Convertire al Capitalismo: Etica Calvinista E Rituali Pagani Tra Gli Altipiani Di Sulawesi, In Indonesia

To further our critical understanding of the extension of market rationality to every domain of contemporary social life, we need fine-grained analyses of how capitalism became associated with a moral project of human emancipation. This article seeks to do so by describing how the Calvinist ethics infiltrated a remote pre-capitalist society of eastern Indonesia. Drawing on historical and ethnographic data, it describes the early twentieth-century encounter between a Dutch Calvinist Mission and the Toraja highlanders of Sulawesi. The author examines the processes of mutual mimesis and cultural transformation resulting from this encounter and shows how the missionaries’ work was aimed at reforming the individual’s subjectivity according to the principles of capitalist ethics. By showing how the Calvinists’ evangelizing work focused on an economic reform of indigenous ritual practices, the article opens a broader reflection on the interplay between the secular and the spiritual underlying the forms of subjectivity of our late-capitalist present.