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We Share Walls: Language, Land, and Gender in Berber Morocco. 2008. Katherine E. Hoffman. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. 261 pages. Photographs, references and index included. $34.95 (Paperback). Published under the [...]

In this article, I will show that charitable giving, along with charitable associations' institutional practices, fashion moral, productive, and religious citizens through both intent and practice of giving. Thereby the individual donors and associations not only legitimize their aim of social transformation with reference to religious norms of giving, but at the same time also introduce new, professionalized (rationalized) forms to further develop, track, institutionalize and regulate these norms. If we define religious engineering as 'active and conscious ways of working on the future shape of a given society'(cf. Spies and Schrode, Introduction), this article argues that the work of charitable associations and the processes of charitable giving in Turkey are practices of 'religious engineering' and should be analysed as such. I do this analysis through a direct focus on activities, ideas, and implementations of charitable associations and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research conducted in Konya, Istanbul, Afyon, Izmir, Manisa, and Denizli, Turkey, in 2004--9, this contribudon documents how gendered individual religious practices are conjoined to transnational business competition, changing labor conditions, and broader projects of economic transformation. The study focuses on the carpet-weaving and textile industries and civil society organizations in Turkey, investigating the ways in which charitable giving, pious practice, and local labor conditions create uniquely complex ways in which socioeconomic policies, processes, and commitments affect gendered lives. What is witnessed in weaving neighborhoods, civil society organizations, and the transnational linkages of production-consumption is neither a wholesale translation of Weberian capitalism nor a strict implementation of Islamic texts and practices. It is a unique Turkish assemblage of faith, religious practice, charitable giving, and flexibility of labor. This contribution calls for feminist researchers to empirically examine "pious economies" - that is, the linkages between pious practice and economic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the pious practice of sabır (patience) within the context of the weaving neighborhoods in Konya, Turkey. Through an ethnographic analysis of the everyday politics of the practice of sabır, which is central to labor relations, this article adds to and complicates feminist analyses of labor politics and the economy by highlighting the interconnected nature of ethical religious practice and labor politics. Additionally, I argue for the need to go beyond the question of whether women have or lack agency as subjects in feminist analyses of labor politics and relationships, and instead point out the need for the empirical examination of specific, contextually-bound practical conditions through and within which women cultivate various forms of ethical action and subjectivities. In pointing out the importance of a project that analyzes operations of power with a keen awareness of context, this essay presents an ethnographically grounded discussion of pious practice within the context of Konya's weaving neighborhoods, underscoring the effects of the coexistence of exploitation and empowerment on the construction of women weavers' selfhoods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]