Negotiating Given Structures: Mapping the "Messiness" of Singapore’s Religious Landscape

• In Event: After Lee Kuan Yew: Repositioning Singapore Studies - Sponsored by Southeast Asia Council (SEAC)

Abstract

As an ethnographer living and working in Singapore, a primary concern in my research endeavours has been to convey and theorise the pulse of everyday life on the island nation-state. My specific substantive interest has been in mapping the ‘messiness’ of Singapore’s religious landscape. My paper offers brief glimpses into the world of ‘jungle temples’, the ‘mixed and matched’ realm of religious festivals and places of worship, ending with an invitation to track ‘signs of the scared’ in an everyday urban topography of Singapore. I demonstrate the ‘disarray’ and ‘disorderliness’ in these sites and practices and make visible the entwined and complex everyday religious lives of lay Singaporean Hindus and Taoists whose sensibilities enliven them. I argue that this ‘disregard’ for carefully drawn religious boundaries and categories has deep-seated roots in the socio-cultural history of the island and has typified Singapore’s religious domain even when Lee Kuan Yew was Prime Minister.

My narrative is at odds with the usual account of Singapore’s socio-cultural and religious realms, set against the backdrop of a hegemonic discourse of an authoritarian, controlling Singapore state which has functioned to over-determine individuals’ lives. I have often encountered the bullish certainty that the Singapore story is either already well known, with little left to discover, or that what might be revealed would be predictably dull and uninspiring. Moving the extant scholarly discourse away from these clichéd and formulaic renditions and towards plural, alternative, unconventional imaginings of Singaporean everyday life remains a challenge for Singapore Studies.

Author

• Vineeta Sinha, National University of Singapore