Agents of Financialization - Laura Elder, Saint Mary's College Notre Dame

• Investing Islamic Alms: The Moral Returns of Charity among Indian Muslims - Christopher Brennan Taylor, George Mason University

• Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility (I-CSR) in Malaysia: Beyond Western Frameworks - Patricia Sloane-White, University of Delaware

• Capitalism and the Struggle for an Islamic Economic Ethics in Contemporary Indonesia - Robert W. Hefner, Boston University

Discussant

• Filippo Osella, University of Sussex