Religious Practices and Embodied Work: Everyday Life of Javanese Workers in Taiwan

Abstract

This thesis attempts to articulate the phenomenon of Javanese Muslim workers as a living religious organism through the observance of its adherents’ daily practice. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, this thesis provides narratives analyses of Islam and its relation to issues such as identities, body, religious culture and power, and explores how all of these have been articulated in their individual and collective religious life. These issues were enhanced by other phenomena such as religious and cultural memories, homesickness and religious based-networking. In this cultural research, I focus on the narrative conditions that tend to produce religious practices or not practices, bodily expression, and religious clothing. The religious boundaries between the worker and employer are maintained and negotiated in secular society like Taiwan, and the thesis also traces how the Javanese workers understand their religion in the midst of dynamic transnational labor flows. This is a picture of the negotiation between work and faith, and their care for their beloved homeland. There are challenges to devote time to work and worship, to reconcile the power of the employer and religious interest of the Javanese workers. Through the narrative method, the thesis explores the relationship between religion and industrialized society in the context of the recent debates on the significance of those associational groups, and spatial-temporal aspects of religious practices (especially in FOSMIT and IPIT). The relationship between migrant worker and Taiwanese employer, particularly giving attention to how Javanese workers identify themselves in relation to others; whether they are different due to multiplicity of nationalities, ethnicities and religious views. The thesis demonstrates how religious and daily practices help the Javanese workers to have sense of ethnic group and the consciousness of otherness and ethnic difference.