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Materializing piety: Gendered anxieties about faithful consumption in contemporary urban Indonesia
Author(s) -
JONES CARLA
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01275.x
Subject(s) - piety , consumption (sociology) , faith , beauty , semiotics , materiality (auditing) , sociology , islam , aesthetics , appeal , indonesian , religious studies , political science , philosophy , law , theology , epistemology , linguistics
Islamic consumption promises to correct the ills of consumption yet relies on the logic of consumption for its appeal. Fashionably pious women in Indonesia have become figures of concern, suspected of being more invested in the material, and hence superficial, world than their virtuous appearances suggest. Arguing that consumption and religion are interdependent systems of faith, I show that women bear unusual semiotic burdens at the borders of materiality and piety. This approach reveals how pious Indonesian women must frame acts of pious consumption as disavowals of consumption and as expressions of beauty and modesty.