Noman Baig

NOMAN BAIG, Habib University, Karachi, Pakistan, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship to aid research and writing on “Cultures of Greed: Commerce and Cosmology in Pakistan.” Based on 24 months of extended fieldwork in Karachi, my book “Cosmonomics: Commerce and Cosmology in Pakistan” centers on the convergence of faith and finance. It investigates how the global discourse on money-laundering and terrorist finance in the post-9/11 era artificially constructed the notion of “good” and “dirty” money. 9/11 brought the US government and the Western media’s sharp focus on Pakistan’s informal economy — well-known to be larger than its formal counterpart — where money circulated relatively free from interference or control by the Pakistani state. Although political Islamic groups are present in the social landscape, this image is far from the lived realities. Framed by a colonial-era urban setting meant for a population one-tenth of its size, this dense social space hums with cosmologies that have little to do with the representation of “Islam” that dominates the global airwaves. The Pakistani state has intensified its efforts to survey and discipline such vernacular practices. Although only partially successful, these efforts have set off a cultural dynamic that threatens to change the nature of popular trading spaces like Bolton Market and the affective experiences of the bodies that inhabit them.