Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Halal (literally, “permissible” or “lawful”) production, trade, and standards have become essential to state-regulated Islam and to companies in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore, giving these two countries a special position in the rapidly expanding global market for halal products: in these nations state bodies certify halal products as well as spaces (shops, factories, and restaurants) and work processes, and so consumers can find state halal-certified products from Malaysia and Singapore in shops around the world. Building on ethnographic material from Malaysia, Singapore, and Europe, the book Islam, Standards, and Technoscience: In Global Halal Zones provides an exploration of the role of halal production, trade, and standards. Fischer explains how the global markets for halal comprise divergent zones in which Islam, markets, regulatory institutions, and technoscience interact and diverge. Focusing on the “bigger institutional picture” that frames everyday halal consumption, Fischer provides a multisited ethnography of the overlapping technologies and techniques of production, trade, and standards that together warrant a product as “halal,” and thereby help to format the market. Exploring global halal in networks, training, laboratories, activism, companies, shops and restaurants, this book will be an essential resource to scholars and students of social science interested in the global interface zones between religion, standards, and technoscience. This is the book’s website: https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138954182.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Johan Fischer is Associate Professor and Head of Studies (International Development Studies) in the Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark. His work focuses on modern religion and consumer culture in Southeast Asia and Europe. More specifically, Johan explores the interfaces between class, consumption, market relations, Islam and the state in a globalized world. A central focus in this research is the theoretical and empirical focus on the proliferation of religious commodities and services on a global scale. He is the author of Proper Islamic Consumption: Shopping among the Malays in Modern Malaysia (NIAS Press 2008), The Halal Frontier: Muslim Consumers in a Globalized Market (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), Islam, Standards, and Technoscience: In Global Halal Zones (Routledge 2015), the co-edited volume Halal Matters: Islam, Politics and Markets in Global Perspective (Routledge 2015) and the co-authored Between Religion, Regulation and Consumption: Globalising Kosher and Halal Markets (Manchester University Press 2016) as well as numerous articles in journals and edited volumes.

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