- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 In Place of Ritual -
2 The City and the Pagoda -
3 Territorial Cults and the Urbanization of the Chinese World -
4 Global and Religious -
5 The Muharram Procession of Mumbai -
6 Urban Processions -
7 Urban Megachurches and Contentious Religious Politics in Seoul -
8 Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good (Trust) Deeds -
9 The Urban Development and Heritage Contestation of Bangkok’s Chinatown -
10 Dealing with the Dragon -
11 Contested Religious Space in Jakarta -
12 Urban Buddhism in the Thai Postmetropolis -
13 From Village to City -
14 The Politics of Desecularization -
15 Parallel Universes -
16 The Flexibility of Religion -
17 Cultivating Happiness -
18 Other Christians as Christian Others -
19 Aspiring in Karachi -
20 Can Commodities be Sacred? -
21 Cinema and Karachi in the 1960s -
22 The Cinematic Soteriology of Bollywood -
23 Media, Urban Aspirations, and Religious Mobilization Among Twelver Shi‘ites in Mumbai -
24 Internet Hindus - Contributors
- Index
Aspiring in Karachi
Aspiring in Karachi
Breathing Life into the City of Death
- Chapter:
- (p.351) 19 Aspiring in Karachi
- Source:
- Handbook of Religion and the Asian City
- Author(s):
Noman Baig
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
This chapter explores how traders in Karachi shape their subjectivity to determine their spot and futures trading. Focusing on the experience of an owner of a money-changing shop with the pseudonym Aamir, it reflects on the notion of aspiration as oriented toward the future and shows that the shaping of subjectivity depends on cultural milieu. It explains how Aamir consciously cultivates his subjectivity in order to determine its course through spiritual exercises taught by a Sufi master who has transformed the way Aamir see himself and his relationship with money. It argues that Aamir's trading practices are fused with the spiritual exercise of zikr and considers how orienting the attention to breathing/aspiring as a way of living in the present becomes an ambivalent exercise.
Keywords: traders, Karachi, subjectivity, futures trading, aspiration, spiritual exercises, money, zikr, breathing
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 In Place of Ritual -
2 The City and the Pagoda -
3 Territorial Cults and the Urbanization of the Chinese World -
4 Global and Religious -
5 The Muharram Procession of Mumbai -
6 Urban Processions -
7 Urban Megachurches and Contentious Religious Politics in Seoul -
8 Good Thoughts, Good Words, and Good (Trust) Deeds -
9 The Urban Development and Heritage Contestation of Bangkok’s Chinatown -
10 Dealing with the Dragon -
11 Contested Religious Space in Jakarta -
12 Urban Buddhism in the Thai Postmetropolis -
13 From Village to City -
14 The Politics of Desecularization -
15 Parallel Universes -
16 The Flexibility of Religion -
17 Cultivating Happiness -
18 Other Christians as Christian Others -
19 Aspiring in Karachi -
20 Can Commodities be Sacred? -
21 Cinema and Karachi in the 1960s -
22 The Cinematic Soteriology of Bollywood -
23 Media, Urban Aspirations, and Religious Mobilization Among Twelver Shi‘ites in Mumbai -
24 Internet Hindus - Contributors
- Index