Proper Islamic Consumption addresses issues that are both timely and important. Fischer convincingly argues that the Malaysian state has taken on the certification of halal commodities as part of its attempt to nationalize Islam and has effected a Malaysian ontology of consumption that is poised between individual consumer desires, social anxieties, and halalization (p. 102). As part of a neoliberal paradigm within the framework of a “Malaysianised mode of millennial capitalism,” the state has continued to deliver a steady stream of privileges to the Malay middle class in return for patriotic consumption or “shopping for the state.” These privileges have come at a cost, however. The price of proper Islamic consumption in the case of Malaysia, Fischer observes, is deepening state authoritarianism.
Reviewed by Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Boston University, Journal of Asian Studies, 69 (1), 2010
Fischer's description of religious consumerism in Malaysia demonstrates that no study of Muslim revivalism today can have any salience without considering its intimate relations with global capitalism.
Reviewed by Faisal Devji, The New School for Social Research, author of Landscapes of the Jihad, Blurb
Johan Fischer reveals here the cross-currents of Malaysia's ambitious experiment in Islamic national capitalism. ...a heady mixture of patriotic shopping, ethnic politics and religious morality whose implications have global significance.
Reviewed by Keith Hart, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Blurb
[T]his book is an excellent study that is lucidly written, strongly informed by theory, rich in ethnography, and empirically grounded. It has blazed a new trail in employing the tools of both religious studies and cultural studies to dissect the complex subject of “proper Islamic consumption”. It is a must-read for researchers and students alike, especially those who want to pursue their study on the middle class, Islam and consumption.
Reviewed by Prof. Abdul Rahman Embong, Asian Anthropology
This volume does make an important contribution to our understanding of the responses of socially mobile, religiously committed communities to the opportunities and perils presented by modernisation. It also tells us something about the debates concerning the meanings and practices of Islam within an aggressive, globalised, secularised modernity. In Malaysia this is an especially intriguing issue because it is the Malay‐dominated state which has been crucial in generating and shaping a particular kind of modernity in order to address the problems posed for nation‐building by a quite radical form of ethnic pluralism.
Reviewed by V.T. (Terry) King, University of Leeds, ASEASUK News 46, 2009
In spite of a long line of social theory analyzing the spiritual in the economic, and vice versa, very little of the recent increase in scholarship on Islam addresses its relationship with capitalism. Johan Fischer’s book, Proper Islamic Consumption, begins to fill this gap. […] Fischer’s detailed description of lives and choices that are often out of sight is to be commended. There remain too few ethnographies about the multiple ways of being middle-class, perhaps because of anthropological anxieties about sameness or assumptions that the middle classes are uniformly unaware of their privileges.
Reviewed by Carla Jones, University of Colorado, Boulder, American Ethnologist, 37 (1), 2010
This is a path-breaking work ... [an] incedibly rich and finely textured ethnography.
Reviewed by Shamsul A. B., Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Blurb
See our latest catalogue of new books