A Synthesis of Time

This book is an anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective of Islamic micro-finance as a field of everyday practice. It is based on long-term ethnographic research in Java, Indonesia, with Islamic foundations active in managing zakat and other charitable funds, for purposes of poverty alleviation. The book explores the social foundations of contemporary Islamic practices that strive to encompass the economic within an expanded domain of divine worship and elucidates the effects such encompassment has on time, its fissure and synthesis. In order to elaborate on the question of time, the book looks beyond anthropology and Islamic studies, engaging attentively, critically and productively with the post-structuralist work of G. Deleuze, M. Foucault and J. Derrida, three of the most important figures of the temporal turn in contemporary philosophy.

Examines how the economic has been re-constituted to better serve goals of redistributive justice in Java, Indonesia Untangles the complex relationship between Islamic economics, divine worship, and time Bridges anthropology with continental philosophy to arrive at a general theory of everyday economic practice as a temporal phenomenon

Autorentext
Konstantinos Retsikas is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London, UK. He is also the author of Becoming: An Anthropological Approach to Understandings of the Person in Java (2012).

Inhalt

1. Dis-closing Intervals.- 2. Dividing the Present.- 3. Justifying Law.- 4. Anticipating Life.- 5. Promising Deliverance.- 6. Contracting the Future.- 7. Soliciting Time.- 8. Rewinding the Reel.