The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and 'traces'.
Everyday Hindu religiosity and ritual objects -- "Mapping" spaces and objects : "diaspora Hinduism" and "puja items" -- Homes for gods : prayer altars for family shrines -- Visual representations of Hindu divinity : disentangling "material" from "deity" from "commodity" -- Flowers for worship, flowers for sale : straddling the "sacred" and the "secular" -- Religion and commodification : what are the possibilities for enchantment.
Access options:
The following links lead to the full text from the respective local libraries:
AbstractReligious pluralism is the norm rather than the exception in contemporary societies but this is by no means a recent phenomenon. This is also an empirical field that students of religion have long engaged theoretically. Such scholarly attention has generated a plethora of conceptual tools to make sense of religious encounters in multi-religious settings. As such, a number of phrases — 'religious pluralism,' 'religious diversity' and 'multi-religiosity' — abound in the relevant literature and the notions of pluralism, multiplicity and diversity inform these discussions. Such expressions as 'religious syncretism' and 'religious hybridisation' have also been proposed to address the various interactions witnessed across a variety of religious traditions. I argue that this terminology and the conceptual frames it advances need to be queried in order to assess their value and relevance for theorising interactions amongst religious traditions. This paper focuses on everyday forms of Hindu religiosity in urban Singapore and the kinds of engagement and participation that occur across religious traditions in this multi-religious context. Through my ethnography, I problematise the above-mentioned noted categories, as well as the sense-making strategies they have led to, while proposing alternative modes of approaching the realm of everyday religiosity at the level of practice.
AbstractThe paper begins by documenting the meanings the labels 'Hinduism' and 'Taoism' carry locally and highlights the complexities and ambiguities in discussions that invoke them. I then present data which demonstrate significant points of convergence between these two religious traditions, viewed as 'ethnic religions' and asserted to be 'different' in the Singaporean context. The turn to the organisational domain is instructive in revealing how 'Hindu' and 'Taoist' institutions have talked about their respective religions in the public sphere. This focus allows me to highlight overlaps in the two sets of discourses, to ask why these affinities should exist and to reflect on the sociological implications of such a phenomenon.
This paper argues that anthropological texts are embedded in specific epistemological and methodological assumptions, although this logic is not always articulated by authors. An attention to these foundational premises is consequential in allowing a procedure for gauging the methodological rigour and conceptual coherence of theoretical formulations thus proposed. Using specific writings of Franz Boas and Lucien Levy-Bruhl, I demonstrate that this embedded, implicit logic can be abstracted from a close reading of texts. A comparison of the methodological routes by which Boas and Levy-Bruhl arrive at their respective conceptualizations of 'primitive thought and 'primitive mentality' is used here for the purpose of demonstration. My selection of these two theorists is not inspired by my interest in the content of their writings vis-à-vis the nature of human thought processes — primitive or otherwise. Rather, the corpus for this paper has been constructed and inspired with a view to articulating the conceptual and methodological processes by which ideas are developed into concepts and subsequently integrated to formulate theories.
This article examines the phenomenon of the 'merger' of places of worship on the island nation-state of Singapore, and raises sociological questions regarding the rationale for such sharing of space for emergent styles of religiosity. The ethnographic material comes from two such cases of merger. involving Hindu and Taoist religious traditions in Singapore. These data allow us to abstract broader issues of conceptual relevance to the understanding of religion under conditions of modernity. My argument is that the practical requirement of merger in a shared physical location creates a literal and sym bolic space, as well as a context for interaction between individuals, communities and ultimately modes of religiosity. This context is both constraining and liberating at the same time, but I do not see modernity as eroding or diminishing religiosity. Rather, one observes that the formal rational, instrumental logic also facilitates innovations, inven tiveness and creativity in the religious domain, producing a vastly altered religious landscape. This challenges and impels us to move beyond a reductionist choice between the secularising or the sacralising effects of modernist forces on religious practice.
AbstractThis paper addresses attempts to construct and practise regional varieties of social sciences in a global setting. It raises for discussion various themes and problematical issues that are deemed to be central to the task of further pushing the boundaries of the discourse on "alternative" formulations of the social sciences. It is argued that critique is essential but, by itself, not sufficient to bring about fundamental changes in the social science domain. There is a need to ensure that these critiques are not merely superficially co-opted without decentring basic problematic assumptions inherent in mainstream social science traditions, and attend to the task of radically restructuring the institutional base of the social sciences, in order to practise them differently.
