%0 Journal Article
%T Hybrid Pathways to Orthodoxy in Brunei Darussalam: Bureaucratised Exorcism, Scientisation and the Mainstreaming of Deviant
%A Dominik M. M¨¹ller
%J Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs
%@ 1868-4882
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/186810341803700106
%X This article investigates the bureaucratisation of Islam in Brunei and its interlinkages with socio-cultural changes. It elucidates how realisations of state-enforced Islamic orthodoxy and purification produce locally unique meanings, while simultaneously reflecting much broader characteristics of the contemporary global condition. The article first introduces a theoretical perspective on the bureaucratisation of Islam as a social phenomenon that is intimately intertwined with the state's exercise of classificatory power and related popular processes of co-producing, and sometimes appropriating symbolic state power. Second, it outlines the historical trajectory of empowering Brunei's national ideology, Melayu Islam Beraja (MIB). It then explores social imaginaries and bureaucratic representations of ¡°deviant¡±-declared practices, before illustrating how these practices become reinvented within the parameters of state power as ¡°Sharia-compliant¡± services to the nation state. Simultaneously, national-religious protectionism is paradoxically expressed in thoroughly globalised terms and shaped by forces the state cannot (entirely) control. Newly established Sharia-serving practices become culturally re-embedded, while also flexibly drawing upon multiple transnational cultural registers. In the main ethnographic example, bureaucratised exorcism, Japanese water-crystal photography and scientisation fuse behind the ¡°firewall¡± of MIB. These hybrid pathways to orthodoxy complicate the narratives through which they are commonly framed
%K Brunei
%K Islam and the State
%K bureaucracy
%K classificatory power
%K exorcism
%K globalisation
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/186810341803700106