Daromir Rudnyckyj

Recent financial crises around the globe have precipitated renewed enthusiasm across the Muslim world for an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. This project is an ethnographic investigation of ambitious plans in contemporary Malaysia to develop the infrastructure necessary to create a transnationally valid Islamic financial system. The project documents the debates among government planners, Islamic scholars, bankers, and others as the state seeks to make the country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, the “New York of the Muslim world”: the central node in a transnational Islamic financial network. The project asks whether Islamic finance offers an alternative economic rationality to conventional capitalism or whether it simply represents a translation of homo economicus into Islamic idioms. This ethnographic study of the everyday practices of creating a transnational Islamic financial infrastructure offers the possibility of an alternative conceptualization of globalization, insofar as it focuses on a global network in which traditional centers in Europe, the United States, and East Asia play a relatively minor role.

I have recently initiated a project on the emergence of corruption as an object of intervention in Indonesia and the effects of state and para-state efforts to diagnose and prevent corruption. I seek to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the category corruption and its effects by asking what forms of economic rationality are produced through denoting certain practices corrupt. This project focuses not so much on determining the causes of corruption, but rather on how corruption is represented and acted upon as a problem that is simultaneously moral and economic. At stake in this transformation is a radical redefinition of what constitutes a moral economy, as the rationality of gift exchange is called into question in efforts to conform to prevailing global norms.

This ongoing ethnographic project documents the worldviews of a generation of engineers and other skilled workers who worked at Krakatau Steel, a massive state-owned company in western Java and the largest steel factory in Southeast Asia. In describing the lives of workers who produced steel, the signature material symbol of modernity, I show how their hopes and aspirations were connected to a broader set of assumptions about development, progress, and the conduct of modern life.

• 2021, Turkish edition. Borcun Ötesinde: Küresel Finansta Islami Deneyimler. Istanbul: Albaraka Yayınlar.
• 2019. Southeast Asian edition published by National University of Singapore Press.

• 2019. Beyond Debt: Islamic Experiments in Global Finance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• 2017. Religion and the Morality of the Market. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (co-edited with Filippo Osella).
• 2010. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 

• 2020. Rudnyckyj, Daromir and Jerome Whitington. “The Ethnography of the Global after Globalization.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 10(3).
• 2020. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. “Spiritual Economy as Mesoanalytics: An Ethnography of a Global Problem Space in Indonesia.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 10(3).

• 2018. Rudnyckyj, Daromir. “Crisis Effects,” Cultural Anthropology. 33(4).

• 2017. “Subjects of Debt: Financial Subjectification and Collaborative Risk in Malaysian Islamic Finance,” American Anthropologist. 119(2): 269-283.
• 2017. “Assembling Islam and Liberalism: Market Freedom and the Moral Project of Islamic Finance.”  In Religion and the Morality of Markets, edited by Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 
• 2017. “Assembling Market and Religious Moralities.”  In Religion and the Morality of Markets, edited by Daromir Rudnyckyj and Filippo Osella.  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (with Filippo Osella).
• 2017. “Debating Form, Consuming Substance: Halal Authenticity in Malaysian Islamic Finance,” Practical Matters. 10: 1-14.
• 2017. “Objectifying Economies: Contemporary Themes in Economic Anthropology.” In Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology, edited by Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, and Ann Kingsolver. London: Routledge.
• 2016. “Islamizing Finance: From Magical Capitalism to a Spiritual Economy,” Anthropology Today. 32(6): 8-12.
• 2015.  “Religious Reform and Emerging Middle Classes.” In the Routledge Handbook of Religions in Asia, ed. Bryan Turner and Oscar Salemink, 329-342. London: Routledge.
• 2015. “Religion and Economic Development.” In the Routledge Handbook on Religions and Global Development, ed. Emma Tomalin, 405-417. London: Routledge.
• 2014. "Afterlives of Development." Symposium in Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 37(1). Co-edited with Anke Schwittay.
• 2014. “Regimes of Self-Improvement: Globalization and the Will to Work.” Social Text. 32(3): 109-127.
• 2014. “Economy in Practice: Islamic Finance and the Problem of Market Reason.” American Ethnologist.  41(1):110-127.
• 2014. “Islamic Finance and the Afterlives of Development in Malaysia." Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 37(1)69-88.
• 2014. “Introduction: Afterlives of Development." Political and Legal Anthropology Review. 37(1):3-9. (Co-authored with Anke Schwittay).