Spiritual Economies

Rudnyckyj's book challenges widespread assumptions about contemporary Islam by showing how moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia are reinterpreting Islam not to reject modernity but to create business practices conducive to globalization.

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Assistant Professor in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria.

In the clearly written and strongly argued Spiritual Economies, Daromir Rudnyckyj brings together the anthropology of development and globalization and the anthropology of the rising Islamic piety movement to show that religious resurgence can be part of globalizing economic development, not necessarily a refuge from it. He traces many of Indonesia's recent political and religious transformations from the vantage point of a steel factory, where the ESQ spiritual training program combines spiritual guidance, business success training, and a vision of Islam as predictive and encompassing of science and technology.

George E. Marcus, author of Ethnography Through Thick and Thin:

In anthropology, the value of inspiring ideas in any period depends on their realization in convincing ethnographic achievements. In this regard, Spiritual Economies is a bravura performance: at the site of Krakatau Steel, it shows the power and kinship of experiments in neoliberal economy, religious revival, ethnography—and para-ethnography—all in the same frame.