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This dissertation looks at Islamic alms, or zakat, and how imams negotiate its rules as well as advise on a range of charitable practices. Zakat is generally understood as an instrument of poverty alleviation, and yet its conceptualization and practice across transnational contexts intersects with social, economic, and political forces. By taking a look at three major groups—Ikhwan, Sufi, and Southern Californian imams—the thesis unpacks the complexities and multiple trajectories that zakat takes in the post-9/11 and post-Arab Uprising period. This thesis pays special attention to the understanding, teaching, and practice of zakat at both the transnational and personal levels.The principal argument of this dissertation is that zakat is being transformed by cultural and politico-economic forces, most significantly neoliberalism and the ethics of international humanitarianism. For example, though imams are often trained abroad in a seminary like al-Azhar in Egypt, the ubiquity of the NGO complex in Egypt and post-9/11 legal requirements in the US privilege managed practices, which the imams consequently naturalize in their own thinking of zakat. Contemporary zakat practices also bring into relief the tensions and malleability of Islamic legal interpretation as well as provide an analytical framework to explore issues of race, class, and gender. By narrowing the scope of shari’a to zakat and looking at its discourse and transnational circuits, I argue that we can gain an understanding as to how shari’a is practiced by our imams and is articulated within the structures of the nation-state and global economy.I follow American imams who have trained at the shari’a college at al-Azhar University in Cairo, but work in their home communities in Southern California. This multi-sited ethnography takes place over five years in Southern California and seven months in Egypt following these students and their discourses, between schools, mosques, and sites of charitable giving. Th

In this dissertation I follow the path of Chinese Vietnamese who left Vietnam for China and Hong Kong during the period 1978-1996, and finally settled in London. I study this collective serial migration based on archival research, structured and semi structured interviews and participant observation with individuals and families in homes, places of business and at community events. Based on this research, I study the reasons for their departure from VN, their time in China and refugee camps in HK, their dispersal in the UK and consequent settlement in London. This leads me to explore collective memory in the context of a collective serial migration that shift attention from borders as containers of meaning and culture to markers of significant shifts along a path. My research shows that sharing the path of migration reinforces feelings of belonging to a specific group shaped by a shared experience. This group dominates ideas of self and belonging, ethnicity and citizenship. This collective serial migration thus provides a particularly fruitful terrain for exploring recombinant histories and more generally the connection between migratory experience and forms of subjectivity. Collective serial migration creates a situation for the children of migrants that is distinct from those of diasporic constituted communities and that leads most of them to pursue paths of individual serial migration themselves. Experiencing paths of collective serial migration passes on a subjective outlook that favors onward migration in the first, 1.5 and 2nd generations.