Study title

Translations of relevant edicts (fatwa), magazine articles and field notes of public events between September 2011 and September 2012 as part of an ethnographic study of the ways in which the inhabitants of the island of Java deal with market neo-liberalism and Muslim conceptions of moral behaviour, in particular how they support charities and behave in a charitable manner in their everyday lives.

The research is an ethnographic study investigating Muslim subjectivities in Indonesia as they are formed and enacted in the context of the deepening Islamisation and commodification of the country's economy. It aims at understanding the ways in which the inhabitants of the island of Java deal with the double imperatives of market neo-liberalism and Muslim conceptions of moral behaviour through visibly supporting appropriate charities and behaving charitably in their everyday lives. In particular, the research focuses on the renewed emphasis that zakat and other voluntary donations have assumed among middle class Muslims in contemporary Java, and the novel institutional forms that have arisen for their collection, management, and distribution in lieu with a series of neo-liberal economic reforms. The project will provide a qualitative, ethnographic account of the plurality of the ways that Islamic forms of charity are conceptualised and enacted in Java, investigate the wider historical and social contexts that account for the post-1998 effloresce of Islamic charitable institutions, and chart the complex and often ambivalent relations between donors, collectors, and recipients the circulation of alms creates.