Of the thousands of scholarly articles and books and academic seminars that have been devoted to the study of Islam in Southeast Asia in recent years, attention has focused mostly on issues concerning religious revivalism, politics, education, history, law, gender, morality, finance and economics, and of course, extremism and terrorism.
Of the thousands of scholarly articles and books and academic seminars that have been devoted to the study of Islam in Southeast Asia in recent years, attention has focused mostly on issues concerning religious revivalism, politics, education, history, law, gender, morality, finance and economics, and of course, extremism and terrorism. It is surprising, therefore, that much less attention has been given to the activity that most Southeast Asian Muslims, like their counterparts in other religions, spend an ever-increasing amount of their time doing today: shopping and consuming. It is this activity that is the subject of Johan Fischer’s original study of Islam and consumerism in Malaysia. …
The focus of Fischer’s study is a number of Malay middle-class families living in the suburbs of Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. The anthropology of suburbia in Southeast Asia lags far behind the anthropology of village society, so Fischer’s attention to suburban life in Malaysia is another novel and welcome feature of the book. …
This book intends to make a theoretical contribution to the scholarly literature on consumption in Asia. Some readers will be distracted by the liberal use of theoretical jargon that derives from the outer reaches of cultural studies. … Yet if the reader is willing to plough through occasional paragraphs of admittedly challenging jargon it will be well worth the effort required to gain the many original and important insights that Fischer makes into consumption and religion in Malaysia.