The politics of becoming fundamentalist in the age of consumer culture

Abstract

The focus of this thesis is the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Indonesia since the late 1990s. The arguments outlined in the existing works about the recent Islamic fundamentalism can be categorised into four topics: Islamic politics, interpretation of religious teachings, global Islamic radicalism and endogenous militant Muslims in the past. This thesis suggests an alternative approach. Based on theories developed within the studies of social movements, identity politics and consumer culture, it is argued that Indonesian Islamic fundamentalism is a form of resistance to problems of oppression and domination and, essentially, reflects social antagonism. The resistance takes the path of the struggle for identity because oppression and domination work at the level of self and everyday life. This kind of oppression and domination takes away one's critical abilities to take independent action and to produce one's own meanings of life in order to create a sense of certainty. The source of oppression is the rapid flow of images and signs that increasingly colonise the fabric of everyday life in modern society. The flowing images reflect the consumer culture, which constitutes the increasingly dominant social and cultural order. Capitalist development contributes significantly to its emergence. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism can be seen as a negation of consumer culture. The resistance, moreover, is an attempt to reject the occupation of self and everyday life by the saturating images and is a challenge to the consumer culture's dominating power. The way the fundamentalists resist, however, is influenced by their location within the class divisions created by the same capitalist development that produces the consumer culture. Throughout this thesis the intention is not to treat knowledge as a neutral and objective instrument for passively disclosing reality. Instead, knowledge is used not only to describe a given phenomenon, but also, more importantly, to shape and produce it. Specifically, the knowledge produced here attempts to expose contradictions and conflicts within the existing socio-cultural order in which Islamic fundamentalism emerges. My aim is to produce a different reality of the phenomenon in order to promote a more critical understanding of the current structural conditions.