The Islamic Spirit of Capitalism: Moroccan Islam and its Transferable Cultural Schemas and Values
This article adds to and critiques current debates about the "spirit of capitalism" for being too "top down", western and elite-oriented. It takes a bottom-end-up and ethnographic cultural perspective to examine the cultural conditions for the formation of willing, low priced lab...
| Published in: | Journal of religion and popular culture |
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| Authors: | ; |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Saskatchewan
[2010]
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| In: |
Journal of religion and popular culture
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | This article adds to and critiques current debates about the "spirit of capitalism" for being too "top down", western and elite-oriented. It takes a bottom-end-up and ethnographic cultural perspective to examine the cultural conditions for the formation of willing, low priced labour power in a Moroccan case study example of the "Islamic south". Tracing how the popular culture of Islam in Morocco provides a reservoir of religious meaning for the framing of, and accommodation to, capitalistic wage labour relations, we argue that capital both in the "north", through migration, and in the "south" gains ready access to huge resources of labour. Popular Islamic religio-cultural practices and beliefs provide ready-made cultural schemas for enacting and reproducing social relations of master-disciple/saint-supplicant, which when applied to capitalist employment relations, despite some real and possible counter-tendencies and seeds of resistance, go a long way towards explaining the apparently submissive attitudes of most Moroccan workers. Further, subaltern classes in Morocco frequently look to divination, to the miraculous, to jinn-related rituals of trance-dance and eviction to arbitrate what they see as their hit-and-miss affair with Fate. This can produce what we term a magical emancipation seemingly releasing them, partially at least, from the sufferings associated with their crushing conditions of existence and offering some psychic space between immediate oppression and immediate suffering. But magical emancipation also obfuscates the true sources of their suffering and ensures, again, subjection to the maraboutic healer and in general to "the master". Poverty and richness as well as social inequalities are perceived to a larger extent to be incurred by the machinery of luck, the evil eye, envy and the will of Allah rather than being the results of practices and discourses of exploitative economic relations. |
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| ISSN: | 1703-289X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of religion and popular culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3138/jrpc.22.3.006 |