Religion, Everyday Struggle, and the Ordinary Ethics

This study explores the ethical works emerging from the everydayness of people dwelling in the coastal slum community in the urban village of Tambakrejo, Indonesia. Applying ethnographic participation in the daily routines of residents and ethnographic interviews to probe into how our informants undergo their lives beyond the usual reference to economic hardship and impoverishment, we use the concept of ordinary ethics—understood as the tacit, everyday moral reasoning embedded in practical action—to frame their constant negotiation and navigation amidst the daily struggle for survival. The study finds that the residents’ ordinary ethics is one that, although closely grounded within the theological dimension of Islam as their professed religion, expresses itself through the ways doctrinal commitments are interpreted, negotiated, and enacted in everyday life. Ordinary ethics, we argue, foregrounds individuals’ conception of religiosity. We explore the ethics of our informants to make sense of their everyday decision-making, detailing three types of ethical considerations that emerged during the fieldwork, which we, in turn, term as: pragmatic-oriented, compliance-oriented, and kinship-oriented considerations.