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CHAIRPERSON

Dr Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Department of History, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The paper inquiries into the ways in which contemporary practices of Islamic microfinance in Indonesia conceive of, promote, and respond to ongoing popular demands for justice. Situated in the highly uncertain political landscape of post-reformasi Indonesia, the paper focuses on a complex set of indeterminate relations articulated amongst a multinational company as it discharges its corporate social responsibility obligations, a highly valued and innovative Islamic charitable organisation keen to implement an Islamic vision for a future national economy, and a restricted number of local people selected amongst the capital’s reservoir of poor, and considered earnest enough for enablement through the dispensation of micro-loans and assisted improvements in piety. Central to the analysis of this very modern assemblage is an emphasis on the contractual nature of rights and obligations incurred in the process as set out in a series of memorandums, agreements, notes, and reports circulated, revised, and signed by the parties involved. And yet, despite the concerted effort in processualizing justice in documents seeking to define with accuracy and precision respective relations, while disambiguating roles, terms and their understandings, a thinly disguised sense of unease and nervousness was pervasive, imbuing public meetings with an anxiety that could in private become outright frustration. The paper will reflect on justice as a force explicated in an unruly residue, itself capable of unsettling texts.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kostas Retsikas is a Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology of South East Asia at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Becoming – An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java (Anthem 2012), the editor of Value Transfers in South East Asia: Religion, Charity, and Subjectivity in an Era of Neoliberal Reform(South East Asia Research, 2017), and co-editor (with M. Marsden) of Articulating Islam: Anthropological Approaches to Muslim Worlds (Springer, 2012).

His latest field research was conducted in Surabaya and Jakarta in the early 2010s and was concerned with Islamic economics as a field of practice, especially as it pertains to zakat, the annual ritual of wealth transfer. He is currently in the process of completing a monograph that focuses on the effects Islamic economics performs on time. He is particularly interested in the ways in which Islamic economic practices are geared towards effecting future redemption both in the sense of delivering prosperity in this world and facilitating salvation in the next.

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