This essay concerns a development taking place across a broad swath of contemporary Asia: an unprecedented upsurge in religious ritual, association, and observance. The resurgence defies a century of forecasts by secularization and modernization theorists of religion's imminent privatization and decline. The event also has distinctive social characteristics. Chief among these is that the new varieties of religion tend to be more popular, voluntary, and laity based than the established religions of yesteryear. Many are also marked by the heightened participation of women, although typically not by explicit normative affirmations of gender equality. Last but not least, some of the new movements also appear preoccupied less with otherworldly transcendence than with inner-worldly well-being.

Of course, not all of Asia is being swept into this raging religious torrent, and not all new varieties of religion are popular, prosperity minded, or woman friendly. Two generations ago, Japan was a pioneer of laity-based, peace-and-prosperity religions (Davis Reference Davis1992; Hardacre Reference Hardacre1984; Metraux Reference Metraux, Queen and King1996). Today, by comparison with some of its neighbors, Japan is experiencing only a modest religious resurgence. Similarly, if for a moment I may look beyond the eastern Asian focus of this essay toward southwestern Asia, any generalization as to religion's galloping resurgence has also to be qualified. After a generation of religious mobilization, Iran is today experiencing one of the strongest secularizing and anticlerical moments the modern Muslim world has known. As Shahram Khosravi (Reference Khosravi2007) has recently reminded us, large numbers of young Iranians are drifting from their faith, estranged from the authoritarian impositions of the Islamic republic.

However, turning back to East and Southeast Asia, one cannot help being struck by the dizzying proliferation of new religions, as well as the no less dramatic refiguration of those old. In the once securely Catholic Philippines, the past generation has seen dramatic conversion to evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity (Howell Reference Howell2008). In response to the Protestant boom, Filipino Catholicism has undergone its own quasi-Pentecostal rebranding, like that of the officially Catholic but Pentecostal-inflected movement known as El Shaddai. With its 10 million members, El Shaddai is the largest charismatic Catholic organization in the world (Wiegele Reference Wiegele2005).

As Hy V. Luong and Shaun Kingsley Malarney have shown, Vietnam since the Doi Moi reforms of the late 1980s has witnessed a “profound reorientation of . . . the state's role,” and this has been accompanied by a “significant resurgence of ritual practice” (Malarney Reference Malarney2002, 1, 2; cf. Luong Reference Luong2010, 226–45). The ritualist surge includes not just the revival of long-suppressed household rites, but also the expansion of public cults, like that of the Lady of the Realm goddess in southern Vietnam (Taylor Reference Taylor2004). In the Theravada Buddhist lands of Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, the past generation has also witnessed a steady expansion in lay devotion, most notably in the form of meditation movements. In Burma, the more independent of these movements square off against a regime-backed Buddhism, creating deeply opposed religious imaginaries. The Theravada movements (Jordt Reference Jordt2007; Schober Reference Schober1995; Scott Reference Scott2009, 74, 84) share a characteristic with Pentecostal and charismatic Christians across Southeast Asia: the prominence of women in their ranks. A similarly gendered disposition is seen in many of China's and Taiwan's new religious currents. There, as Nancy N. Chen (Reference Chen and Overmyer2003), Kenneth Dean (Reference Dean and Overmyer2003), C. Julia Huang (Reference Huang2009), and Robert P. Weller (Reference Weller1999) have shown, women are disproportionately represented in the ranks of new healing sects, lay Buddhist associations, Christian converts, and neotraditionalist temple worship.

Over the past generation, Muslim Southeast Asia has also experienced a dramatic religious revitalization. At first sight, the localized and/or “middle range” (Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2003, 173) qualities of the religious resurgence in other areas of eastern Asia seem less conspicuous here, as if Islam in Southeast Asia were more macrocosm minded than localized. Certainly, transnational movements are at work all across Muslim Southeast Asia. Whereas two generations ago, Southeast Asia was renowned for the home-grown varieties of Islam made famous by scholars such as Clifford Geertz (Reference Geertz1960, Reference Geertz1965) and Sven Cederroth (Reference Cederroth1981, Reference Cederroth1996), today, Saudi-inspired Salafiyyah conservatives, Hizbut Tahrir internationalists, and Muslim Brothers move effortlessly across the region. However, although Southeast Asia's Islamic resurgence shows clear global inflections, the universalized influences find their meaning, to borrow a phrase from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, not in “abstract principles of knowledge and power, but rather in concrete engagements” (Reference Tsing2005, 67; cf. Hefner Reference Hefner and Hefner1998; Howell Reference Howell2008, 219–21).

The most startling of eastern Asia's religious revitalizations, however, is that taking place in China. China specialists do not have to be reminded that this development is especially surprising in light of the high modernist secularism of Chinese Marxism Leninism, expressed in its full austerity during the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet today, a generation after those “superstition”-smashing calamities, tens of millions of Chinese are active in Buddhist worship; several hundred million participate in ancestral and temple rites; and between 20 million and 60 million profess Christianity, most commonly of a neo-Pentecostal variety (see Ashiwa and Wank Reference Ashiwa and Wank2009; Chau Reference Chau2006; Overmyer Reference Overmyer2003). Certainly it is too early to forecast, as some conservative American commentators have, that China will soon have the greatest number of Christians outside of the West. What is clear, however, is that popular society in China is undergoing not an end of history secularization, but a bustling and pluralized religionization of broad expanses of social life.

The question underlying my remarks in this essay then, is whether eastern Asia's embarrassment of late modern religious riches is merely a strange historical coincidence, or whether it has some common sociological and moral thread running through it. Some analysts have hypothesized that Asia's resurgence is a response to the ostensible retreat of the state in the face of a globally ascendant neoliberalism. Others of Tocquevillian persuasion have seen the resurgence as the welcome expression of a civil society rising in the face of a long overbearing state. Still other commentators have portrayed the resurgence as the unintended consequence of the destabilization of once secure secular nationalisms, themselves the offspring of political secularisms introduced in the heyday of Western colonialism.

Although each of these accounts directs our attention to relevant issues, I suggest that, for the purposes of understanding what draws nonelites to new forms of religious observance, these metanarratives put rather too much emphasis on the macro-logics of the state, global capital, and a putatively “secularist” modernity and rather too little on the micro- and meso-passions of self, family, and everyday life. As Harri Englund and James Leach have noted with regard to certain usages of the concept of “modernity,” high-flying narratives risk obscuring the “specific existential passions” (Reference Englund and Leach2000, 234) of religious actors, especially those whom I shall call—adapting a notion from the anthropologist Michael Peletz (Reference Peletz, Hefner and Horvatich1997)—“ordinary” believers.

Although the macrocosm in which these new religious currents have emerged does indeed bear the imprint of postcolonial secularisms, neoliberal disciplines, and restless civil societies, at the grassroots, these new religious currents also show the influence of things more near at hand than abstract: the desire of ordinary believers for security, self-initiative, and dignity in the face of far-reaching social change. This is not to say that the new religious movements are not a response to the ongoing social, economic, and moral transformation of East and Southeast Asia. They most certainly are. But for believers of nonelite provenance, the ideals and methods of engagement are not typically those of structural analyses or self-conscious resistance. As the sociologist David Martin has said of poor Pentecostals in the global south, “they alter what is in their capacity to alter, beginning with themselves” (2002, 12; cf. Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006, 209). Although their class profile varies, much the same is the case for many among Asia's new generation of popular believers.

Having made this appeal for greater attention to the mid-range horizons of most of Asia's new religious actors, I will at the end of this essay present what may strike some readers as a paradoxical conclusion. I will suggest that the micro- and meso-horizons of many in Asia's religious resurgence are not the result of the triumphant reassertion of the local, but of the fact that everyday lifeways have now more than ever been drawn into transnational networks of information, commoditization, and power.

Cargo-Cult Religiosity?

Let me begin to dig a bit more deeply into these issues by briefly revisiting the old question of whether there is a causal relationship between the religious resurgence and the capitalist development that has so transformed East and Southeast Asia over the past half century. The idea that modern religious change might be related to capitalism is, of course, one of the oldest in Western social theory. The premise was central to the work of Marx, Durkheim, and Troeltsch, although, as far as most Asianists have been concerned, the thesis was most provocatively explored by the German social theorist Max Weber. Such distinguished postwar Asianists as Robert Bellah (Reference Bellah1957) and Clifford Geertz (Reference Geertz1960, Reference Geertz1965) dedicated their early careers to looking for functional equivalents to Weber's Protestant ethic in the thoroughly un-Protestant landscapes of East and Southeast Asia. Bellah's 1965 collection on Religion and Progress in Modern Asia extended this gaze to the whole of Asia. By the early 1970s, however, the modernization theory to which Bellah and Geertz had once dedicated themselves had fallen out of fashion, victims of the raging social debates of the 1960s. For a while, the larger question of capitalism and religion fell by the wayside as well.

In the 1990s, however, and in the aftermath of eastern Asia's sustained industrial growth, the issue of religion and capitalism returned, now with a vengeance (see Roberts Reference Roberts1995). A sign of the intellectual times, the way in which the issue was assessed, however, had changed. Whereas neo-Weberians and modernizistas had long concerned themselves with how religion might inculcate habits of the heart and wallet conducive to capitalist enterprise, this new scholarship was less intent on determining how religion might make capitalist enterprise work than with exploring the full range of synergies between capitalism and religion, including those whose implications for market performance might be neutral, corrosive, or fetishized.

Nowhere perhaps has the new study of religion and capitalism been more contentious than with regard to one of the more recent of the new Asian religiosities, Pentecostal Christianity. Pentecostalism's historical roots lie not in Asia, of course, but in England and America's Great Awakenings. In the early years of the twentieth century, the evangelical message of millennial hope, scriptural inerrancy, and baptism by the Holy Spirit was borrowed by African American preachers, who spiced it up with ecstatic weeping, healing, dancing, and speaking in tongues (Martin Reference Martin1990, 28; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006; Robbins Reference Robbins2004). In the 1960s, the Pentecostal stream underwent an additional ethical and epistemic permutation. A new leadership directed its message away from the fire-and-brimstone theology of an earlier era, and preached a kinder, gentler, and more market-friendly doctrine, which we know today as prosperity theology (Coleman Reference Coleman and Roberts1995). The message was that—notwithstanding what Jesus of Nazareth had once said about a camel, a needle, and the near-zero prospects of a rich person getting into heaven—God does not want you to stay poor. On the contrary, health and wealth await all who abide by His commandments.

Although not of Asian origins, localized varieties of the prosperity gospel appealed to the new generation of Asian Pentecostals and charismatics who flocked to the faith from the 1980s on. The message was popular, for example, among the middle-class Chinese Christians with whom I interacted in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore in the 1980s and 1990s. Other studies have confirmed that the prosperity message carries well across class lines, including in today's China (but not Taiwan), where millions of poor and a smaller number of middle-class Chinese have flocked to this wealth-affirming variety of the faith (Bays Reference Bays and Overmyer2003; Martin Reference Martin2002, 155–57; Vala Reference Vala, Ashiwa and Wank2009 ).

Prosperity Christianity has also made inroads into non-Buddhist and non-Muslim areas of Southeast Asia, including the Catholic Philippines. In that country, charismatic Catholics have defied the church establishment and liberation theologians and rallied to the prosperity message of spiritual confidence and economic success. However incongruous this Catholic embrace of a neo-Protestant theology may appear, the example highlights aspects of religion and capitalism that are widespread across eastern Asia.

In her Investing in Miracles (2005), anthropologist Katharine Wiegele has provided us with a subtle account of this Filipino species of charismatic Catholicism. Wiegele's focus is the El Shaddai movement, which first appeared on the Philippine scene in 1981. El Shaddai's overwhelmingly lower-class membership grew steadily in the aftermath of the 1986 People Power Revolution and the economic surge of the Fidel Ramos presidency (Wiegele Reference Wiegele2005, 3). By the late 1990s, El Shaddai had about 10 million followers.

Although El Shaddai is grudgingly tolerated by most of the church hierarchy, many clergy and left-leaning Catholics can barely hide their distaste for the movement. El Shaddai, these critics claim, is little more than a lightly Christianized cargo cult. The movement promises wealth in magical exchange for tithing donations to the “treasure boxes” so prominently displayed at El Shaddai's five- to ten-hour prayer rallies. As with David Maxwell's (2007) study of Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe, Wiegele dismisses this cargo-cult characterization as simplistic. But she also points out that the underlying logic of the tithing in which El Shaddai members engage is indeed modeled on a rather blatant form of spiritualized patron-clientism. Through donations and prayer, one seeks to “obligate God” into delivering miraculous material favors. No less significant, El Shaddai theology resembles that of many other first-generation Pentecostals in the global south, in that it deflects the desire to problematize “structural, societal, or historical understandings of inequality” (Wiegele Reference Wiegele2005, 1003; cf. Freston Reference Freston and Freston2008, 26). The message is clear: If you've fallen on hard economic times, don't feel sorry for yourself, and don't get distracted dreaming about structural reforms and social justice. If you get in there with God and do your best, miracles will happen, whatever your marginalized circumstance in society.

Social-psychologically, if not structurally, speaking, miracles do happen. As Wiegele explains, the El Shaddai brings “ritual space into the home and self.” There's the proximate spirituality to which I referred earlier. This spiritual empowerment of home and self, Wiegele adds, allows “ordinary people to heal and to mediate with God”; it “rejects determining notions of poverty and seeks to retell life histories and futures in narratives of transformative miracles” (2005, 171). This tangibly optimistic and self-empowering spirit is captured vividly in the slogan chanted by hundreds of thousands of mostly poor people at El Shaddai rallies: “I am rich! I am strong! Something good is going to happen to me!” (Wiegele Reference Wiegele2005, 173).

From the broader perspective of the eastern Asian resurgence, the El Shaddai story is not unique, although its class profile is more impoverished than many other movements. The past generation has seen wealth-affirming and individual-“empowering” religiosities take root across the region. A few years ago, the anthropologist Robert Weller pointed out that in Taiwan and China, the religious scene was rife with amoral ghost cults. Weller described these cults as amoral because their spiritual logic is that of a self-interested and freelancing actor making a quick-and-easy bargain with a gift-giving ghost. The spiritual deal making requires little, if any, public mindedness, and even less ethical self-cultivation. In Weller's words, the interaction is premised on “individualism instead of community, utilitarianism instead of family or community good, and an unpredictable, amoral market instead of a clear set of shared morals” (Reference Weller, Keyes, Kendall and Hardacre1994, 162).

In recent years, we have also seen a proliferation of similarly transactionalized cults in Vietnam and the Theravada lands of Southeast Asia. As Rachelle M. Scott's (2009) study of the Dhammakâya Temple outside of Bangkok reminds us, however, not all of these movements are as indifferent to self-cultivation and public ethics as Weller's ghost cultists. The largest and fastest growing of Thailand's Buddhist temples, the Dhammakâya recruits from higher up in the social hierarchy than does El Shaddai, among the urban middle class rather than the poor. The temple uses modern mass media and slick marketing to advertise its religious services. In so doing, it operates “in a manner similar to Soka Gakkai [in Japan] and Foguan Shan [in Taiwan], as well as the prosperity gospels of prominent Christian evangelicals,” in the sense that “the Temple links personal and communal success to the application of Buddhist truths to one's everyday activities” (Scott Reference Scott2009, 55). At the same time, and in a manner analogous to El Shaddai's position with regard to the Philippine Catholic Church, the Dhammakâya leadership takes care to make public pledges of allegiance to Thailand's religious and political establishment. Tellingly, however, the temple uses these declarations to legitimate less establishment-authorized practices and doctrines. Chief among these is that the temple “effectively laicizes the meditation tradition of monastic practice” (Scott Reference Scott2009, 65), making exercises once reserved for monastic male virtuosos available to lay men and women.

The Dhammakâya thus draws down the high ideals of Theravada Buddhism into the life worlds of ordinary citizens hoping for a proactive and proximate practice of the faith. Seen from this perspective, and keeping in mind the middle-class profile of its core constituency, it is not at all surprising that the temple also offers guidance on how “to prepare for college entrance exams, transform wayward teens, cultivate confidence in professionals, and bring families together” (Scott Reference Scott2009, 55). The logic of this and many other varieties of so-called prosperity religion, then, is not merely material well-being, but confidence and moral security in the pursuit of near at hand concerns.

If there is one religious tradition in which some might expect not to see such a market- and society-accommodating mien, it might well be Southeast Asian Islam. It is not that Islam is opposed to wealth making or class inequalities. As Muslim reformists from the Middle East to Southeast Asia have loudly declared for the better part of a century, the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife were merchants, and of all the major world religions, Islam is arguably the most commerce friendly, at least as seen from the perspective of its scriptures. All this is true enough, but one would hasten to add that Muslims have not always been enamored of modern capitalism, for two basic reasons.

First, notwithstanding Western liberal imaginaries to the contrary, in the Muslim world, modern capitalism was not the felicitous product of individuals shedding the shackles of feudal oppression and establishing enterprises in bustling towns benefiting from the benign protection of commerce-savvy kings. Modern capitalism was introduced to most of the Muslim world by Western colonialists. Worse yet, those colonialists had a habit of reserving the commanding heights of the economy for fellow Europeans.

The second fact that has tainted Muslim perceptions of late modern capitalism is that the capitalism that flooded into Muslim societies beginning in the 1970s was no longer the modestly dressed and appetite-denying enterprise of Max Weber's idealized Calvinist. The new variety was the self-indulging, want-inflating, sensually “liberated,” Big Gulp consumer made famous in the sociological literature by such authors as Daniel Bell (Reference Bell1976) and Colin Campbell (Reference Campbell1987). From Levis and McDonald's to Madonna and Lady Gaga, this consumerist capitalism was thick with lifestyle entailments, many of which struck observant Muslims as ethically suspect (cf. for Africa, Comaroff and Comaroff Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2003).

There continue to be significant areas of tension between Islamic social ethics and late modern capitalism. Notwithstanding this friction, a market-friendly and individualistic Muslim ethic has now arrived, and it is having an impact on religion and business from Morocco and Qatar to Indonesia. The Swiss political scientist Patrick Haenni (Reference Haenni2005) has coined a phrase that captures the spirit of this new economic ethic rather nicely: Islam de marché—market Islam. As Haenni observes, one of the areas of the world in which this Islam de marché has made greatest headway is Muslim Southeast Asia.

Much like El Shaddai, the proponents of Islam de marché are more interested in helping the pious acquire market skills and a keen business sense than in providing structural analyses of inequality and reform. For Haenni, this is the clearest indication that market Islam is “post-Islamist,” in the sense that it has “let go of the great collective projects [of yesteryear] in favor of personal objectives in which what is dominant is self-realization and the quest for individual well-being” (2005, 10). As the French political scientist Gwenael Njoto-Feillard has demonstrated in a dissertation defended at Paris Sciences-PO in February 2010, what is especially striking about Southeast Asian varieties of Islam de marché is that the most celebrated of its proponents borrow unhesitantly from the writings of American Evangelical prosperitists. Indeed, in Indonesia, one of the most successful of prosperity Islam entrepreneurs is an American convert named Craig Abdurrohim Owensby. Before he made millions in Indonesia selling subscriptions to cell phone Qur'anic passages, Owensby had worked with Jerry Falwell and served as a preacher in Houston, Texas (Njoto-Feillard Reference Njoto-Feillard2010, 443; cf. Hoesterey Reference Hoesterey, Fealy and White2008; Rudnyckyj Reference Rudnyckyj2009).

Examples like these do not mean that all of the new religious currents in eastern Asia embrace the market uncritically. Although their numbers are dwindling, some Filipino Catholics are still devoted to the ideals of liberation theology. Notwithstanding their interest in Western self-help literature and management theory, most market Muslims still decry what they regard as the ethical barrenness of North Atlantic capitalism. Equally striking, in addition to the consumer-friendly meditation groups in Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia, there are good numbers of Buddhist monks and lay persons who, rather than legitimating middle-class wealth making, call for a sober and environmentally friendly religious ethics (see Taylor Reference Taylor and Hirsch1997).

The story of religion and capitalism in contemporary eastern Asia, then, is not that of mass religion everywhere neoliberalized or even made market friendly. Like the nun-led Compassion Relief movement studied by C. Julia Huang (Reference Huang2009) in Taiwan, and the Santi Asok Buddhist community set up by an anticonsumerist monk in Thailand (Scott 2007, 40), some of the new religious movements dedicate themselves to the poor and the marginal as much as the middle class and mobile.

Nonetheless, for the moment, the verdict of history seems clear. The most successful of the new religious streams have recruited a mass following by promoting a more upbeat and accommodating message on markets, consumerism, and wealth. The logic of their accommodations reflects less a knowledge or endorsement of neoliberal abstractions, than a concern to provide their adepts with the confidence and moral legitimacy with which to negotiate the maze of the marketplace and urban society. In the next section of this essay, I will suggest that the logic of the proximate that applies to religious responses to capitalism also applies to the other elephant in the eastern Asian religious room: the modern, omnipretentious developmentalist state.

States and the New Religiosity

What, then, of the nation-state behemoth? Could it be that some tectonic shift in the relationship between state and society is the real key to the new Asian religiosity? Let me try to address this question first by looking back on ground already covered.

Ghost cultists, prosperity Christians, wealth-affirming Buddhists, and market Muslims all tend, relatively speaking, to steer clear of any grand theory of the state or the structures of hierarchy and exclusion in society. Each does so in a manner that reflects the proximate concerns, capacities, and class standing of its believers, as well as the doctrinal and epistemic constraints of the religious tradition itself. The lack of interest in abstract political schemes may at times also reflect the formlessness of the ritual community, as with China's healing cults, in which a healer works with individual clients and thus without anything like a congregational assembly. At other times, as with the Philippines' El Shaddai or Thailand's Dhammakâya, the apoliticism is compounded by the sense that activism might jeopardize the leadership's political and economic interests.

Notwithstanding a general disinclination toward grand political theory, some among the new religions enjoin their adherents to pay heed to politics and public ethics. As Charles Keyes (Reference Keyes1987) and Donald Swearer (Reference Swearer1995) have shown, Theravada Buddhism has long had an ideal of the just king upholding the dhamma law. Both establishment conservatives and democracy reformists in Buddhist Southeast Asia invoke that ideal to legitimate opposing political visions. There is a similar pattern to Islam in Southeast Asia. There, both militant Islamists and Muslim democrats cite Islam's public ethical principle to “command right and forbid wrong” (Cook Reference Cook2000), but they do so in support of different political aims (Hefner Reference Hefner and Hefner2005; Wilson Reference Wilson, Fealy and White2008). Above and beyond this variation in political-mindedness, however, it is striking that, if they turn to politics at all, the more successful religious currents do so by bringing their religious message close to the concerns and life worlds of ordinary believers. The politics they pursue is one that moves through subjective and proximate disciplines, rather than frontal assaults on a distant state or religious establishment.

This point is nicely illustrated with regard to contemporary Burma's enormous lay meditation movement. As Juliane Schober has shown in a series of important studies, Buddhism in contemporary Burma is torn between two rival organizations animated by profoundly different ethical visions. The first is that so lavishly supported by the regime-backed State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the present-day extension of the State Law and Order Restoration Council that has ruthlessly ruled Burma since 1988. As Schober explains, the SPDC uses “large-scale rituals to legitimate a political hierarchy of the state” (2005, 114). This étatist Buddhism is, of course, thoroughly political, but its politics is premised on a “scripturalist, otherworldly, nonpolitical, and centralized sangha” (Schober Reference Schober and Skidmore2005, 117). This official Buddhism also sends missionaries to the nation's tribal margins, as an adjunct to the regime's repressive efforts at ethnic and national integration.

Schober is quick to point out, however, that there is another variety of Buddhism in Burma. It is based not on the regime's religious designs, but on the popular and generalized practice of lay meditation. As with the long-suppressed Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, some in the meditation movement blend a socially engaged Buddhism with Western post-Enlightenment thought, devising Buddhist grounds for democracy and human rights (Schober Reference Schober and Skidmore2005, 127). As Schober and the anthropologist Ingrid Jordt have both shown, however, the largest of the lay meditation movements also engage in a proximate spiritual politics: they seek to open vipassanâ meditation to a lay public that, in an earlier time, would have been barred from this elevated spiritual discipline. The first principle of this religious politics, then, is not state capture, but the desire to open a ritual form once reserved for monastic virtuosos to ordinary believers. No less important, Jordt tells us that “[t]he most distinguishing feature of this New Laity is that women are by far the main participants in meditation” (2007, 158; for Thailand, cf. Scott Reference Scott2009; for Taiwan, see Huang Reference Huang2009; Madsen Reference Madsen2007, 21–41; Weller Reference Weller1999, 33–36).

Like Schober, Jordt goes on to point out that the vipassanâ movement does not steer entirely clear of higher-level political preoccupations. Where the state and national politics are brought into view, however, they are by way of concrete religious disciplines rather than abstract analyses. The lay meditation movement, Jordt writes, “is not a movement in search of a particular political solution—for example democracy. The movement also does not challenge the state in the sense [James] Scott related in his ‘weapons of the weak’ argument. And yet the movement has definite implications for the political environment” (2007, 158). The latter emerge, Jordt adds, because vipassanâ meditation is a “technique leading the individual to . . . a core, reliable source of knowledge verifying what the goals of society are, what the obligations and rights of the state are, and how the individual is related to state, society, and soteriology” (2007, 3). In short, this effort at consciousness building rests on not an abstract blueprint for an alternative state order, but the ground-level disciplines of meditative self-transformation.

A similar popular and proximating transformation of religious authority and observance has taken place in Southeast Asian Islam over the past twenty years. Two generations of rural-to-urban migration, sprawling urban growth, and the spread of new forms of religious association have all resulted in an Islamic religiosity emphasizing chosen rather than inherited faith, and personal initiative rather than virtuoso privilege. State-sponsored mass education added to the popular surge by bringing literacy to an increasingly mobile and detraditionalized population (Hefner Reference Hefner and Hefner2009; cf. Eickelman Reference Eickelman1992). Contrary to its nationalist sponsors' original intentions, however, many among the newly educated apply their learning not to state-authorized tasks, but to a subjective and sustained engagement with Islam. Although the core constituency for the resurgence is more middle class (much as the Theravada meditation groups) than it is El Shaddai poor, these developments in Islamic society have made for a popular Muslim counterpart to Buddhist lay meditation and charismatic Christian congregationalism.

The new Islamic movements' primary medium is, of course, neither lay meditation nor apostolic gatherings to welcome in the Holy Spirit. Those drawn to the new observance nonetheless construct their piety self-transformatively, by way of small halaqah study circles or usrah “family” circles (Bubalo, Fealy, and Mason Reference Bubalo, Fealy and Mason2008, 57; Salman 2006, 192; cf. Mahmood Reference Mahmood2005). The core ethical presupposition of these groupings is that responsibility for Islam cannot be delegated to learned scholars or state-appointed elites, but must be rooted in the near at hand disciplines of self, family, and everyday sociability. Halal food, Arabic greetings, Qur'anic study, the Ramadan fast, and daily prayers—all these are indices of a faith premised on the sanctification and refiguration of proximate realities, and the popularization of pietist disciplines. Certainly, some among the newly observant go on to link micro-piety to the macro-political. They are all the more likely to do so when crises in state and society disrupt religious routines, and when a well-organized religious “vanguard” provides narrative frames that convince believers that local crises are the result of global conflicts. For most among the newly pious, not least of all the poor and marginalized, however, such grand projects remain remote and dangerous. More to the point, all such political projects are seen as compromised when they do not first pass through the pietist disciplines of ethical self-fashioning (cf. Gade Reference Gade2004; Smith-Hefner Reference Smith-Hefner2007).