Proper Islamic Consumption: Shopping among the Malays in Modern Malaysia

'[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