| Publication |
2008.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This article asks how pious religious practices, which are often highly gendered, and implicated in diverse formulations of "the modern" in non-Western contexts. Based on ethnographic research among women members of Indonesia's Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), I argue that PKS women's pious practices are part of the creation of a particular kind of middle class subjectivity. An examination of two constitutive elements of this habitus, clothing and marriage, reveals how these pious Islamic practices enact class and gender difference, and simultaneously produce "modern" selves. While scholars have shown that gender is an important axis for class difference, I extend this argument to suggest that gendered forms of piety are key ways class in which distinctions are embodied and expressed. Yet the habitus of PKS women is just one of several competing Islamic habitus in Indonesia. The question of which habitus is most culturally legitimate, I maintain, turns on the hegemony of particular understandings of piety and ideas about how modernity should be defined-issues which remain unresolved in contemporary Indonesia.
|