Beyond Debt

Recent economic crises have made the centrality of debt, and the instability it creates, increasingly apparent. This realization has led to cries for change—yet there is little popular awareness of possible alternatives. 
 
Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.  

“"This book sets a new standard for the ethnography of global finance with its detailed account of contemporary financial practices in a non-Western context. In addition, Rudnyckyj pays equal attention to infrastructure, cultural styles, and expert discourses. Beyond Debt is a major corrective to our dominant Euro-American understandings of debt, equity, risk, and profit, and thus offers new ideas for both theory and practice."”

"Daromir Rudnyckyi's Beyond Debt is a meticulous discussion of challenges that Islamic finance faces. . . . Indeed, Rudnyckyi's main objective is to provide an anthropology of Islamic finance to challenge the debt-based financial system in the secular world." -- "Journal of the American Academy of Religion"

"In Beyond Debt, Daromir Rudnyckyj paints a compelling picture of Malaysia's efforts to turn KL into the pre-eminent global city of Islamic finance, and by extension how it came to have a significant impact on the industry itself."

-- "Penang Monthly"
"[Beyond Debt] is a detailed and sensitive study of experiments in finance and banking at a time when there is much to be enraged about the relentlessness of capitalism. It delves into the practicalities and intricacies of doing this experiment through the voices of numerous interlocutors. It is a rich ethnography of a financial experiment."
-- "SOJOURN"
"Beyond Debt makes an innovative and compelling contribution to anthropologies of finance and studies in Islamic finance in particular. This book is recommended for specialists in these fields, along with graduate students and scholars interested in globalization, money, and the economy. Highly recommended."-- "CHOICE"
"Focusing on efforts--orchestrated from within the Malaysian central bank--to design a new global system of Islamic finance, Rudnyckyj reveals an interpretative realm where the logics of finance can be appraised theoretically and evaluated ethnographically. He demonstrates with skill and acuity how experiments in Islamic finance--which allow surplus capital to flow to businesses without incurring conventional debt obligations--can yield a compelling demonstration of the salience of finance in underwriting our lives together and shaping the contingencies of our futures. A tour de force account of a critical contemporary problem, this path-breaking book will be debated for many years to come. Beyond Debt is a unique and paradigm-shattering work that should be mandatory reading for everyone from financiers and central bankers to activists and reformers to anthropologists and scholars of religion."-- "Douglas R. Holmes, Binghamton University"
"This book sets a new standard for the ethnography of global finance with its detailed account of contemporary financial practices in a non-Western context. In addition, Rudnyckyj pays equal attention to infrastructure, cultural styles, and expert discourses. Beyond Debt is a major corrective to our dominant Euro-American understandings of debt, equity, risk, and profit, and thus offers new ideas for both theory and practice."-- "Arjun Appadurai, New York University"

Daromir Rudnyckyj is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada.

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