Patricia Sloane-White, dphil

Associate professor

Department of Anthropology,

university of delaware

pswhite@udel.edu

Courses

Anthropology and Business

Asian Women in the Global Workplace

Asian Women’s Lives

Elites: The New Rich in Asia

History of Anthropogical Theory

Immigrant Islam in the West (Study Abroad Paris and London)

Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology

Muslim Delaware

Peoples and Cultures of East Asia

Peoples and Cultures of Southeast Asia

Peoples and Cultures of the Muslim World

Tutorial in Social and Cultural Anthropology: Reading and Writing Ethnography

Wives, Mistresses, and Matriarchs: Asian Women’s Lives (Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies Program)

Young, Privileged and Global: American and Malaysian Lives (interactive videoconference course co-taught with university students in Malaysia)

Teaching

In all of my courses, I teach students that the words and experiences of their daily lives—globalization, modernization, fundamentalism, terrorism, power and inequality, and the economy—concern ideas and realities that require them to look at other cultures and societies. I emphasize that as informed citizens of the modern global world, they must know about the traditions, beliefs, and social practices which are embedded in other cultures and nations and the ways in which seemingly global practices such as capitalism are localized and particularized in different settings. Above all, I see teaching anthropology as a chance to enlarge students’ view of the world, and to help them understand some of the cultural, economic, historical, and religious forces that have shaped and will shape the modern world.

My courses are writing-intensive courses. I ask students at all levels of their anthropology education to question through writing and critical thinking what defines difference and belonging in our own and other cultures, and what unites us as human beings.

I teach courses in the Department of Women’s Studies and several of my courses fulfill requirements for the major and minor in Asian Studies and the minor in Islamic Studies.

I am the Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware and administer several programs for the College of Arts and Sciences, including the Plastino Scholars, Dean’s Scholars, and the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies programs.

For an article on my videoconference course between students at the University of Delaware and students in Malaysia, click here: http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2008/feb/malaysia022808.html

For an article on my course on “Muslim Delaware,” click here: http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2012/mar/muslim-delaware-032812.html

Research

After nearly a decade of senior-level business experience on Wall Street, I trained as an anthropologist to study the relationship between Islam and modern capitalism in Malaysia.

I first conducted fieldwork in Malaysia in 1993-1994. My initial two-year period of research analyzed Islam and social and economic change in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Malaysia is a powerhouse among Southeast Asian nations for both the success of its capitalist development and the influence of its Islamic worldview.

When I arrived in Malaysia, no anthropologist had yet fully investigated the culture of its emergent Islamic capitalists. The centerpiece of my initial period of research is my book, Islam, Modernity and Entrepreneurship among the Malays, a detailed study of urban Malay Muslim society in the process of capitalist transformation.

In my second period of research in Malaysia, from 1996 to 1998, I focused on the professional, white-collar, urban Malay Muslim middle- and upper-middle-class that has emerged as a consequence of capitalism in Malaysia. The object of this research was to consider the ways in which Muslim people who traditionally share an egalitarian religious ethos experience the new ideas, values, experiences, desires, and subjectivities of global modernity. I have written articles on the nature of middle-class identity and the creation of class difference in urban Malaysia.

In the past few years, I have made four extended fieldwork visits to Malaysia to conduct new research on what I call “Corporate Islam” and the Islamic economy. I currently study the relationship between business culture and sharia (Islamic law). What particularly interests me as an anthropologist is how sharia has increasingly emerged as a novel form of corporate culture, reconfiguring workplace identities and relations in distinctly Islamic ways. To the people in the Islamic economy I have studied, sharia is not merely a guide for financial operations. It is, as Muslim jurists understand it and in the fullest meaning of the word, a “path,” a way of life (and a way of work). I am studying the use and growth of Islamic principles and precepts in the capitalist workplace, most recently focusing on Islamic philanthropy and corporate zakat, and how Islamic ideals are used to define the nature of modern capitalist power relations and class, ethnic, and gender relations, as well as relations between individuals and institutions.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

“Beyond Islamism at Work: ‘Corporate Islam’ in Malaysia,” in Roy, Olivier and Amel Boubekeur (eds), Whatever Happened to the Islamists? New York: Columbia University Press/Hurst, 2012.

“Working in the Islamic Economy,” Sojourn, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 26: 2, 2011.

“From Sisters to Sinners in One Generation: The Shifting Status of Middle-Class Malay Girlhood.” In Helgren, Jennifer and Colleen A. Vasconcellas (eds), Girlhood: A Global History. Rutgers University Press, 2010.

“Beyond Fifty Years of Political Stability in Malaysia: Rent and the Weapons of the Power Elite,” Patricia Sloane-White and Isabelle Beaulieu. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 30: 1, 2010.

“US and Malaysian Students: Encounters in Modernity.” In Lee, Julian (ed), The Malaysian Way of Life. Tarrytown, NY and London: MarshallCavendish, 2010.

“The Hospitable Middle-Class Muslim Home in Urban Malaysia: A Sociable Site for Economic and Political Action,” in Lynch, Paul; Alison J. McIntosh; and Hazel Tucker (eds), Commercial Homes in Tourism: An International Perspective. London: Routledge, 2009.

“The Ethnography of Failure: Middle-Class Malays Producing Capitalism in an ‘Asian Miracle’ Economy.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 39 : 455-482, 2008.

“Why Malays Travel: Middle-Class Malay Tourism and the Creation of Social Difference and Belonging.” Crossroads: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 18:2, 2007.

Books

Islam, Modernity, and Entrepreneurship among the Malays. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave/Macmillan Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Corporate Islam: Working in Malaysia’s Islamic Economy (manuscript in preparation)