James Edmonds is a Ph.D. Candidate at Arizona State University in the Anthropology of Religion tract in the Religious Studies Department. His research is focused on the place of materiality and exchange in the everyday spaces of ethical formation. His dissertation titled, "Hunting Baraka: The Spiritual Materiality and the Material Spirituality reconfiguring the Indonesian Islamic Landscape," takes the performances of Habib Syech bin Abdul Qadir Assegaf across Indonesia and other parts of Asia as spaces in which reconfigurations of piety, identity, and strategies for living Islamically are indexed to baraka, often translated as blessings. His dissertation seeks to show how baraka, as both an actors’ category and a theoretical tool, challenges, evades, and redefines Western, Indonesian, and Islamic visions of religion, embodiment, materiality, exchange, and existence.