Globalization and Religion: Identity and Power
INAES (Institute for North American and European Studies), University of Tehran
15-16 November 2005
Abstract
"Being Religious" in Malaysia's Multinationals: The Globalization of Capital and Disease
Robin Root
City University of New York – Department of Sociology and Anthropology
rroot@nyc.rr.comRobin Root is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. and M.A. in Oriental Studies-Chinese); Harvard University (Masters in Public Health-Population and International Health); and the University of California at Los Angeles (Ph.D., Medical Anthropology). She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), USA.
As the stigmatizing label appended to Muslim Malay factory women in Malaysia in the 1980s, Minah Karan connoted sexual excitability and a moral delinquency that many feared might spread beyond the delimited export processing zones. By the 1990s, concerns over Minah Karan, as the anti-hero of economic development, were eclipsed by concerns that "racial mixing" in the multinational factories was the reason the government had labeled them high risk setting for AIDS. As a social etiology of AIDS, the cultural logic of mixing-as-risk includes three main variables: race, religiosity, and national identity. The author uses historical and ethnographic data to demonstrate that "mixing" expresses concern, in the context of globalization, over the spatial/cultural decolonization of Malay/Sian land, labor, and society by acultural, amoral multinationals, to produce a confounding, and unprecedented, landscape of inter-gender, inter-racial relations. Fear that this process will precipitate a dilution of socioreligious practices, especially those that govern appropriate interactions between men and women and different ethnic groups, is at heart a fear that development puts society's moral order "at risk". Mitigating this risk through forms of Islamic revivalism, meaning a reinvigoration of Malay Muslim identity, beragam, beriman ( be faithful and pious) surfaces as the operative paradigm, not only to prevent HIV/AIDS but to mediate the cultural consequences of globalization and, finally, to challenge the construct of globalization itself, as a hegemonic process operating independent of local culture.