Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces 9781138347342, 9781138347366, 9780429437045

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Figures
1. Introduction
Introduction
Chinese religion is not Chinese religion
Sacred space and/vs state space
Sacred space is imagination and materiality intertwined
Sacred space in Chinese religion is highly visual
The state and sacred space
The visual essay in the social sciences
Making a visual monograph - theory and practice
Contributions
Note
2. Visualising the (spiritual) city
Introduction
3. The social dead, the agentic spirit
Introduction
4. The Hungry Ghost Festival and aesthetic juxtaposition
Introduction
5. Tang-ki as embodied spiritual capital and arbiters of sacred space
Introduction
Note
6. Intimate sacred spaces - the body and home
Introduction
Body
Intimate spaces
7. The ebb and flow of sacred spaces
Introduction
8. Movement and motion in sacred flowscapes
Introduction
9. Conclusion
Introduction
Sacred flowscapes and the spiritual imagination
Sacred flowscapes, diasporic identities and the state
Some exploratory questions on writing the visual monograph
Towards a lyrical-visual sociology?1
Note
Epilogue
References
Index

Citation preview

OF GODS, GIFTS AND GHOSTS

How do individuals inscribe their spiritual identities and diasporic ethnicities in the city? Through a series of sociological and photographic essays, Terence Heng maps the various rituals, collectives, individuals and events that characterise Chinese religion practices in Singapore. From spirit mediums to the Hungry Ghost Festival, each chapter engages with the social, the spatial and the ephemeral, and in so doing will explore the significance and relevance of Chinese religion in a secular nation-state; reveal the strategies and tactics used by diasporic individuals to perform and retain their identities; uncover the importance of flow and fluidity in the making of sacred space; and evidence the value and efficacy of the use of photographs in social research. Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts is a ground-breaking exploration into the intersections between visual sociology, cultural geography and creative photographic practice. A visual monograph that gives equal importance to image and text, it interrogates the tensions between sacred and profane, official and unofficial, state and individual, physical and spiritual, peeling away the myriad layers of the spiritual imagination. Terence Heng is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Visual Methods in the Field: Photography for the Social Sciences (Routledge, 2016), and his work has been featured in Area, The Sociological Review, Social and Cultural Geography and Visual Communication. He is the 2015 winner of The Sociological Review’s Prize for Outstanding Scholarship.

“This stunning book takes a new step for visual sociology. Terence Heng has created a remarkable visual monograph. He adeptly brings together his scholarship as a sociologist of religion with a remarkable set of images which engage possibilities of documentary photography to bring us up close to the embodied and performative realities of everyday domestic and public spatialities of Chinese religion in Singapore. Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts will be a deeply insightful text for researchers and students of visual sociology and the sociology of religion.” Sarah Pink, Professor and Director, Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University, Australia “This book is both beautifully visualised and beautifully written. It is a fascinating study of Chinese religion in Singapore which explores the visuality of religious material culture and the visual work of worship through ethnographic writing but also through a series of mostly colour photographs which are so much more than illustrations. Strikingly and thoughtfully composed, this is a work of visual sociology and geography at its most insightful.” Gillian Rose, Professor of Human Geography, University of Oxford, UK

OF GODS, GIFTS AND GHOSTS Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces

Terence Heng

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Terence Heng The right of Terence Heng to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-34734-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-34736-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43704-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

For Ngoh Bah and Emily

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements List of figures

viii ix

1. Introduction

1

2. Visualising the (spiritual) city

15

3. The social dead, the agentic spirit

37

4. The Hungry Ghost Festival and aesthetic juxtaposition

57

5. Tang-ki as embodied spiritual capital and arbiters of sacred space

81

6. Intimate sacred spaces – the body and home

107

7. The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

133

8. Movement and motion in sacred flowscapes

159

9. Conclusion

185

Epilogue References Index

199 224 234

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the culmination of many years of ethnographic fieldwork. It draws from work done as an early-career researcher, with some projects meant to be short term, but has now become a lifelong and longitudinal sociological inquiry. To this extent, my collaborators are numerous, and it would be impossible to name them all, but some bear special mention – Hui Yew-Foong at Hong Kong Shue Yue, Koh Keng We at Nanyang Technological University and Liew Kai Khiun for their invaluable support, connections and advice. Also to my colleagues, friends and students in academia, thank you for your continued collegiality and friendship. Sometimes, informal networks and coffee sessions are the most important things – thanks especially to Helen Lomax, Jiow Hee Jhee, Joel Gn, Lye Kit Ying, Janice Kam, Shawn Goh, Mark Teo, Stuart Strange, Oh Soon-Hwa, Jesse O’Neill, Lim Sun Sun, Caroline Knowles, Paul Jones, Ross McGarry, Susan Pickard, Kirsty Morrin, Zoe Alker, Deborah Joy Warr, Ross Coomber, Sara Kindon, Debra Morris and Kate Theman. Thanks to the actors behind the scenes who helped make this book a reality – Jakob Horstmann, Martina O’Sullivan, Gerhard Boomgaarden, Alyson Claffey, Diana Ciobotea, Heather Jones, Nicole Abbott and the many staff at Taylor & Francis who have worked on the layout and production. To my family – thank you for always taking that leap of faith with me; to my wife E-Ping, my parents Ivan and Jenny, my sister Deborah and family – Lutfey, Aaryan and Ishaan – and of course my in-laws, Ngoh Bah and Emily. And as always, thanks to God for courage and comfort. Lastly, thanks to my informants, for without you I would have no photographs. Our encounters were often fleeting but no less important. In particular, thanks to Victor Yue for always being there, Nick for his friendship and support and Jeffrey and Doreen for their hospitality and openness. To the leaders, tang-ki, worshippers and allies of Bao De Gong, Hai Lian Tua, Xuan Jiang Dian, Wu Fu Tan, Choa Chu Kang Dou Mu Gong, Fu Tian Dian and Shan Wei Tan, thank you for your kindness and generosity. The printing of this book was partially supported by the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool.

Figures

1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3A and 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8A and 2.9 2.10 3.1 3.2 3.3A and 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10A, B 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8A and 4.9 4.10

B

B

B

and C

B

Visually stunning, wherever the place – Nine Emperor Gods Festival, temporary site on a beach Marina Bay, Downtown Singapore Tourist signs and symbols Transient aesthetic markers “Combined” temples “Backstage” altars Everyday homescapes – exterior Everyday homescapes – interior Everyday homescapes – transitions Communal homescapes Hidden sacredness A different kind of cemetery “These are your ancestors” Transmogrifications Fulfilling requests from the dead Continued personhoods The body is the body, even when there is no body The person is the person, even when there is no person Ghostly needs Ghostly rewards Intersections of state, society and spirits Itinerant altars … … along liminal corridors Embedded in the everyday Juxtaposed against modernity Points of spiritual focus Host society privileges Earth deity, wandering spirits Itinerant traces Spiritual scars Grandest in Singapore

8 19 21 22 25 26 27 30 31 33 35 41 43 44 47 48 49 51 53 54 55 61 63 64 65 67 69 71 73 75 77

x

Figures

4.11 5.1 5.2A 5.3 5.4A 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 6.1A 6.2A 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 7.1 7.2 7.3A 7.4A 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9 7.10 7.11 7.12 8.1

and B and B

and B and B

and B and B

8.2

8.3 8.4 8.5A and B 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9A and B 8.10 8.11 9.4

Salvation in the cover of night Performed comportments Becoming god Looking the part Playing the part Accessibility Divine power Imparting capital Spiritual marketplaces Production lines Decision-maker Enforcing boundaries Making spaces matter The presence of spiritual capital The embellished body Status symbols Bodies carrying bodies Extending embodied sacredness Malleable spaces Mundane intersections Sacred niches Spillovers Shared spaces, compartmentalised lives Closeness Setting-up The medium and his master Permanent home, temporary home Cleanse and consecrate Precarious places Improvise Compromise Fleeting encounters Sacred spaces as social networks Winning favour Informal ritual theatre Making transience Going forth Flowing over Changing course Motion is spiritual presence Lines of regulation and infrastructure Spirits flow Physicality and fluidity Enthronement, enthralment Flows of imagination Mechanised flows Intangible flows Old propaganda sticker in a shopping mall – “Chinese People, Chinese Language”

80 85 86 87 89 93 95 96 97 98 99 101 103 105 111 115 118 119 122 123 125 127 129 132 137 139 141 143 147 149 150 151 154 155 156 157 163 166 167 169 170 173 176 177 178 182 183 191

1 INTRODUCTION

3 Introduction

Introduction The choice of the first image in this book is not, as one might think, simply because it shows the sheer specta­ torship and performativity of Chinese religion rituals in Singapore (with an adherent in the foreground for scale). Indeed, the climax of many of these rituals involves setting highly flammable paper effigies of gods, possessions, servants and/or money alight – a means to transmogrify and hierophanise mundane objects into a spiritual reality, to be consumed mostly by gods, deities, ancestral spirits and ghosts both known and unknown. Scale becomes a proxy for social, economic and cultural capital of the devotees involved – the bigger the pile of things to burn, the greater the prestige, and perhaps the ensuing rewards from satiated ancestors. Look closer, and you will notice that the effigies are constrained by a steel cage – a mundane appliance designed to keep the objects burning within a designated safe and legal space. Unlike other instances of burning in other countries, these rituals are often regulated by health, safety and environmental laws (except during some periods of the year) – religious fervour and social performativity are bounded, both literally and metaphorically by the state. At the same time, what the photograph does not show is that the ritual is taking place in an open-air carpark right next to Singapore’s Newton Hawker Centre – a food court made famous in tourist television commercials ex­ ported to the rest of the world. Newton Hawker Centre brings tourists to a safe, largely authentic, but still highly manufactured and contrived version of Singapore’s food cultures. The juxtaposition of the Hawker Centre to the burning effigies is a parable of many dialectic tensions of identity that permeate this nation-state – state/individual, “tradition”/modernity, local/global and much more. This book is about visualising these dialectical tensions, bringing a sociological and geographical lens onto the practice of Chinese religion in Singapore, and its implications for the practice of sacredness, making of sacred space and forming and shaping of diasporic ethnic identities. Through the use of documentary photography, I will explore how the sacred and sacredness is manifested by individuals and groups in the unlikeliest of places, and how the exercise of such agency reveals the implications of making sacred space (Kong 1993) and performing ethnic identities in a nation-state of hypermodernity. This chapter introduces three important things about the book – one, I will provide a background and context of Chinese religion and the practice of Chinese religion in Singapore. Two, I will explore Singapore’s approach to managing space (especially religious space), ethnic identities and the relationship between the two. Three, I will explain the rationale for the book’s structure – because unlike other monographs, this volume seeks to put photographs at the centre of my analysis and presentation.

Chinese religion is not Chinese religion “Chinese religion” is a complicated concept – what seems simple to identify on the surface (anything religious that is related to Chinese culture) gives way to a competing definitions, linguistics, spellings, forms of worship and scholarly attention (Adler 2007, Goh 2009, Goossaert 2005, Tan 2018). Goossaert and Palmer’s definition is the most useful here, where they note “Chinese religion” (in its late Qing Dynasty form) is “… (a) system (of) integrated traditions of individual salvation, such as self-cultivation through meditation and body techniques, moral living, and spirit-possession techniques, including spirit writing; kinship-based rites, such as life-cycle rituals and ancestor worship; and communal religion, such as cults to local saints and deities – all of which were only partly framed within the three institutionalised teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism …. As Chinese religion does not have a single canon that could be a source of textual authority, there is no unified formal theology.” (Goossaert and Palmer 2011:20) Or, as Tan explains

Introduction

4

“… Chinese popular religion is actually the complex of Chinese indigenous beliefs and practices that most ordinary Chinese observe in their daily and festive life, including honoring ancestors and worshipping gods and goddesses and even ghosts. Considered as religion in the anthropological sense, it is diffused, to use C. K. Yang’s term (citing Yang 1961:294); that is, like many religions outside the Islamic and Judeo-Christian traditions, it is part of people’s social life rather than forming a separate religious institution.” (Tan 2018:4) Chinese religion is also sometimes referred to as Chinese popular Religion (Tan 2018). However, Chinese religion and its variants are concepts that appear to be restricted to scholarly, and not quotidian use - none of my informants have ever claimed to be “Chinese religionists”, or state that their religion is “Chinese religion”. For example, Goossaert (2005:1613) points out that “Chinese popular religion is a scholarly construct which does not corre­ spond to any traditional Chinese notion or institution … the fundamentally ambiguous word ‘popular’ sometimes refers to any widespread or commonly held idea or practice …”. Goossaert himself uses the term “Chinese religion” because it is accepted as a way to describe this myriad system of beliefs, largely because no one single term can encompass the multiple variants associated with it (see, e.g. Adler 2002, 2007, Mair et al 2005, Goossaert and Palmer 2011, Jansen 2012). The groups and individuals I have worked with over the last seven years would be what many scholars consider to be part of the term “minjian zongjiao – which literally means ‘religion among the masses’” – sectarian groups that are numerous and influential enough to be considered an institution in themselves (Tan 2018). In Singapore, such a combination of beliefs is usually associated with the Zhengyi sect of Taoism, which combines folk religious beliefs with Taoist doctrine and practices (Adler 2007, Tan 2018). As such, my informants commonly refer to themselves as Taoist, and many Spirit Altar (sin tua or sheng tang – 神坛) organisations are registered with the Singapore Taoist Federation. One of my key informants, Nick, a tang-ki (乩童), or spirit medium, often lists one of his ambitions as spreading and raising awareness of Taoism. It is not in the purview of this book to discuss the intricacies of how Chinese religion should be defined. Many scholars have spent tremendous amounts of time examining its history (Goossaert 2005) and have questioned its definition (Goh 2009), making it the de facto way to describe the phenomenon that I am studying. But I use the term “Chinese religion” with more than a little reluctance in this book – to do so removes at least some agency from my informants who refer to themselves as Taoist. But for the sake of simplicity, and also consistency with the literature, when I refer to practices as Chinese religion, I mean a Singaporean (and often South-east Asian) form of sectarian, spiritualist Taoism that encompasses liturgy from Taoist canon, deities from diasporic points of origin in China, and selective elements from Buddhism and other regional spiritualist practices (Taiwan being an increas­ ingly popular source). Doing so helps to differentiate Chinese religion from institutional Buddhist and Taoist practices in Singapore. In Singapore, scholars have examined Chinese religion from a variety of angles – most often so as a characteristic of Chinese or Diasporic Chinese cultures, everyday life, societies and/or history. Early studies of Chinese religion in Singapore include those by Topley (1955) who studied ghost marriages in Singapore, where families arranged for their deceased kin to be wedded, either to another deceased individual or to a living individual. In his study on Singaporean Chinese households, Freedman (1957) also included aspects of Chinese religion such as ancestral veneration, and the living’s relationships with the dead. Freedman’s study was also useful in mapping out makeshift temples and the positions of temporary altars in temple celebrations, which have continued to remain the same today. More recently, Tong (2004) explored contemporary death rituals in Singapore, examining themes of pollution, kinship, and cultural perspectives of different kinds of death – good, bad and violent. Chan (2006) is also often cited for her work on Chinese spirit mediums in Singapore, using a dramaturgical perspective to consider their role within society. Many of these studies however ignore the sociological and (to a lesser extent) geographical insights that stand to be gained from analysing Chinese religion. More often than not, anthropological themes are heavily invoked (see, e.g. Cheu 1993, Wee 1976, DeBernardi 1984, 2004, 2012, Tong 2004), which significantly illuminate our understanding of the ritual, but do not place them within a sociological imagination. For example, how do we understand Chinese

5 Introduction

religion from a race/ethnicity perspective? In what ways is capital (Bourdieu 1986) gained through spirit possession? What is the role of the state in regulating practices that subvert its authority? In other words, much has been done in examining Chinese religion as a phenomenon unto itself, but more has to be said about what the practice of it means to the social lives of its adherents and the spaces in which these practices take place. Even then, one of the difficulties I have encountered when writing about Chinese religion in Singapore is its opacity as a system of beliefs and practices to individuals (apart from scholars in anthropology and sociology). This opacity applies not just to audiences unfamiliar with religions from Asia (loosely defined), but also to individuals dwelling in Asia themselves. In Singapore, the practice of Chinese religion is gradually becoming dominated by the working-class, leading to a lack of meaningful engagement with the faith by policymakers, religious groups and to a lesser extent scholars (with some notable exceptions – see Chan 2006, Dean 2016, Goh 2009, Graham 2020, Lim 2019, Yang and Lang 2011). Chinese religion practitioners in Singapore are often derided or critiqued (especially by Evangelical/Protestant Christian adherents; see, e.g. Tong 2003) as superstitious and/or opposed to Judeo-Christian beliefs. Some of this is because of the visual culture of Chinese religion and the use of kim sin (idols) as part of the worship, the other because churches in Singapore have drawn much of their converts from this faith. For example, Clammer (1991) has looked at the parallels between Charismatic forms of Christianity and Chinese religion, and how their similarities have enabled easier conversions from the latter to the former. In secular circles, Chinese religion, especially Spirit Mediums and their assorted activities, are commonly viewed with suspicion, particularly by the state for their historical (and some would say current) connections with criminal activity and secret societies/triads. To this extent, part of the reason for this book is not just to analyse the practice of Chinese religion as a sociological and geographical phenomenon, but also to attempt to demystify it in the eyes of the individuals who encounter it in the everyday. During certain parts of the year, Chinese religion rituals, such as the Hungry Ghost Festival, take up large swathes of space, both physical and social – becoming visible and reified, significant but still mysterious (even to its adherents). Despite efforts by both the state and civil society to engage in inter-religious dialogue, much of society remains fragmented along ethnic, class and religious lines, which in themselves inter­ weave and overlap in complex ways. Other work on other religious practices in Singapore is also urgently needed for a better understanding and awareness of the multifaceted nature of faith. However, for now I intend to develop this book as a way to visualise what is often hidden in plain sight. In the next section, I will discuss the spaces and places where such rituals, activities and artefacts are situated, and the relationship between them and the regulatory state.

Sacred space and/vs state space Sacred space (Kong 1993), as the term implies, is space in which the sacred is seen to have manifest, often through a process of hierophany (Eliade 1961). Sacred space is social, political and cultural – it is constructed through the actions and imaginations of individuals who inhabit and dwell in that space, thus also often associated with the act of place-making. Within the social sciences, sacred space appears to be most analysed in human geography – where discussions are wide-ranging on topic and scale, from looking at the politics of strategizing the making of sacred space to the everyday life and place-making activities of adherents and devotees (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, Tong and Kong 2000, Kong 2002, della Dora 2009, Holloway 2003, Woods 2013). In this section, I will consider three points that will help frame the rest of this book. One, sacred space is as imaginative as it is material. It is a thirdspace (Soja 1996), reified and made concrete in the minds of the individuals who inhabit the space, where such reification is done through tactile, emotional and sensorial means. Two, despite its ephemerality, sacred space is also highly visual. Three, because of said visuality, sacred space is both subversive and controlling – it is often a space of political contestation between groups, usually society and state, where individuals struggle in creating different and often contrasting forms of meaning. I argue that these characteristics lend themselves well to visual approaches. I will deal with each of them in turn.

Introduction

6

Sacred space is imagination and materiality intertwined In previous work (Heng 2015), I have argued that creating spiritual space is an act of place-making, in which the imagination of individuals was paramount in their reification of spirituality in physicality. Spiritual space was a form of what Soja (1996:67) would call secondspace – “the primary space of utopian thought and vision … the purely creative imagination some of artists and poets”. Laid over the planned and state-mandated maps that Soja also called firstspaces, we could see how a thirdspace – a reification of the imagination – could emerge. Likewise, with sacred space, the role of the imagination is important, as it allows for the subversion or workaround of physical structure and political restrictions so as to make a place useful for one’s faith. For example, Woods (2013) examined the use of ritual and prayer (and sacred networks) amongst Christian groups in Sri Lanka in the creation of house churches – alternative sacred spaces where fully visible and dedicated Church buildings were prevented by the state, while spiritualist churches in north-east England rely on a mix of belief, imagination and interpretation when establishing spaces in which the dead speak or communicate to the living through mediums (Bartolini, MacKian and Pile 2017). Imagination can also be associated with believing in the presence of spiritual actors to aid in hierophany (Bartolini et al 2017), which are both sensed/felt and manifested, especially in deathscapes (what I would argue to be a subset of sacred space). Bennett and Bennett (2000) explained presence as the sensation of having the spirit of a deceased loved-one present, often in a physical sense, such as the feeling of being watched, hearing voices or smelling a particular scent associated with the loved-one. Maddrell (2013:508) has also examined presence (and absence) in great detail, particularly in relation to mnemonic deathscapes – the absence of loved ones is shown through the presence of rites and artefacts that exhibit continuing bonds between the living and the dead – “It (continuing bonds) can be performative, expressed through ritual and other embodied acts … but numerous studies show it is also manifested and sustained through material objects: graves, flowers and plants, memorials, domestic shrines, photographs …”. From these and other studies on sacred space (e.g. della Dora 2009), we can see the complex intertwining of imagination and materiality. Individuals’ imaginations are crucial to seeing and feeling a physical space as something more than the mundane – that the sacred inhabits and textures the space because of the presence of spiritual actors (God, ghost or otherwise). At the same time, such imagination is not enough to establish a space as sacred. The sacred must be manifested in ways that engage the senses – sight, sound, touch and taste. That the sacred is made material is nothing new – vernacular spaces that are most commonly cites as “sacred” are those that have some kind of marker (Heng 2014, Sinha 2016) associated with them. Whether it is an architectural structure (church, temple, mosque) or a more modest set-up (roadside shrines, memorial flowers, plaques, etc), the sacred needs to be shown. Instead, what I propose here is that in making sacred space, imagination and materiality are intricately in­ tertwined through the social actions and agency of individuals (both dead and alive, groups and institutions). This suggests that in order to understand how sacred space relates to issues of class, gender or race, we need to uncover not just the work of individuals, but the work of individuals as is found in their spiritual imagination – what do they think is there, that cannot be seen, or how are they choosing to develop relationships with what they believe to be “out there”? Materiality thus becomes one of the proxies by which imagination is visualised – whether it is in the intricate carvings of idols or statues, or the off-limit zones of ritual spaces because spirits there mean to do harm to the living. Materiality engages many of one’s senses, it can be seen, heard, smelt and touched, but none more so than sight. Through visual methods and our own sociological imagination, the invisible is now visible and recordable.

Sacred space in Chinese religion is highly visual It seems obvious to make the point that sacred space is visual. When has it ever not been? Scholars have long linked the sacred with visual markers. Whether it is the worship of deities or spirits in the form of statues, idols or other

7 Introduction

visualised symbols (Cohen and Jaw 1977, Maffly-Kipp 2005), or through the aestheticisation of religious spaces in the form of architecture (Chan 2005, Eberhard 1967), visuality is highly apparent. This section is not for me to repeat these arguments, but to make clear just how significant the visual is to worship in Chinese religion, and thus why I have chosen it as a way to produce a visual monograph. Such visuality manifests itself in many ways, and in this section I will briefly discuss two pertinent factors – one, the material culture of Chinese religion is aesthetically dominant, and two, adherents themselves engage in significant visual work as part of their worship – spectating and recording (on mobile phones - see Lim 2020) performative rituals and explosive moments of spirituality. In Singapore, my chosen site of study, the practice of Chinese religion and the act of consumption through material artefacts (as opposed to experiential phenomenon) texture each other in complicated interactions. The result is a material culture displayed in highly performative, and some might argue ostentatious and conspicuous ways. The level of ornamentation is the antithesis of minimalism – seeking colours that replicate grand imperial palaces (yellow) or have auspicious connotations (red). “Required” objects for “proper” worship are also nu­ merous and varied – incense sticks both large and small, effigies (of money, gold, possessions and servants), ritual objects (calligraphy, amulets, talisman) and regalia for priests and spirit mediums mix freely with more secular expressions – for example the rental of Pokemon-themed floats that blare Buddhist chants set to techno-music or the appearance of Maseratis in a parade celebrating the Nine Emperor Gods. Other scholars have also noted this heavy use of material artefacts as a form of performance. For example, Chan’s (2006) study of spirit mediums in Chinese religion is framed within a theatrical lens, where not only the behaviour, but also comportment (especially in front of adherents) of a spirit medium make the visual significant. My fieldwork has taken me through this rich menagerie of artefacts and aesthetic markers (Heng 2014, 2015), so much so that to not photograph them would not do justice to their visual lush-ness. This sensorial cacophony of visual markers is partly also why much worship involves the use of sight. Compare this to some religions where prayer involves the act of closed-eyes, and the Chinese religion adherent rarely looks away (or stops looking) during periods of worship (unless instructed to). Figure 1.1 demonstrates the centrality of visuality of Chinese religion in both its production as well as consumption. In the opening ritual of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival, a palanquin is entrusted with sacred ashes representing the presence of an Emperor God. Adherents not only kneel to show their devotion, but many have also joined the official (and unofficial) pho­ tographers in documenting a particularly special moment. The significance of the visual to worship in Chinese religion is an important reason that we must engage visually as well, from an ethnographic point of view. Furthermore, it is not just visual, but also experiential factors that demand an equally visual and immersive approach. During my fieldwork, adherents often struggled to explain how they experienced spiritual phenomena (whether that explanation was through particular doctrine or otherwise). In fact, Tan (2018) notes the primacy of symbols (both representational and idealised) in Chinese religion. Adherents may or may not know which deity or God they are interacting with or encountering (as has been the case in much of my fieldwork), but continue with their worship and/or devotion nonetheless. Thus, much of sacred space-making in Chinese religion, at least in Singapore where my observations are based, are about dwelling (Ingold 2000) – where dwelling encompasses the many actions and interactions taken by adherents and spiritual leaders alike – experiences ensconced in observable rituals.

The state and sacred space However, dwelling does not go uncontested, and the political negotiations around sacred space have been well documented and argued. In fact, according to Kong (2001), this negotiation is inherently political, involving debate and disruption (sometimes violent) over what space is sacred, and what is not, by different actors with different interests. Quoting Chidester and Linenthal (1995:6), Kong (2001:213) notes that “nothing is inherently sacred” because the sacred “is at the nexus of human practices and social projects”. The politics of sacred space, according to Kong, manifests itself in three different forms of relations – religious-secular, majority-minority, and a mix of the two. In religious-secular relations, we see that power is located in secular forces (often, but not

Introduction

FIGURE 1.1

8

Visually stunning, wherever the place – Nine Emperor Gods Festival, temporary site on a beach

necessarily limited to, the state) who make use of bureaucracy, law and capitalist notions to define what spaces may be termed sacred and what may /should not be. In this case the state also gets to determine how “sacred” is defined in the vernacular, and in this case definitions are often linked to religions and spiritual practices that are approved or authorised by the state. In other words, a religious group that is not recognised by the state will often similarly be unable to establish a state-approved sacred space. Again, Woods (2013) provides an excellent example of this relation, showing how house churches in Sri Lanka rely on social networks to propagate and sustain themselves. In majority-minority relations, we think primarily of different groups with different levels of political power. When spiritual or religious interests collide, such disparities in power start to manifest, and how this power is used becomes apparent. The “majority” in this sense may refer to simple numerical superiority, but of course that is not always in the case – numerical minorities in any one society may hold greater levels of social and economic capital, thus being able to exert their agency over debates on sacred-ness and sacred space (e.g. lobbying for more space for their own faith, or exerting influence over laws or secular moral values in society). Hunter’s (2016) study of Muslim burial grounds in Glasgow is a good example of majority-minority relations. As Hunter pointed out, what

9 Introduction

was a “moderate” claim to space by a minority ethnic group with diasporic connections met with “fierce re­ sistance” from the local populace (Hunter 2016:252). Although the primary concern from the majority host society was that of violation of green-belt principles (the rural land meant to prevent urban sprawl), the debate brought with it allegations of racism, revealing not just negotiations over sacred space, but that of the identities of diasporic ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom. Such complex negotiations exposes the fact that majorityminority relations are not simply about competing sacred interests, but are textured by a myriad number of other social processes. The third form of relation, which involves a mix of the previous two, is significantly manifest in this book, and acts as the foundation for my photographs and analyses. As I and others have argued elsewhere (Heng 2016a, Kong 2001, Sinha 2016, Woods 2019), the Singapore state plays a disproportionate role in shaping both sacred space (and, in fact, all spaces – see Ng 1999 and Yeoh 1996) as well as the identities of the population (Barr and Skrbiš 2008, Kong and Yeoh 2003, Wong and Tan 2017), ethnic or otherwise. In many cases, religious and ethnic identities are intertwined, such that the regulation of one significantly affects the other, and resistance to one also affects and/or performs the other (Heng 2015). The result of the engineering nature of the state is a series of conforming strategies adopted by individuals and communities that allow them to continue with their everyday spiritual practices and, in turn, their heterogeneous, diasporic identities. The idea of strategic conformity amongst diasporic groups is suggested, though not always explicitly mapped out in the literature. Scholars have long noted the accommodations that diasporic communities must and do make in order to either avoid conflict or censure from their host society (see Clifford 1994, Cohen 2008). Older migration policies often evoked the idea of “assimilation”, where migrants would eventually take up social and cultural norms of their host society (Ang 2014, Benton and Gomez 2014, Koshy 1994, Shanes 2012). Such policies created ex­ pectations of a subservient ethnic group, willing to reject cultural forms from their point of origin in favour of the dominant narratives they now face. Some choose to resist such policies and expectations, whilst others develop workarounds by embracing exoticity, novelty and hybridity, with mixed results (Berumen 2019, Gans 2007, Trabalzi and Sandoval 2010). In such instances, the practice of religious faiths is a double-edged sword – it can become a flashpoint for confrontation between diasporic community and host society (Hunter 2016), but it can also be a way to challenge dominant narratives (Heng 2015). The question remains as to how religion can do this, or in other words, how do workarounds work? What are the processes by which belief and the spiritual imagination contribute to the making of sacred spaces that confront without confronting, undermine without undermining? How do sacred spaces and spiritual practices help us to understand the strategies of diasporic communities? Throughout this book, my photographs and analyses will reveal this interplay between Chinese religion, the state, ethnic identities, and Singapore’s role as a global city at the influx and crossroads of sometimes conflicting cultural forms and norms, and I will revisit the relationship between sacred spaces and diasporic ethnicities in the conclusion of this book. For the moment, it is important to first explain the rationale for the visual format of this book, and what I seek to achieve by creating a visual “monograph”.

The visual essay in the social sciences This book, at its heart, is a work of visual sociology and geography. It takes seriously the proposition that images (in this case photographs) are an important and significant way in which we can make sociological arguments. However, it does not seek to make that argument exclusively through text. Over the last 20 years or so, so­ ciologists, both visual and otherwise, have written significant amounts of text arguing for the production, analysis, inclusion and consumption of the visual in scholarly sociological outputs. These include, but are not limited to – Howard Becker (1995), Douglas Harper (2012), Caroline Knowles (Knowles and Sweetman 2004, Knowles 2014), Jon Grady (1991), Luc Pauwels (2015), John Rieger (2011), Elizabeth Chaplin (2006), Jon Prosser (1998), Dona Schwartz (2009), Jon Wagner (2002), Dawn Mannay (2015), Penny Tinkler (2013), Helen Lomax (2012) and many more. Visual sociology also owes theoretical and methodological debts to scholars in relevant disciplines in the social sciences, with the likes of John and Malcolm Collier (1986), Marcus Banks (2001, 2013), Gillian Rose

Introduction

10

(2008, 2012, 2014), Sarah Pink (2007, 2012) all being regularly referenced. What many of these scholars have done is to argue for the value of the visual, usually in the form of photographs, to the social sciences. Many have worked towards defining the field of visual sociology (Becker 1995, Grady 1991, 1996, Pauwels 2015, Wagner 2002, 2006), whilst others have produced guides and case studies for the application of visual methods involving the production and/or analysis of images within a sociological context (Harper 2012, Heng 2016b, Knowles and Sweetman 2004, Margolis and Pauwels 2011, Pauwels and Mannay 2019, Suchar 1997). These publications demonstrate that there has been much evangelising for the use of photographs in sociology, with welcome progress since the time that photographs were seen as unreliable, subjective and partial,1 to the point of being banned from publication in some peer-reviewed journals (see Twine 2006). In addition to the work of boundary-defining, scholars have also sought to create works of visual sociology, where photographs do more than just act as illustrations. There are many instances, too many to name, but a number are worth mentioning as particularly informative for this book. For example, each chapter of Knowles and Harper’s (2009) book on mi­ gration and migrants in Hong Kong opens with a 360-degree image spanning two pages, giving the reader an immediate visual contextualisation of the social spaces that each chapter’s subjects inhabit. Greenblat’s (2004) treatise on Alzheimer’s patients made strategic use of photographs as part of her ethnographic methods, allowing readers a significant insight into the lived experiences of patients in a care home, whilst Schwartz’s (2009) col­ lection of everyday life in a family home, while not making extensive use of text, is exemplary in the kind of sociological images that we can potentially create (and in itself could be seen as an extension of sociological re­ search done). Now into its third edition, Good Company: A Tramp Life by Douglas Harper (2016), is an ethnographic account of homeless men who travel across the United States on freight trains, doing precarious labour where such work could be found. Reversing the standard format of literature review followed by data and analysis, Harper begins by presenting detailed studies of interactions with his informants, bringing these narratives alive with 78 photographs (up from an initial 43 in the first edition), comprising a mix of environmental portraits and still-life. Even though they were taken decades ago, the images retain their impact, reaching to a part of the sociological imagination that perhaps could not have been achieved by the (albeit) rich textual descriptions given by Harper. The balance of photographs and text in Good Company is unusual (with perhaps only Greenblat’s (2004) volume having a similar image-to-text ratio) – many other articles, books and chapters claiming to use visual methods still employ text as the dominant form of scholarly communication, to the extent that a typical so­ ciology or geography journal article has no more than four to six photographs (not counting those that employ maps, graphs or charts). One wonders if photographs are perceived to carry “less data” than other kinds of visualisations, and are thus taking up valuable space. That said, such implicit reluctance to use images over text may not always be the decision of the author – many publishers still place restrictions on how many photographs or images (such as maps) can be included in any particular publication, sometimes also creating a “wordequivalency” per image. Colour photographs create further complications, sometimes also incurring additional publication fees (Heng 2011). In other words, the practical issues of using photographs in sociological texts can be as challenging as any epistemological or ontological concerns. As such, scholarly outputs that do make significant use of photographs (thereby sacrificing text) are relatively few and far between. When published in peer-reviewed journals, they are often classed as “visual essays” (Heng 2019, Pauwels 2015). Although they are assigned a DOI number, and are cited in the same way as “full-length” articles, visual essays still attract a level of stigma in the form of various negative assumptions – they are a product of practice and not theory, they are more easily produced and therefore used to pad out curriculum vitae, they are not a valid form of research, and so on. Some might argue that the varying levels of peer-review that visual essays undergo contribute to this stigma. In some journals, they are reviewed by the editors themselves, whilst in others by (anonymous) members of the editorial board. Others might argue that these kinds of visual essays resemble too closely photobooks and photo essays produced by practicing photographers, and not academics.

11

Introduction

That is not to say that some have tried to build equivalency between visual essays and other more text-centric articles (see also Harper 1988 and Grady 1991). In his book Visualising the Social Sciences, Pauwels (2015) devotes an entire chapter to what a scholarly visual essay looks like. In trying to distinguish a visual social scientific essay from photo essays in general, Pauwels (2015:143) argues that as a form of scholarly communication, a visual essay should “… in some way address the exigencies … of its intended disciplinary audience”, and in a related point, that “a visual essay will hardly ever be purely visual”, explaining that without text to contextualise the scholarly con­ tributions of the article, the visual essay would be left wanting. I would extend these points and argue that a visual essay in the social sciences needs to be grounded in a theoretical framework. Similar to a journal article or a book chapter, situating a visual essay within a particular theoretical framework(s) or concept(s) allows for the author to make an argument (or what Pauwels (2015:144), quoting Plantinga (1997:17), calls an “assertive stance”), while at the same time contributing to scholarly debates around a particular theory, topic or field. Doing this would entail a discussion of relevant literature as well as framing of the photographs within theoretical and/or methodological concepts. In other words, how will the photographs in the visual essay work to support, challenge, reveal, or undermine something to do with theory? The inclusion of theory can be the defining difference between a visual essay that is grounded in academic research, versus one that is grounded in artistic or professional practice. Of course, this is not to say one is superior to another, neither is it to say that any of these are mutually exclusive. Interdisciplinary practice often necessitates the blurring of boundaries between theory and practice, and perhaps it is through the creation of visual essays, grounded in theory, that we can generate useful transgressions. However, this inclusion of a theoretical framework is not easy, because to do so would require a not-insignificant number of words, involving at least an ac­ knowledgement of, if not engagement with, existing literature. The challenge to the author of a visual essay, then, is to be able to not just curate and exhibit a limited number of images to make an argument, but also to succinctly embed those images within an equally limited number of words. In considering other recent visual essays (Heng 2012, 2014, Hunt 2016, O’Brien 2010, Traverso 2009) I have proposed that a visual essay structure could typically consist of 1,000–2,000 words that act as the theoretical and contextual introduction, followed by 10–15 photographs and accompanying captions, where preferred or applicable (Heng 2019). How the visual essay presents photographs remains the prerogative of the author, but I have also argued that common approaches include narrative/linear layouts (see Yang 2014b) that follow a sequence of events (useful when analysing rituals) or thematic layouts where photographs are arranged according to a particular theme or theory (e.g. Hunt 2016, McGarry 2019 Minton, Pace and Williams 2016, O’Brien 2010, Ryan 2013). This combination of words and photographs is also consistent with guidelines offered in journals such as Cultural Geographies and Visual Communication that accept, and have a long history of publishing, visual essays.

Making a visual monograph – theory and practice Like journal articles, one important limitation to a visual essay is how much can be argued in a limited amount of space. The answer in scholarly communication has always been a monograph, an opportunity to present a longform piece of research that includes deeper insights and demonstrates the extent of empirical evidence to the reader. Monographs are still seen as the “gold standard” output in sociology and other cognate social science disciplines, but little of their structure has changed over the years. Sociology monographs remain in the region of 60,000–70,000 words, with a limited number of images that are usually used as secondary illustrations. If monographs act as longform versions of journal articles and book chapters, how then might we envisage longform versions of visual essays? This question has been on my mind for a number of years. As mentioned in the previous section, the number of sociology books with a substantial visual component are few and far between (Greenblat 2004, Harper 2016). Even visual anthropology books tend to be anthropological analyses of visual culture and the visual in culture, with the

Introduction

12

majority of author-created visual material reserved for ethnographic film-making or photo essays. With this in mind, I propose that it is possible to create a visual monograph – defined here as a book-length collection of visual essays, where each visual essay is contextualised within a theoretical framework related, in this case, to sociology or human geography. The term “visual monograph” is not new, it has appeared occasionally in both academic and non-academic contexts. For instance, Grasseni (2004) defines the visual monograph as an ethnographic film within the discipline of visual anthropology. Photographers also sometimes refer to their production of photobooks (sometimes also colloquially termed “coffee-table books”) as visual monographs – collections of 40–50 photo­ graphs with short paragraphs of introductory text and captions (see, e.g. Cooper and Bellingham (2001) as well as the catalogue of photobooks by Magnum Photos (2018)). Yet these kinds of visual monographs do little to challenge the traditional social science monograph – ethnographic films are a separate genre, and while useful and contributing much to the social sciences, are not “books” in themselves. Photobooks, whilst books, also position themselves clearly within photographic practice, and less so in academic fields. Hence my offering of a visual monograph attempts to position itself as an “academic photobook” – one that privileges the visual as key to analysis, but seeks to focus on answering academic questions. In this way, I propose that this is a new format of research communication, one that seeks to make effective use of theory and practice to generate both sociological and geographical insights, as well as produce an evocative, engaging and immersive visual experience. This book will comprise of seven visual essay chapters (and one visualised essay), each of them dealing with a vignette of Chinese religion practice in Singapore. Meant to be read in a linear fashion like a monograph, these chapters examine spiritual place-making as a social practice within the social and political structures of a statedriven global city. Chapter 2 sets out the landscape, both literally and sociologically of Singapore as nation-state (Kong and Yeoh 2003), global city (Sassen-Koob 1990) and spiritual city (Pile 2005). The photographs in this chapter seek to expose the reader, who may be unfamiliar with Singapore’s architecture, to its everyday spaces (such as social housing) that are less publicised on the global stage. Chapter 3 engages with the agency of the dead (Harper 2010, Rubin 2015). In Chinese religion, an ancestor is never truly dead, their spirits continue to exist in parts, requiring both sustenance and appeasement. Using the case study of Bukit Brown Cemetery, where rituals of remembrance, exhumation and appeasement take place, I will show how the living maintain active relationships with the dead through material proxies of consociation. I continue on a theme of continuing bonds (Maddrell 2013) by examining the Hungry Ghost Festival (Heng 2014, Teiser 1996) in Chapter 4. How do planned spaces change in character during certain parts of the religious calendar? This chapter examines the way individuals engage in spiritual place-making through the performance of roadside altars and offerings, changing the way space is consumed and dwelled in through transient aesthetic markers (Heng 2015). Chapter 5 provides an interlude from place-making activities to examine the social processes of particularly spiritual practices in Chinese religion, known as tang-ki worship (Chan 2006). Tang-ki are spirit mediums who enter into trances, and are believed to be possessed by the spirit of deities that they are beholden to (see also DeBernardi 2012). Chapter 5 examines the role, relevance and aesthetic comportment of tang-ki in Singapore. Here, I argue that tang-ki are not just a significant conduit between the physical and spiritual worlds, through the performance and accumulation of spiritual capital (Verter 2003), also act as arbiters of sacred space. The next two chapters deal with the precarious relationships between individuals and the state. Starting with intimate spaces, Chapter 6 deals with the home. Spirit altars (or sin tua) are often associated with individual (or small groups of) tang-ki who engage in acts of worship within their own homes. Holding weekly consultation sessions for devotees, the aesthetic and spatial presence of their deities consume a large part of their lives. Sin tua and the tang-ki who run them are an important part of the quotidian working-class fabric – providing social, cultural and mental health support for individuals, but at the same time always exist precariously thanks to strict planning laws regarding the use of social housing (where most sin tua are based). Here, I visualise how a tang-ki’s body becomes the locus around which unofficial sacred space operates (Heng 2016a), making informal and less optimal spaces more sustainable for spiritual practice.

13

Introduction

Despite this fluidity, many sin tua still aspire to larger, more purpose-built spaces. Strict regulation of land-use space has meant that sin tua who cannot afford to bid for parcels of land must find ways to make temporary forays outside of their everyday spaces. This is often achieved by appropriating the aesthetic of a temple by using open fields and other liminal public spaces in short bursts of activity. Thus, Chapter 7 considers how tang-ki and sin tua project sacred space into the public through legal but precarious means, surviving on single-use permits to host public events. Like the transient aesthetic markers seen in Chapter 4, these acts of ebb and flow are a crucial way of sustaining the otherwise space- (and state-) restricted activities of sin tua. Chapter 8 brings themes of transience, liminality and precarity into the public and performative sphere. The literature on sacred space is often focussed on cartographically static spaces – shrines, churches, memorial benches or other kinds of scapes. This chapter challenges the notion of sacred space as fixed and explores what it means for sacred space to flow with individuals in and through physical infrastructure, and how such movement redefines boundaries of identity, control, regulation and ownership. Performativity, expressed through ritual and con­ sociation allows adherents to inscribe, however briefly, their personally-legitimised identities onto different landscapes where they would not normally be seen. Using examples from annual rituals such as yew keng (游境) (ritualistic parades, see Heng 2018) to the Nine Emperor Gods Festival (spirituality mixed with political legit­ imation of community), this chapter reveals the enduring power of temporality in the form of sacred flowscapes. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of the different concepts raised throughout the book, particularly the culminating framework of flowscapes. I will show how sacred flowscapes not only better help us to understand how sacred space works in concert with physical infrastructure, but also how the sacred is an important aspect of diasporic identity negotiation in nation-state modernity.

Contributions The first contribution of this book is to shine a sociological and geographical lens onto the practices and nuances of Chinese religion in modernity (Yang and Lang 2011), through the use of visual methods. The choice of Chinese religion as opposed to other religious faiths is deliberate – it lends itself very well to visualisation and a visual-centric analysis, it is often misrepresented and misunderstood in both contemporary society and social policy formation, and thus urgently requires a demystification through insights in the social sciences. This book also seeks to start con­ versations about the role of folk-esque religions in society today by showing the importance they retain in the everyday lives of individuals (Turner 2011). The second contribution of this book is to propose new ways of seeing the processes of sacred-space making (Bartolini et al 2017, Holloway 2003). I will demonstrate the social, material and spatial nuances of sacred-space making by revealing the different actors, actions, interactions and artefacts that make up the process. While we understand that materiality, ritual and human agency all play a part in making sacred spaces, more can be said about the work of individual and collective imaginations, and the ways in which the state, precariousness and fluidity shape its persistence and volatility. In doing this, I also raise questions about the social nature of sacred space – not that there is no such as thing as spaces that individuals consider to be special and spiritual, but where, when and how these spaces manifest, persist and dissipate. Connected to the act of sacred space making are the implications to the making of diasporic identities. In my chosen field of study, the two are intricately connected through history, politics and policy decisions, such that one cannot discuss the former without at least considering the latter. Here, I will extend previous work I have done about these connections (Heng 2014, 2015) to better understand the social processes underpinning individuals’ resistance to state narratives of identity. The third and most important contribution is methodological, and is to evidence a new way of commu­ nicating qualitative visual research through the creation of a visual monograph. While advances in research methodologies, digital printing and electronic dissemination (see Clark and Philips 2008) mean that visual (and other creative) methods are gaining both acceptance and popularity, the formats adopted by visual researchers are still limited (Heng 2011). Cost, inertia and adherence to text-only arguments and theorisation all continue to stymie the opportunities that the visual can afford us. I offer a possibility – a strategic compromise between text and image, and one that establishes visual data as a primary way of making a sociological argument. This book is

Introduction

14

thus an equal mix of sociological argument, artistic experiment and methodological proof of concept – a way forward in finding that difficult balance between theory and practice.

Note 1 Again, this book’s purview is not to extensively debate the value or use of photographs in the social sciences, or perhaps even the nature of visual sociology. For a more nuanced discussion on the “state” of photographs in sociology, see Michael Guggenheim’s (2013) excellent blog post.

2 VISUALISING THE (SPIRITUAL) CITY

17

Visualising the (spiritual) city

Introduction Singapore is a place obsessed with space, often because there is (relatively) so little of it in relation to the rest of the world, and the number of people living on the island. It has one of the highest population densities in the world, and recent policies in the last 10 years have sought to increase that density even further, mostly through immigration. Coupled with this are regular and dominant state narratives of scarcity. The Singaporean state has for the longest time emphasised Singapore’s resource vulnerability – a lack of natural drinking water (Wong and Brown 2009), no natural resources to mine (see Wan, Ong and Lee 2005), limited land to build on (Addae-Dapaah 1999), and so on. Most commonly, the state will remind the population that Singapore is “small” – geographically, economically, etc, and that difficult policy decisions and sacrifices must be made for the country to thrive or simply survive. That narrative has meant a consistently authoritarian approach to space and the uses of space (Han 2017). Singapore is highly planned, every parcel of land is carefully denoted for specific uses in an urban masterplan (Waller 2001). Plot ratios (see Phang 1996) determine how high/dense buildings can be built. Buildings are purpose-built and rarely meant to deviate from their intended function (unless given explicit permission). Such an approach has resulted in a number of implications. The state has successfully crafted and presented Singapore as a modern postcolonial nation-state that has achieved significant technological and economic success in a very short span of time, especially when compared to its geopolitical neighbours (Koh 2005). At the same time, this portrayal has also meant that Singapore carries with it an homogeneous, sterile image of technocratic and bureaucratic processes (Barr 2006, 2008, Tan 2012). To its supporters, Singapore is an example of collective sacrifice and hard work, a model for nation-states (Nair 2000, Shatkin 2014). To its detractors, Singapore’s authoritarian state stifles the imagination and expressions of its population in pursuit of economic growth (Lee 2014). While this book does not seek to support nor disprove such claims or perceptions, it does, like other studies (Lim 2019, Sasges and Ng 2019, Teo 2016) look to provide alternative and ethnographically rich textures of everyday life in Singapore, and how these textures texture. Sacred spaces provide one of these significant textures, but at the same time are held in constant tension of regulation and relaxation. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the study of how sacred space is regulated in this way has been well-defined by others, including Kong (1993) and Woods (2018, 2019), and it is not in the purview of this book to map out or repeat these arguments again. What is important to note here is that regulation and contestation of sacred space in Singapore is complicated – it is not always a straightforward fight between state and society, but an ongoing, often unspoken negotiation where implicit compromises are made on both sides. At the heart of these negotiations is what appears to be the tension between the aspirations and imaginations of the state and society. On the one hand, the state sees its role as the economic and political leader of the nationstate, responsible for realising a dream of a hypermodern city, replete with technology (see, e.g. its ambitions in becoming a smart city/nation) and rationality. On the other hand, members of society (who also desire such modernity), concurrently retain spiritual aspirations and imaginations that do not always concur with the state’s vision. A key example of this is the state’s desire to ensure spatial efficiency and consistency in Singapore – many spaces (both public and private) are designed and designated for particular purposes (e.g. sacred spaces are reserved for particular plots of land and buildings – see Kong 1999). Deviation from these intended purposes (in this case, for spiritual practices) can carry consequences of censure, but again, are textured by the aforementioned compromises. These compromises give rise to all kinds of nuanced resistance, subversion and censure that affirms the messiness of everyday social life. Instead of simply seeing the act of sacred place-making as explicit, direct conflict against the state, we need to see it as something woven in the fabric of everyday life, while still providing a lens onto the tension between aspirations and imaginations. As Steve Pile notes, Chinese engagement with spirits in Singapore is not a denial of the city’s modernity, but an affirmation. “Such beliefs, I would argue, do not simply co-exist with modernity, nor are they some kind of vestigial premodern superstition that will somehow disappear in the modern city; they are part of what it means for

Visualising the (spiritual) city 18

Singapore to be modern. In other words, Singapore’s modernity and its urbanism is ghostly, haunted, just as it is magical and vampiric.” (Pile 2005:134–35) Pile’s observation that the spiritual is deeply intertwined with the identity of the city in Singapore is a useful framework for us to understand sacred space. Sacred space in Singapore then is not always about special, set-aside spaces or special events that texture these spaces (although they frequently are). Sacred space is also located in the everyday spaces of life, where ritual, belief and imagination intermingle with the mundane and repetitive. While many cases mentioned in this book are about the performative and the spectacular, they take place in the background of the mundane This is most obvious in the often juxtaposed instances of adherents against casual observers, or the completely nonchalant. Even when set aside (typically what it means to be sacred), they are regulated and structured against the demands and restrictions of the state. As such, sacred space never exists in a social vacuum, it is always in the process of being constructed or deconstructed. The photographs in this chapter seek to do two things. One, they offer a visual map of the spaces in which spiritual activities take place, contextualising Singapore’s urbanity and modernity for the global reader (I have also done this previously, albeit from the perspective of a wedding photographer (Heng 2012)). A number of these images are thus of landscapes and cityscapes, an attempt to immerse the reader in the modern complexity and technocracy of Singapore. Two, the chapter seeks to show how Chinese religion practices are both special and mundane, and how they often take place in the backdrop of the everyday, revealing the compromises and nuanced resistances between state and society. Such images thus juxtapose the visually spectacular or unusual with the visually mundane (but, of course, what we consider to be special or mundane is also always up for debate).

FIGURE 2.1

Marina Bay, Downtown Singapore

Taken on its 50th anniversary as a nation-state, this is an example of Singapore’s projection to the world. The Marina Bay area appropriates the city’s Central Business District, mass market luxury mall (Marina Bay Sands) and

engineered tourist attractions (Gardens by the Bay – a climate-controlled, temperate botanical gardens) into one. It is also the site of the annual F1 Singapore Grand Prix, a tribute to wealth, aspiration, technology and consumption. It is, in many ways, a hypermodern space (Lipovetsky and Charles 2005).

FIGURE 2.2

Tourist signs and symbols

On a smaller scale, the state continues to engage in narratives of modernity to the outside observer. One way of doing this is espousing a kind of ‘cultural neatness’, a curated performance of cultural identities often for the purpose of tourism or global reputation. The Merlion, a tourism mascot developed in the 1980s (Yeoh and Chang 2003), is an example of such neatness – safe, accessible and uncontroversial. FIGURE 2.3A and B

Transient aesthetic markers

Safety, neatness and efficiency are thus hallmarks of the modern Singaporean nation-state. But this cannot be achieved without regulation (Lye 2010). Historically, such regulation was punitive – consisting of monetary fines, corporal punishment or public shaming. Corrective work-orders, where individuals convicted of littering were made to clean the streets while wearing high-visibility vests and photographed by the press, was one such example and highly popular in the 1990s and 2000s (Chan 2003). Here we see how (private and public) punitive warnings intersperse with spiritual desires during the Hungry Ghost Festival (see Chapter 4).

FIGURE 2.4

“Combined” temples

At the same time, physical spaces are planned for relentlessly. As Soja (1996) notes – these are firstspaces – the spaces of maps, rules, and drawings. Spiritual places such as temples, churches and mosques cannot be built without permission, and only on parcels of land designated by the state. Given the lack of supply to demand, the state now tends to lease these parcels to the highest bidder in intra-religion auctions (see Haila 2015). Groups who are unable to win parcels of land sometimes combine their bids, choosing to share land for their temple rather than not have any at all. This photograph shows the result of one such successful bid, each doorway an entrance to a separate temple with its own history and identities.

Visualising the (spiritual) city 26

FIGURE 2.5

“Backstage” altars

Others will choose to site their practice in “unofficial” locations such as homes and industrial estates (the latter of which was sanctioned for use only in 2014). A significant portion of this book considers the social implications to the ways in which “unofficial” spaces are used. Unlike dedicated, state-recognised land, “unofficial” sacred spaces are under constant threat of dissolution or removal.

29

Visualising the (spiritual) city

FIGURE 2.6

Everyday homescapes – exterior

Almost 84% of individuals in Singapore live in state-subsidised housing, known as Housing Development Board, or HDB, flats. These flats maintain a usually austere outward appearance, and have traditionally followed an architecturally modernist aesthetic. In recent times, newer HDB flats have been designed to cater to individuals’ aspirations for private housing. FIGURE 2.7

Everyday homescapes – interior

HDB flats vary by size and number of bedrooms, but are categorised according to the total number of rooms (living room + bedrooms, excluding kitchen). A three-room flat is thus a two-bedroom flat, and so on. State subsidies and financial benefits are commonly apportioned based on the size of one’s HDB flat, i.e. an assumption that flat size is roughly proportional one’s position on the economic hierarchy. Here we see a three-room HDB flat’s living room from the kitchen, with the main entrance in the background, and the bedroom door on the left.

FIGURE 2.8A and B

Everyday homescapes – transitions

HDB estates are also characterised by multiple transitory and liminal spaces – many of which have become rich sources of literary engagement and imagination (see Cheong 1996). “Void decks” are empty ground floors that act as communal spaces for multiple temporary activities like funerals, wakes, weddings and parties. “Common corridors” are long passageways that link multiple households together, but through the dwelling of residents, take on their own histories and identities.

FIGURE 2.9

Communal homescapes

Some HDB flats also house retail and food and beverage units. The kopitiam (coffee shop) is the Singapore approximation of the British pub. Commonly housing four to five independent food vendors as well as a drinks vendor, these spaces are both utilitarian and social – often providing a space for local residents to meet, eat and drink on an everyday basis. Here we see a procession of spirit mediums walking past a kopitiam, where residents barely register anything out of the ordinary.

FIGURE 2.10

Hidden sacredness

Nonchalance is balanced with the understanding that the sacred has a role to play in the everyday life of individuals. Although not obvious, shrines and other offerings are peppered throughout the island, hidden from view or in plain sight. Car parks in many commercial buildings will commonly house a shrine, set up by workers and service personnel.

3 THE SOCIAL DEAD, THE AGENTIC SPIRIT

39

The social dead, the agentic spirit

Introduction In this chapter I attempt to build on previous work (Heng 2014, 2018) in visualising the relationships that individuals forge between themselves and the spiritual world, particularly through acts of remembrance. My findings are framed within the theoretical possibilities of spiritual agency, where the dead (or other kinds of spirits) are seen to be agentic and capable of influencing the actions of others. In such instances, objects may be seen to work as proxies through which the dead and living interact and consociate – in other words, they are material proxies of consociation (Heng 2020). Here, I wish to visualise the efficacy of such proxies showing, amongst other things, the degree of agentic power the dead can have over the living. At the same time, I will also show how such power is diminished when positioned against state discourses of scarcity and “progress”. The study of deathscapes and memorialscapes have certainly considered the dead as important actors as part of the process of assemblage (Maddrell 2009, 2013, 2016, Maddrell and Sidaway 2010, Hallam and Hockey 2001). Some have also noted that the living engage in lively communication with the dead (Maddrell 2013, Bartolini, MacKian and Pile 2017), suggesting that the dead are not passive actors, but can have real and observable influence over the actions of the living (Young and Light 2003). In some cases, assemblage appears to have some limitations when considering how lively spiritual beings and lively objects co-exist in deathscapes (Bartolini 2015). I suggest that objects, while still important and influential, can also be considered more as proxies through which the lively dead interact (and not just communicate) with the living. This opens up our consideration of just how objects work, and how the active and influential presence of the dead is key to our engagement with spaces and objects associated with the dead and divine. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the work of a spiritual imagination (or spiritual imaginations) is important because it is through imagination (or belief) that the dead and divine have real influence over the actions and decisions of the living, i.e. the capability to have effect (Latour 1993). It is also only though the exercising of a spiritual imagination that we are able to conceptualise a social world beyond the physical or electronic realm. Like many other faiths, Chinese religion adherents believe in an afterlife of the everyday (see Chan et al 2005, Xu 2007), where individuals continue to exist very much as they would when alive – consuming, transacting and interacting. That belief means that the spiritual world to some is not about a dramatic transition to an ethereal existence, but a continuation of the mundane. As such, the living’s interaction with the dead is also one that is mundane – providing supplies and sustenance for everyday living. To not show fillial piety in this way is not just a smear on one’s character, but also invites the wrath of angry ancestors (Bray 2013, Otake 1980). As such, many of the things we see Chinese religion adherents do is about the exercising of spiritual imaginations about a (spiritual) world that is simultaneously sacred and profane. And much of it is done because the dead are social, have social needs, and can wreak social havoc if ignored. In other words, the type of continued bonds (Klass and Walter 2001) we see between the living, dead and divine are not just about grief, but centred around a belief that the physical and spiritual world are not all that different. Such mundane relationships have significant real-world implications. From a policy perspective, seeing the dead as agentic and lively (Maddrell 2013, 2016) is an important problematisation in the way we consider the significance of deathscapes and mnemonic rituals in everyday life. If the living see themselves as necessarily interacting with the dead, where that interaction is contingent on the presence of proxies, replacing these proxies with unsatisfactory alternatives might explain some of the resistance that arises when the state (or other actors) attempts to do just that. In Singapore, such alternatives are manifest in two ways – proposals to reduce the burning of paper effigies, especially during particular times of the year, and the re-purposing of deathscapes into other spaces such as luxury housing and motorways. The first is often a response to environmental concerns – the burning of paper effigies is a conspicuous act of pollution (Khezri et al 2015). For example, Kochhar-Lindgren (2016) notes how pollution and ritual burning are often conflated in the public eye in Hong Kong. It is commonly a lightning-rod for individuals performing subjectivities that frame these practices as archaic, superstitious and harmful. The result is often a raft of solutions that do not consider the social process of burning and transmogrification from effigy to spiritual reality, for example, replacing the effigy with digital objects in a smartphone app. The second is couched in previously

The social dead, the agentic spirit 40

mentioned state narratives of progress, scarcity and priority. Efforts to shrink deathscapes (particularly cemeteries, see Chong and Chua 2012) in Singapore is often justified by the state as a better, more efficient use of land as opposed to simply housing the dead, where the dead are seen as passive actors. In this situation, the dead are not agentic, but instead impediments to economic and political aspirations (Han 2015, Kong 2012). Although proposed alternatives at least show a little more empathy than simply digitising the dead, they are still insufficiently contextualised in the interactive nature of the social dead. In this visual essay I will attempt to make use of points of praxis (Heng 2018) to visualise the interactive ways in which the dead are alive to the living. As I previously also argued (ibid), many methodologies that visualise deathscapes rarely take into account the point of interaction between living and dead. This is a missed opportunity in visual methods, as the affordances offered by the camera allow us to see material proxies of consociation in action, to understand interaction at the point it takes place. As such, the photographs in this essay will attempt to capture movement, praxis, action and interaction, as a way to make known the liveliness of spirits and the sociality of the dead. I will also intersperse photographs of objects between these images of interaction, to give a sense of the vast inventories of material culture that affords Chinese religion practice in Singapore. Here, I use a case study of Bukit Brown Cemetery – a large deathscape located in the geographical centre of Singapore. Once used to house the dead of a particular regional diasporic community (migrants from the Fujian province in China), the cemetery was appropriated by the British colonial government and converted into a municipal cemetery. Closed in 1971, Bukit Brown remains the largest Chinese cemetery outside China, and the last remaining large-scale cemetery that is not on the periphery of the island. In recent years, the state has chosen to appropriate the cemetery for development – first constructing an underground train station with the same name, and then exhuming 4,000 graves and effectively bisecting the cemetery to make way for an eight-lane highway. Despite efforts from civil society and nature interest groups (Huang 2014, Luger 2016), the cemetery will likely be eventually absorbed into the state’s narratives of modernity and progress (see Yao 2001). Prior to the building of the highway, the state chose to commission a documentation project including a cultural inventory of affected graves, as well as recording their exhumation and reinterment, of which I was a part of. Three years of deep involvement with a variety of informants – visitors, gravediggers, descendants, activists, state officials, religious figures and spirit mediums has led me to see the cemetery as a space that is social and alive, filled with interactions between the living, dead and divine. This visual essay thus intends to examine how individuals construct, imagine and materialise the relationships they have with the spiritual world by visualising the social, cultural, active and expressive life of the cemetery, captured in points of praxis and materialised performances.

FIGURE 3.1

A different kind of cemetery

Bukit Brown Cemetery defies the performative neatness that Singapore projects to the rest of the world. With the cemetery closing in the 1970s to new burials, much of the space was reclaimed by tropical rainforest, making the cemetery unique in its composition of history, environment, politics and spirituality.

FIGURE 3.2

“These are your ancestors”

Rites of memory and remembrance are key moments for individuals to evoke the lively dead. In this photograph, an extended family gathers in Bukit Brown Cemetery for Qing Ming Jie – a festival that shares parallels with many other religious/cultural festivals that commemorate, remember and/or honour the dead (e.g. Day of the Dead, All Souls’ Day, etc). It is widely practiced as a form of tomb-maintenance – where individuals visit graves and other memorials to make offerings, pay respects and communicate with the dead. The dead in this case are very much “alive” in this sense, and require similar forms of sustenance in the spiritual world as the living. Here, younger members of the family are also being introduced to their ancestors and lineage. FIGURE 3.3A AND B

Transmogrifications

This sustenance is evidenced not just in mundane offerings of food, but in acts of transmogrifying physical effigies into “real” spiritual forms (see Chung and Li 2017, Harvey 2008, Sharifan 2013). Physical effigies are symbolic objects of mundane items – money, clothing, toiletries, electronic devices, food/drink, housing, automobiles, credit cards and more (Scott 2007). When burnt, they become these objects in the spiritual world used and consumed by spirits. In Figure 3.3A, a pile of kim zua smoulders on the first morning of Qing Ming in Bukit Brown. In Figure 3.3B, a family prepare for the exhumation of their father, and burn kim zua or “hell money” (see Chung and Li 2017) as an offering to the earth deity protecting the grave. Behind them are food offerings for their father to consume.

FIGURE 3.4

Fulfilling requests from the dead

The desire to use such objects is sometimes based on the desires of the living (an exercise in physical-spiritual conspicuous consumption) but also sometimes on the wishes of the dead. It is not uncommon to speak to informants who make their choice of offerings based on dreams in which the dead speak to them, telling them of their needs in the afterlife. Here, a box of paper effigy clothes is offered and burnt during Qing Ming. Names and birthdates are written on the box before burning to ensure the package gets to the right spirit. FIGURE 3.5

Continued personhoods

Key to the agency of the dead is also how the dead are still treated as living individuals who have needs, wants, emotions and moods (see, e.g. Ladwig 2012, Holt 2012). Various social and material processes support this continued personhood. Firstly is the practice of portrait images on memorial objects – tombstones, urns, ancestral tablets, columbarium niche fronts and more. Portraits visualise the dead (Abraham and Wegars 2003), personifying an otherwise potentially forgotten ancestor. FIGURE 3.6

The body is the body, even when there is no body

Secondly, the body is treated as alive and individual, whatever its condition. Through their spiritual imagination, adherents believe that an aspect of the soul continues to reside with the body, existing simultaneously with other aspects in the netherworld and in ancestral tablets. Here, an exhumation is in its final stages – while one gravedigger sifts through the excavated grave by hand for any final bone fragments, his colleague symbolically ‘bathes’ the bones in rice wine.

FIGURE 3.7

The person is the person, even when there is no person

Likewise, when dealing with remains, the bones and ashes of the dead are not just seen as what remains of the individual (and therefore accorded respect), but are the individual, again with needs and wants. During the

exhumation and reinterment process, exhumed bones are cremated before being stored in an urn and placed in a columbarium. The ashes are handled gingerly, ritually, with family members invited to touch and move pieces of bone from one container to another.

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The social dead, the agentic spirit

FIGURE 3.8

Ghostly needs

When in this world, the dead are also expected to “be like” the living. In other words, they face the same physical needs and constraints as if they were living individuals. Child ghosts must have offerings placed on the floor because they cannot reach high up on a table. Drink cans must be opened with a straw placed inside so that they can be drunk from. Adequate sanitary facilities are sometimes provided for ghosts to wash themselves (Tan 2018). Here, a Taoist priest ritually places a paper ancestral tablet of gathered souls from the Bukit Brown into a ghost toilet, so that the spirits may refresh themselves before dinner.

The social dead, the agentic spirit 54

FIGURE 3.9

Ghostly rewards

Although “constrained”, spirits and ghosts are also believed to be able to influence the physical world and the “fate” of individuals. In particular, spirits are seen to show favour through granting lucky numbers to individuals or groups in the national lottery (see Lin 2018), or by increasing the “good luck” (see Fong 2000) of an individual so that their career or business may thrive. Often, when individuals make offerings to ghosts, they also draw lots to ascertain four digits for Singapore’s most popular form of lottery.

FIGURE 3.10A, B AND C

Intersections of state, society and spirits

During my time documenting the exhumation of graves, I saw the active intersections and collisions between state, society and spirits. Most individuals were resigned to the displacement of the dead, given that many cemeteries in Singapore (and in other nation-states) have suffered similar fates. However, a few have resisted, arguing that too much has already been sacrificed at the altar of modernity. The desires of the state mean that individuals often have to find ways to balance their relationships and duties to the dead and divine.

4 THE HUNGRY GHOST FESTIVAL AND AESTHETIC JUXTAPOSITION

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Aesthetic juxtaposition

Introduction The Hungry Ghost Festival is a dichotomous period of contrasts in Singapore. It is performative and hidden, collectivist and individualistic, uniting and divisive. Its most well-known ritual – that of rampant burning of paper effigies of money and leaving offerings of food by the road and on footpaths, positions the individual against the state, and individual against individual, all framed within competing narratives of religion, superstition, regulation (of the environment and individuals’ behaviour) and identity. Taking place during the seventh month of the lunar calendar (roughly between mid-August to mid-September), the Hungry Ghost Festival is celebrated to varying degrees in both China as well as diasporic Chinese groups around the world (see Li 2017, Tan 2018, Teiser 1996). Tan (2018) explains the Hungry Ghost Festival as a syncretic ritual, combining folk religion, Taoist and Buddhist beliefs. It goes by many different names/terms across communities and cultures – Yulanpen (盂兰盆节)/the Ullambana Festival, Zhong Yuan Jie (中元節) and Pudu (普渡). Tan (2018) notes the various histories and belief systems that have come to form what we understand today as the Hungry Ghost Festival, but the key characteristic that we are interested in for this chapter is the temporary presence of spiritual beings in physical places. While there are numerous and varied rituals surrounding the Hungry Ghost Festival, they are often focussed on the relationships between living and dead. For 30 days during the seventh lunar month, individuals believe that the spirits of the dead are released from the netherworld, during which they wander through the world of the living. Such beings require sustenance in the form of clothing, food, currency and entertainment, and thus it is the responsibility of the living to offer these to the dead. Such ghosts are both familiar (spirits of ancestors) and unknown (“orphaned” ghosts, respectfully called “good brothers”). The former are usually cared for through salvation rituals (Li 2017), while the latter are often catered for by the placing of offerings by the road, meant to appease them as they wander, so that they would not cause harm to the living (Heng 2014). In previous work, I argued that the placing of itinerant altars and spiritual place-making could also be seen as a form of identity performance, where individuals subvert homogenised state narratives of Chineseness through region-specific cultural forms transported from points of origin (Heng 2015). As shown in Chapters 1 and 2, the state’s dominance over both spatial and ethnic social policies means that the heterogeneity of ethnic identities in Singapore has been downplayed in favour of narratives that favour simplistic and collectivistic racial categories, so as to further the formation of the nation-state (see Hill and Lian 2013). Overt resistance by diasporic groups (who are often the minority) against such categorisation in other nation-states has rarely been successful (Cornell and Hartmann 1998, Rae 2002), and as such raises the question of alternative strategies. I argued that heterogeneous identities are performed through “regional specificities and diasporic memories” (Heng 2015:58) that exist within thirdspaces (Soja 1996) of individuals’ reified (secondspace) spiritual imaginations. These performances offer individuals a channel (however unintentional) to indirectly challenge the will of the state (see also Chan 2020). Such reification and subversion works in the context of the Hungry Ghost Festival because of its transience. Unlike more “permanent” forms of ethnic identity performances (e.g. organisations, institutions and buildings), rituals and offerings made during the Hungry Ghost Festival appear and disappear quickly. Food, candles and joss (incense) sticks are present for a night at most, ready to be cleared and swept away by town councils in the morning. In high-traffic areas such as neighbourhood shopping malls, I have observed the clearing of offerings being done as soon as two hours after they have been placed. I have termed these objects (and other rituals) as transient aesthetic markers – things and actions that support the comportment of an individual, allowing them to reveal aspects of ethnic identity (that differ from that of the state), but are at the same time fleeting and evasive. In other words “it is through the impermanence of transient aesthetic markers that we see their resilience” (Heng 2015:75) in undermining homogeneous state narratives. Transient aesthetic markers can take many forms, and I have identified three particular ways that enable spiritual place-making (Heng 2014, 2015). The first is through itinerant altars – these are makeshift arrangements of food, drink, incense sticks and candles – set up for wandering ghosts to consume and be appeased by. Itinerant altars contribute an ethnic aesthetic to the spaces they inhabit, especially the more elaborate varieties with tables, scrolls and urns. Their presence shifts the landscape from physical to a mix of physical and spiritual, granting a particular

Aesthetic juxtaposition

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kind of ethnic identity. Often situated in otherwise mundane (and deliberately ascetic) environments, itinerant altars provide a point of interaction between living and dead – a reminder of the ever-present hungry ghost. The second is the re-purposing of planned spaces through the use of bai ku qian or bai xi qian (白溪钱), slips of paper effigies of silver coins, meant as payment (or bribery) to invisible spirits that may do one harm. Unlike other forms of effigies of currency which are burnt, these are thrown wildly into the air, temporarily changing the planned firstspaces of the everyday from mundanely purpose-built to spiritually purposeful. The third involves actual performances through synchronous rituals – public events that are consumed as they are performed, unlike the asynchronous placement of itinerant altars or encountering scattered bai xi qian. These are most commonly salvation rites known as chao du (超度) (patterned after Buddhist Ullambana rituals), where the living pray for the release of the dead from purgatory. They are concentrated bursts of activity, sometimes unannounced until they happen, and their briefness and intensity make them especially transient, but also equally impactful. Much of my previous visual work on the Hungry Ghost Festival (Heng 2014) was centred on a particular town centre in the north of Singapore, an intriguing case study of transient aesthetic markers in a 300-metre radius. Since my initial visual ethnographic foray into that space in 2013, I have documented many other instances of itinerant altars and performative rituals throughout the city. This visual essay seeks to broaden my survey of transient aesthetic markers, to incorporate what I call a process of aesthetic juxtaposition. One of the reasons why transient aesthetic markers work so well is the contrast they provide to the everyday. Despite there being a significant number of altars and temples in Singapore, the sheer density and positioning of transient aesthetic markers in places where they are not found during the rest of the year amplifies the performativity of ethnic identities. Through aesthetic juxtaposition, we consider not just the content of markers (what they are), but also their visual impact in the environment they are situated in (what they look like). When placed where they are not typically placed, they offer the passer-by an opportunity for serendipitous engagement – to invoke their spiritual imagination and remind them of the sacred possibilities of that space because they stand out from the everyday. At the same time, aesthetic juxtaposition reveals other kinds of tensions, different to negotiations of ethnic identity between individual and state. Despite their quick appearances and disappearances, these markers often leave behind physical traces – burn marks, fragments, odours, decomposition (which also feed into a wider concept I will discuss later in this book). Such traces are held in contrast to a different kind of ‘sacredness’ in Singapore society – that of state-enforced and socialised cleanliness (see Ong and Sovacool 2012). The presence of transient aesthetic markers in this situation are not about religion, ethnicity or identity, but (state-enforced and socialised) social norms and values. Issues of environmental discomfort and pollution (see Khezri et al 2015) are often invoked, both in mainstream as well as social media. Critics of the rituals also point to how such widespread burning and placing of offerings contradicts state narratives of a multireligious society (Lai 2008), giving the appearance of privileging one group over another. In this situation, the role and implications of transient aesthetic markers are further complicated than my initial arguments about performed ethnicity – their multiplicitous meanings suggest conundrums to the state’s official and unofficial policies towards the practice. Aesthetic juxtaposition as a concept allows us to better understand how the active making of sacred space is also challenged by everyday notions of secular sacredness permeating through Singaporean society.

FIGURE 4.1

Itinerant altars …

A typical example of what I have termed “itinerant altars” – these roadside offerings, while varied, often have a number of similarities. These include a selection of food (for utilitarian and symbolic purposes), candles and incense sticks. Paper effigies of currency, gold and silver (sometimes known colloquially as hell money, or

collectively as kim zua) are burnt and transmogrified into spiritual goods (Scott 2007). Bai Ku Qian is also scattered without being burnt as payment for the celebrant’s safe passage during this period.

FIGURE 4.2

… along liminal corridors

A woman walks past a setup of itinerant altars. Offerings are placed on grass verges at the base of HDB flats (effectively the nearest place one can make/burn offerings to one’s unit while avoiding sanctions). Where possible, kim zua are burnt in council-provided metal drums. White daylight fluorescent lamps are typically used in common areas of HDB flats, providing a stark contrast to the warm candlelight.

FIGURE 4.3

Embedded in the everyday

Itinerant altars are embedded in the everyday. Although individuals make sure they do not step on offerings, they are not averse to their presence. Void decks are typically communal areas when not used for specific purposes such as funerals or weddings, and here residents enjoy the evening breeze at a void deck, a child walking nonchantedly past an itinerant altar.

Aesthetic juxtaposition

FIGURE 4.4

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Juxtaposed against modernity

A more elaborate but still temporary altar is placed in a void deck, hidden in plain sight of a town council’s CCTV camera. Inscriptions placed above these altars are commonplace, noting the altar’s purpose, and a wish to wandering ghosts for good relations during the season. The four digits on the top left of the inscription are an example of a physical-spiritual transaction – should a ghost be pleased with the offerings, they may choose to bless these numbers to win the national lottery known as 4D (see Lim and Rogers 2017 on Chinese beliefs in ‘luck’). FIGURE 4.5

Points of spiritual focus

While all spaces are considered spiritual and sacred during the Hungry Ghost Festival, altars are places of spiritual focus, visualising one’s spiritual imagination. Recurring altars in void decks are an example of the ebb and flow of sacredness from other locations (also see Chapter 7), indicative of a more permanent spiritual practice somewhere in that particular block of flats (see Chapter 6).

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Aesthetic juxtaposition

Aesthetic juxtaposition

FIGURE 4.6

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Host society privileges

As shown in Chapter 2, the display of religious belief is not disallowed in Singapore, and it is common to find more permanent shrines and altars permeating through the commercial and residential landscape. These shrines/ altars reveal to us the complex relationship the Chinese community have with their circumstances – as a host society, they retain certain privileges, but intra-ethnic identities are also self-regulated and held in tension (see Chapter 9), textured by politics, class and successive waves of migration. FIGURE 4.7

Earth deity, wandering spirits

Shrines to the Earth deity Tua Pek Kong, or Fu De Zheng Sheng (福德正神) are a common sight in places of commerce (Chia 2017). Meant to both protect and bless the business, it stands in stark contrast to the more informal offerings on display. Where worship of deities on an everyday basis is focussed on a more permanent altar, the presence of wandering ghosts means that more informal offerings must be placed as well. If we think of “permanent” shrines as points of origin, we can then see how spiritual practices find opportunities to exceed their locus and flow into other parts of the infrastructure.

Aesthetic juxtaposition

FIGURE 4.8A AND B

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Itinerant traces

The leftover traces of itinerant altars are not always easily visible, but when noticed, still juxtapose themselves strongly against their surroundings. In Figure 4.8A, we see a single sheet of kim zua resting on the grass, no doubt blown aside when its brethren were burnt. In Figure 4.8B, a collection of sweets and biscuits for child ghosts are spilled onto the concrete floor, perhaps by the local neighbourhood cat. FIGURE 4.9

Spiritual scars

But not all traces are easily erased, dispersed or picked up. Instead, some scar the landscape in ways that reveal the privileges of being a majority host society. In other words, while we can understand the making of itinerant altars as resistance to state-organised ethnic identities, we also see the same act as an exercise in majority-minority relations in the making of sacred space (Kong 1999).

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Aesthetic juxtaposition

FIGURE 4.10

Grandest in Singapore

In 2013, I first witnessed the burning of the effigy of Tai Su Yah (大士爷) – the King of Hades and an incarnation of Guan Yin (觀音), the Goddess of Mercy (Choo 2011, Irwin 1990). Appearing only during the Hungry Ghost Festival, Tai Su Yah’s role is not just to regulate and discipline, but also to evangelise Buddhist teachings to wandering ghosts. The burning marks the culmination of salvation rituals (see Li 2017) – where the living actively try to secure release for their dead ancestors. The rituals reveal to us the continued bonds and relationships (see Maddrell 2013) between living and dead – where the living retain filial responsibilities for those in the spiritual world. FIGURE 4.11

Salvation in the cover of night

Salvation rituals for both familiar and unknown spirits appear spontaneously throughout the island during the Hungry Ghost Festival. The ones that gather the most attention tend to employ semi-permanent structures (see Chapter 7), reminiscent of the more performative identities at play in Hong Kong (Chan 2018). Less obvious are those that happen under the cover of night, adherents doing spiritual work away from the gaze of state and society.

Aesthetic juxtaposition

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5 TANG-KI AS EMBODIED SPIRITUAL CAPITAL AND ARBITERS OF SACRED SPACE

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Embodied spiritual capital

Introduction Much has been written about tang-ki, but less is known about their sociological significance to sacred space and sacredness. Tang-ki, also known as ji-tong (乩童), are spirit mediums who enter into a ritual trance (Chan 2006, DeBernardi 2012, Heng 2016b). During this trance, they are said to be possessed by the spirit of the deity in which they worship and have a contract with (my informants affectionately term these deities their “boss”), and in doing so are seen to become said god or deity. They take on the mythological and normative mannerisms, behaviours and dispositions of their god/deity, and adherents believe they gain supernatural powers to bless, admonish or empower. The origins of tang-ki in Singapore and much of South-East Asia are linked to folk religion practices in the Southern regions of China (or Southern Min communities – see DeBernardi 2012:9–19), evidenced in forms of rituals, identities of deities worshipped, and the use of Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese dialects (spoken both in ritual and by tang-ki whilst in a trance – thus, in effect, the languages spoken by gods). In this chapter, I will be examining how tang-ki operate as embodied (albeit transient) forms of Bourdieusian spiritual capital, and how through this embodiment they become temporary arbiters of sacred space. As long as they are able to enter into a trance and become a god, tang-ki become the spiritual lynchpin in the group or organisation that they are part of. Tang-ki in Singapore are often either the leader of a small group of adherents, commonly known as a sin tua, or sheng tang (literally meaning spirit altar), or are in the employ of a larger institutionalised temple, where they retain a significant role in the spiritual life of the temple, but not necessarily its administration (unlike the former where the tang-ki is more of an entrepreneur than employee). Bourdieu’s concept of capital is useful in understanding the authority of adherents and devotion attributed to a tang-ki, especially when in a trance. Capital, as defined by Bourdieu (1986:241) “is accumulated labor (in its materialized form or its ‘incorporated,’ embodied form) which, when appropriated on a private, i.e., exclusive, basis by agents or groups of agents, enables them to appropriate social energy in the form of reified or living labor.” In other words, it describes certain forms of resources available to and used by an individual to position themselves within a particular social hierarchy, or what Bourdieu calls a “field”. Whilst initial forms of capital could be seen in social, cultural and economic varieties, other scholars have gone on to extend this discussion of capital from a religious or spiritual perspective. For example, Verter (2003) explores spiritual knowledge as a form of cultural capital. Noting that Bourdieu’s study of religion “… employ(ed) categories that are too rigid to account for the fluidities of today’s spiritual marketplace” (Verter 2003:151), Verter offers the term spiritual capital as a way of understanding how individuals make use of their spirituality to influence others and gain prestige within a hierarchy.1 Citing Iannaccone (1990), Verter first distinguishes spiritual capital from religious capital, where religious capital is constructed within the boundaries of a particular institution. These might include knowledge of a particular religion, such as familiarity with ritual or doctrine, and social connections with other adherents. Such capital is more about reputation than power. Spiritual capital, on the other hand, grants the holder the ability to compete with others in their field, positioning themselves within a spiritual and social arena. An embodied form of spiritual capital is not just how an individual is placed, but places through their comportment and informed behaviours, the latter being gained through knowledge, positioning and credibility. This process can be reinforced through objectified forms of spiritual capital – commodities that support comportment (especially sacred objects and vestments), and then further ratified through institutionalised actions, such as the setup of independent organisations which cement the position of the individual. This concept of spiritual capital maps well to the practices of tang-ki in Singapore. Tang-ki lose their personhood when they are in a trance. In other words, once a god or deity has entered their body, tang-ki are seen as vessels through which a spiritual being exercises their agency (see DeBernardi 2012, Lee 1986). But it is in becoming a vessel that a tang-ki temporarily gains the greatest amount of spiritual capital. As a god/deity, a tang-ki’s words and commands are near absolute. Their embodied spiritual capital is expressed through the ability to perform thaumarturgical rites – including cleansing haunted spaces, healing ailments or altering an individual’s ‘fate’ (which usually involves advancing a worshipper’s career, or granting them good fortune to win the national lottery). This

Embodied spiritual capital 84

spiritual capital is further reinforced and objectified by the use of vestments and artifacts related to each individual god or deity. When entering a trance, a tang-ki is typically semi-dressed – shirtless for men, or a t-shirt for women. Once the trance is complete, and their god/deity has arrived, they are then dressed appropriately, including aesthetic markers that complete the “look” – wigs and beards are not uncommon, worn so as to match a god’s/ deity’s likeness. Being possessed by a god or deity moves a tang-ki to the top of the hierarchy of a temple or sin tua for the duration of the trance. The tang-ki’s assistants, also known as toh tao (桌頭) attend to their every whim and desire, giving them their favourite food and drink, lighting their cigarettes (the underworld deities in particular love to smoke), and doing whatever is asked of them. As previously mentioned, their authority in deciding spiritual (and in the case of smaller temples and sin tua, administrative) matters are often unquestionable. Dates for special events and rituals are decided, locations for where rituals take place are also given by a tang-ki in a trance. At times, a tangki will also make special requests for their comportment, which their followers must comply with. Being in control of this level of spiritual capital also means that tang-ki are often called upon to sanctify and arbitrate on sacred spaces, both transient and permanent. In Chapter 7, we will see how sacred spaces of sin tua ebb and flow from a (relatively) fixed centre, to allow for a greater sphere of influence for the organisation. This constant shifting, expansion and contraction of sacred space involves both decision-making as well as the supernatural power of a god/deity to legitimise adherents’ activities. As such, the making of sacred space by Chinese religion adherents is often predicated on the spiritual capital and spiritual credibility of their leaders – in this case, one or more tang-ki. The photographs in this chapter aim to visualise the making of spiritual capital, how it is embodied, objectified and institutionalised, how it is used by tang-ki as part of their practice, and lastly the volatility of spiritual capital, evidenced in its own kind of transience.

FIGURE 5.1

Performed comportments

Tang-ki rely on what I term to be “performed comportments” to establish an authentic form of spiritual capital. This is first achieved through a performative ritual of entering a trance. A tang-ki rarely does this on their own, instead relying on both place (usually in front of an altar where their deities reside) and social capital (being surrounded by their followers). FIGURE 5.2A and B

Becoming god

Often, toh tao would also chant, invoking and inviting this god/deity to appear and take hold of their leader. The tang-ki would then start to move, shake or rock involuntarily, and begin to take on normative behaviours and movements associated with their possessing god/deity. FIGURE 5.3

Looking the part

When fully immersed into a trance, the tang-ki is robed by their followers in the vestments appropriate for their god/deity. This robing is vitally important because it signals both authenticity and authority. The tang-ki is now no longer a person, but an embodied spiritual being, capable of supernatural feats.

Embodied spiritual capital 92

FIGURE 5.4A AND B

Playing the part

Performed comportments continue throughout the trance. Tang-ki often make actions that remind onlookers and followers that they are, indeed, possessed. This involves again mimicking the physical appearance of their god/ deity. A tang-ki possessed by the Monkey God would scratch themselves, or one possessed by Tua Ya Pek (大爺 伯), an underworld deity (see Graham 2017) would occasionally stick their tongue out, as is popularly depicted in idols and other imagery. FIGURE 5.5

Accessibility

Interaction also reinforces spiritual capital. As a god/deity, the tang-ki is not simply sequestered away from adherents, and is thus not “sacred” in that sense. They are, instead, recast as public figures, granting access to all who wish to pay tribute or seek assistance. As such, a tang-ki rarely operates in a social vacuum, and as such is part of both semi-formal (sin tua) and formal organisations (temples). Sin tua act as micro-versions of temples, both in structure and appearance, and serve to institutionalise a tang-ki’s spiritual capital. Here, Nick, a tang-ki and one of my main collaborators, holds court during the Lunar New Year in the flat he shares with his parents.

FIGURE 5.6

Divine power

Shan Cai Tong Zi (善財童子) – the Child God of Wealth, blesses their sin tua’s chairman/sponsor through playful banter by placing a steamed bun on his head. The belief in the ability to perform thaumaturgical acts establishes and maintains the tang-ki as leader, object of devotion and power, and primary vessel of spiritual capital in the sin tua.

Embodied spiritual capital 96

FIGURE 5.7

Imparting capital

As vessels and sources of spiritual capital, tang-ki are also called upon to convert and objectify that capital into artefacts. Such artefacts can range from amulets to paper talismans to everyday objects such as sacks of rice. The objectification process often involves a tang-ki making a sacred mark on the object, whether through calligraphic inking or stamping. Through this process, the artefacts are seen as material extensions of a tang-ki’s spiritual capital, and vessels of power in themselves, able to bestow good fortune on the owner.

97

Embodied spiritual capital

FIGURE 5.8

Spiritual marketplaces

These artefacts are converted into economic capital for the sin tua during the organisation’s annual celebrations (often commemorating the birthday of the sin tua’s chief deity). The auction is a key source of income for sin tua and temples (e.g. see Hartati 2017, Walsh 2007), who do not enforce regular tithing or contributions amongst their followers. Adherents can buy artefacts for their own use, or sponsor particular artefacts used by the tang-ki and sin tua.

FIGURE 5.9

Production lines

One popular and performative artefact is hong cai (红彩) – a red banner, typically hung over the front door of an individual’s or a business’s dwelling. An aesthetic marker (see Knowles 2003), these banners are often displayed prominently to passers-by. Here, assistants to a tang-ki have formed an assembly line for the consecration of preordered banners. Like other objects, they do not just extend a tang-ki’s spiritual capital beyond a sin tua, but also work to establish a tang-ki’s ability to determine and dictate the sacredness of everyday space.

FIGURE 5.10

Decision-maker

Against a backdrop of social housing flats, Jonathan, a tang-ki possessed by the spirit of Qi Tian Da Sheng (齐天大 圣), or Sun Wukong the Monkey God (Shahar 1992), directs his assistants to carefully place talismans denoting specific compass points, thus orienting their temporary tentage for the sin tua’s annual celebration. The Monkey God is precise and demanding – adjusting the placement of talismans to a couple of centimetres.

FIGURE 5.11

Enforcing boundaries

Carrying lit incense sticks, adherents make their way down to the shoreline to invite lost souls to partake of their offerings. Just before, the ritual musicians had gone ahead of the group, and were quickly rebuked and called back by the presiding tang-ki, possessed by the spirit of Di Ya Pek (二爺伯), another underworld deity and counterpart to Tua Ya Pek, known collectively as Hei Bai Wu Chang (黑白无常) (see Storozhuk 2017, Tan 2018). The shoreline was, according to Di Ya Pek, unclean and should not be trespassed upon without his presence to protect them.

103

Embodied spiritual capital

Embodied spiritual capital 104

FIGURE 5.12

Making spaces matter

Tang-ki do not just create and influence sacred space, they also legitimise other spaces as sacred through their presence, choices and commands. Tang-ki retain the right to choose where a sin tua might perform a ritual, or even arbitrarily alter a planned route/path. The latter can be quite common, suggesting a rapid fluidity of place-making, influenced by the agency of the tang-ki (see Chapter 8). Here, a toh tao scurries back to a waiting car after paying spirits for safe passage using bai xi qian (see Chapter 4), he being part of a larger contingent following the orders of their sin tua’s tang-ki to establish an area of temporary worship in a cemetery. FIGURE 5.13

The presence of spiritual capital

In Bukit Brown Cemetery, Choon, a middle-aged tang-ki, dances around a bonfire of kim zua set up by another group. Choon was already in the area for his own rituals, but still entranced, chose to interact with the group, much to their delight. His presence and performed comportment reinforced the artefacts already there, with many adherents taking the opportunity for informal consultations and blessings.

Note 1 For a detailed discussion of spiritual capital, its history and varieties, see Guest (2010).

6 INTIMATE SACRED SPACES – THE BODY AND HOME

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Intimate sacred spaces

Introduction In a small rented studio flat near the centre of Singapore, I witness three middle-aged/elderly men take turns to become Gods. The flat is the site of Wu Fu Tan, or the Altar of Five Treasures, and a key example of “house temples” (Heng 2016a) in Singapore. Wu Fu Tan is a sin tua (神坛, spirit altar; see Nickerson 2001), a semi-formal group of Chinese religion practitioners led by one or more tang-ki, who often operate out of residential or commercial properties. As mentioned in Chapter 5, sin tua are an institutionalised form of spiritual capital for tangki and their assistants – a formation of semi-structured hierarchies that legitimise and reify a tang-ki’s social position as spiritual leader and representative of the divine. In this chapter, I will be considering how sacred space is “unofficially” constructed in residential homes, refining and extending an earlier argument I made about the body of a tang-ki as sacred space (Heng 2016a). As explained earlier in the book, spaces dedicated to religion and spirituality are highly regulated in Singapore, where the state determines the size, nature and tenure of any particular space, which is then further neoliberalised through an auction/bidding process (Woods 2018) between different groups of the same religion (which in itself is also categorised by the state). Scarcity and competition means that the majority of smaller faith groups (regardless of religion/belief) are effectively priced out of the spiritual space ‘market’, and should they wish to continue their practices, need to find alternative spaces to conduct worship (Kong 2002). The positioning of sin tua in residential homes is not just a clear example of the ways in which sacred space is produced in relationships between the state and individuals, but also how individuals circumvent and find accommodations in their practices in the face of scarcity, regulation and restriction (see Woods 2019). Although the latter has been explored by scholars with regards to the strategies of everyday adherents (Tong and Kong 2000), less is known about how professionals and leaders of the faith engage with the state, especially since their practices, altars and artefacts all tend to be more prominent and elaborate. In an earlier paper (Heng 2016a), I outlined the reasons why tang-ki were able to develop and sustain “unofficial” (Kong 1993) sacred spaces in their homes, despite these homes being small and unable to fully approximate the spatiality of a temple. The main reason for this was related to the performed comportments of tang-ki and their status as gods. Once a tang-ki was in a trance, their spiritual capital increases exponentially, such that the social attention of adherents becomes more fixated upon the tang-ki than say, other spaces/objects around the tang-ki. As such, the tang-ki’s body becomes the locus around which sacredness rotates, allowing for the body to be sacred space. For a short and liminal period of time, space itself becomes less relevant than the individual present. In other words, tang-ki are not just arbiters of sacred space, they also supplement and temporarily replace space for their followers – where a tang-ki goes, sacredness and spiritual imaginations follow. As such, I argue that more attention needs to be paid to the body as a site of, proxy for, and place of practice for, sacred space (Holloway 2003, Gökarıksel 2009). In this case, the body becomes key to undermining and/or accommodating for state restrictions placed upon individuals (regardless of religious affiliation). The body is thus not just the site for subjectivities of the religious self (e.g. Gökarıksel 2009, Rountree 2002), but also the site for subjective space. As a subjective space, the tang-ki’s body is inscribed with objects and rituals – painted on, pierced with, clothed with, etc. Other studies have also shown the ways in which the body of a medium is central to the construction of a spiritual identity and projection to adherents (Cohen and Barrett 2008, Lambek 2002, Seaman 1981). As such, the first part of this chapter’s visual essay closely examines the body as a subjective, fluid and inscribed space, upon which meaning and devotion is adorned. However, this is not to say that other forms of physical/ social space are unimportant – for gods and deities still need a place to live and dwell. The statues of gods/deities (also known as kim sin) are seen as literal embodiments of their likeness. They are not simply placeholders or proxies, but once “awakened” through ritual, are gods, and require constant attention, devotion and appeasement. They also cannot be placed or stored in any fashion, and require enthronement in similar ways to a temple. Whilst it is not uncommon for adherents to have one to three kim sin on an altar at home, sin tua altars maintained by tangki are typically much larger, more elaborate/complex, and house many more kim sin.

Intimate sacred spaces 110

I propose that these characteristics of an altar are significant for tang-ki. Not only do these altars act as objectified spiritual capital, they also grant legitimacy through assessment signalling. This is achieved in two ways. Firstly, sin tua altars take up a significant amount of space (both physical and social) in a tang-ki’s home – anywhere from a quarter to a third of the living room in a typical two-bedroom flat (the most common social housing type I have encountered in my research). The size and complexity of an altar also appears to act as an indicator of the tang-ki’s connection to the spiritual world, supplementing the tang-ki’s reputation and efficacy in performing thaumaturgical acts. In taking up so much space, the sheer primacy and presence of an altar (and other artefacts) work to repurpose the flat’s primary social role from residential to spiritual (although it is still both at the same time). Often, during public consultations, items are moved around to increase the “footprint” of the altar, making the living room a fluid and malleable space. That fluidity, sometimes achieved by marginalising other elements in the living room (television, furniture), is an important affordance for tang-ki who wish to work where they live. Secondly, sin tua altars (and other supporting objects) help to appropriate and approximate the typical aesthetics of a temple, although none will actually claim to be operating a temple. The aesthetic likeness of a sin tua (achieved primarily through the altar and presence of kim sin) to a temple grants a degree of atmospheric spirituality to a flat (see also Goh Ze Song 2020). This kind of atmosphere differs from the intentional grandeurs performed by temples in that it offers the possibilities of interactions with the divine in an intimate, personal space. In a sin tua, the gods are physically and socially closer, and the disadvantage of a lack of space becomes an advantage to tang-ki, who are more readily able to reciprocate the attention and devotion afforded to them by their followers. The second part of the visual essay in this chapter will thus consider the various ways in which intimacy works to foster and support interaction between sacred and profane, god and adherent.

111

Intimate sacred spaces

Intimate sacred spaces 112

Body

FIGURE 6.1A and B

The embellished body

Whilst it is the behaviour and disposition of a tang-ki that denotes their trance state and hence status as gods/deities to followers, how their bodies are adorned and inscribed are equally important. What they wear during the trance establishes their identity as particular deities, down to a specific sub-type. For my informants, there are two significant Ah Peks in the pantheon (see Chapter 5), but several variants from different levels of hell, or with different responsibilities for parts of the physical world, or with different duties.

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Intimate sacred spaces

FIGURE 6.2A AND B

Status symbols

An increasingly adorned body of a tang-ki is also reflective of the economic status and success of that particular sin tua. A greater number of accessories (toys for child gods, “weapons” for underworld deities, etc) become an outward sign of the efficacy of the tang-ki to effect divine intervention in the lives of their followers (usually by improving their “luck” or career progression or both), who reciprocate by “sponsoring” items for the tang-ki to wear or use.

Intimate sacred spaces 118

FIGURE 6.3

Bodies carrying bodies

Ah Heng, a tang-ki who leads Xuan Jiang Dian (玄江殿) a sin tua that has made several moves over the years from homes to semi-permanent premises, commands his followers to skewer his cheeks with a spiked rod, on which the end is adorned with a wooden head of a heavenly soldier. During particular rituals, tang-ki and their followers carry such soldiers in their mouths and on their arms (pierced through their skin) as a form of spiritual support and protection from evil spirits.

FIGURE 6.4

Extending embodied sacredness

Nick on the opening day of his sin tua. Bent over the altar table in a trance, Nick cuts his tongue to bleed onto paper talismans which are quickly gathered and dried by his followers in assembly-line precision. The use of blood and saliva as part of the hierophanisation of objects and spaces reveals the ways in which a tang-ki’s body is part of the flow of the spiritual imagination through body, objects and space. Certain objects and spaces only become sacred through the interventions of a tang-ki’s body.

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Intimate sacred spaces

Intimate spaces FIGURE 6.5

Malleable spaces

Altars in sin tua are the physical, social and spiritual focal point of the home. Their size and position mean that all other activity works around and in concert with it. This wide-angled image represents the sum total of Nick’s home and sin tua (I am standing close to the main entrance). It is the Lunar New Year of the Rooster, and the sin tua are holding celebrations, which involve the storing away of all non-essential furniture (sofas) and repurposing of other items (their dining table is also a secondary altar table). FIGURE 6.6

Mundane intersections

A photograph from an earlier time, when the sin tua was new, shows the interplay of everyday and spiritual spaces. Nick’s nieces play in the kitchen while he works in a trance. His mother flits between the mundane and spiritual, assisting in different tasks where needed.

Intimate sacred spaces 122

125

Intimate sacred spaces

Intimate sacred spaces 126

FIGURE 6.7

Sacred niches

Simon, a tang-ki working in the east of Singapore, shows me the “hidden” sacred spaces of his sin tua (which in other households would be the flat’s main storeroom). In order to give each god/deity a suitable place to live, adherents and tang-ki alike negotiate the spatial restrictions of their living conditions by engaging in creative placemaking (see Tong and Kong 2000). FIGURE 6.8

Spillovers

This creativity extends further into the liminal spaces beyond the home. Here, Jeffrey Low, a tang-ki who only enters into a trance once a year for his family, leads them in paying respects to Yu Huang (玉皇 the Jade Emperor). The altar to the Jade Emperor must be placed across and in opposition from the main altar (bottom left of image), but with a wall and limited space, it creeps its way outside.

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Intimate sacred spaces

FIGURE 6.9

Shared spaces, compartmentalised lives

The physical prominence of the altar in a tang-ki’s living room means there is precious little space to perform rituals which would normally entail a much larger footprint. Madam Lim, a tang-ki who is typically possessed by Nan Hai Guan Yin (南海观音 the Goddess of Mercy of the South Seas), consecrates a new huat soh (法索) for the sin tua. Just outside the main entrance to her flat, we see glimpses of other everyday lives intertwined with hers. FIGURE 6.10

Closeness

Yet these cramped spaces afford intimacy of the level that many temples are unable to provide, meaning that tang-ki in sin tua are more personal, and develop closer connections with their congregation. Much like a single doctor versus a corporate hospital, tang-ki consultations and blessings in sin tua carry with them the same intimate nature that their spaces suggest.

Intimate sacred spaces 132

7 THE EBB AND FLOW OF SACRED SPACES

135

The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

Introduction It is not uncommon for religious organisations to stage temporary events and parades outside their premises, especially on special occasions or commemorations (Jacobsen 2009). Indeed, the study of religious processions in Singapore has shown how the management and regulation of minority faith processions reveals both the making of and divisions within community identities (Kong 2005). In the case of many sin tua in Singapore, this staging is not only regular but often vital to the financial sustainability and longevity of the group. In this chapter I will explain how sin tua make use of liminal spaces by consecrating them through ritual as well as an elaborate mimicry of a temple aesthetic. Doing this allows sin tua to temporarily emulate and appropriate the scalar atmosphere of a “temple”, thereby exceeding its typical everyday footprint. This differs from cases of “official” sacred spaces stretching their boundaries, because they start from the point of state recognition. Here, “unofficial” spaces become temporarily “official”, owing to the need for permits – but as I will show, these permits are precarious and unstable, making the ebb and flow of such sacred spaces volatile and sometimes unpredictable. In Chapters 5 and 6, we considered how individuals and groups were able to resist state restrictions on space by focussing on not just the body, but also the modes of interaction between adherent and leader/deity/god. The body and intimacy served not as limitations, but opportunities to reconfigure how one sees and interacts with sacred space. But at the same time, tang-ki and sin tua have aspirations beyond their limited physical footprints. To achieve these aspirations, sin tua regularly hold events commemorating the birthdays of their chief deities, or to mark important festivals requiring elaborate rituals such as the Hungry Ghost Festival. These events are on a much larger scale than weekly consultations with adherents, they involve taking over a large public space (normally a field or void deck) for a few days, and involve several hundred attendees, sometimes with the local Member of Parliament as a guest of honour. The decision to hold such events may come from the sin tua themselves, but also directly from their deity, instructing them through their tranced tang-ki. For many, extending outside their homes and other unofficial spaces is also a financial necessity – sin tua rely on the generosity of donors and sponsors to ensure their survival – new vestments for tang-ki, artefacts, ritual consumables are but a few of the items that are often purchased. A wealthy sin tua is also a sign of an efficacious tang-ki, one whose god can bless followers effectively, and will thus attract more followers in a virtuous cycle. In other words, economic capital is simultaneously a key contributor and signifier of spiritual capital – a tool for increased opportunities to exhibit performed comportments to a larger audience. But establishing a site for a religious event in public, especially on space that is owned by the state, is not always straightforward. In the case of an HDB flat sin tua, permission must be sought from the relevant authorities, which is usually the town council or residents’ committee responsible for the flat in which the sin tua is typically based. This means that a sin tua, which technically exists as an unofficial sacred space, must seek permission to create an official but temporary sacred space. My informants tell me that permission is not always granted, but success is often achieved on the sin tua’s merit as a member of the community, providing both material, emotional and spiritual comfort to residents. Even then, such permission is precarious – sin tua who receive a permit to host an event may very well be denied one the following year if the council receives complaints about noise (see Kong 2005 for an explanation of noise and environmental regulation of religious activities). Activities must typically last no later than 10.30 pm, and spot-checks are sometimes conducted to ensure compliance. All this means that sin tua are able to exceed their footprint through temporary, albeit concentrated, explosive and intense ways, only to quickly recede back to their everyday spaces, waiting for the next chance to get a state permit. To maximise these limited opportunities, sin tua appropriate the spaces they are given with significant embellishment. Large tents are constructed overnight, deities are painstakingly moved one or two at a time, decorations scurried away in storage units (or borrowed) are unleashed, professional videographers and photographers are hired to document the event, international celebrants are sometimes engaged (especially those with particular expertise). The list goes on, but two aspects help us to better understand how the ebb and flow of a sin tua’s sacred space works.

The ebb and flow of sacred spaces 136

The first is an aesthetic appropriation of a temple’s appearance, even more so than the sin tua normally does in its everyday spaces. This is not new, as Freedman (1957) observed many years ago. However, the practice is still important and relevant for our understanding of the processes of constructing sacred space. Here, instead of simply establishing a bulwark from which to “do” religion, sin tua spend significant amounts of time making their temporary space look like a temple. To achieve this, they construct elaborate altars, banners and entrances in and around the tentage. They also conduct rituals that establish the area as sacred (placing of talismans, inviting a spiritual army to protect the space and so on). Scale is crucial here – the size and height of the tentage allows for much grander expressions of faith to be performed, granting the sin tua a temporary front that belies their everyday spaces. The second is legitimatisation of the space through sacred presence. This is achieved commonly through the enthronement of the sin tua’s kim sin in the tentage – which often involves moving all deities from their home on the altar to this new location. This is no small matter, as adherents consider each a god, and each must be handled with great care. But their presence in the tentage gives the casual follower of the sin tua license to recognise the spiritual legitimacy of the space. Another way of gaining legitimacy is through the informal networks established between sin tua, where tang-ki from allied sin tua come as guests to the events (we will see more of this in Chapter 8). Visiting tang-ki lend an additional veneer of authenticity and authority through their presence – an increase in numbers also increases the sense of scale in the tentage. The photographs in this chapter seek to visualise these two processes, to establish the ways in which sacredness ebbs and flows from HDB flat to common space and back again. It is based on two sin tua that I have been collectively following over the last five years – Bao De Gong (寶德宫) (led by Nick, and featured in Chapters 5 and 6) and Hai Lian Tua (海蓮壇) (led by cousins Jeffrey Tay and Doreen), based in the north of Singapore. While the former was only established in 2013, the latter is an “inherited” sin tua, with the cousins taking over tang-ki duties from their grandmother, citing values of tradition and heritage as their main motivators. The visual essay pivots narratively between and around these two allied sin tua and three tang-ki, starting from the ritualistic set-up phase to examining both the materiality and performativity of their festivals.

FIGURE 7.1

Setting-up

Sin tua have typically two reasons for setting up outside their everyday spaces – to commemorate the birthday of a significant deity in their roster and to conduct rituals related to the Hungry Ghost Festival. The former will occur throughout the year, depending on which deity they are celebrating, and the second occurs during the Hungry Ghost Festival itself.

FIGURE 7.2

The medium and his master

Facing the kim sin of his “boss” and sin tua’s chief deity, Qi Tian Da Sheng, or Sun Wukong, the Monkey God, Nick prepares for an annual celebration commemorating the deity’s “birthday”. The celebration takes place in a large field about 300 metres from his sin tua, and requires the careful transposal of deities from the sin tua’s altar to the temporary tentage.

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The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

FIGURE 7.3A AND B

Permanent home, temporary home

Each deity and sacred artefact is brought by hand to the tentage, and personally rearranged by Nick onto a much larger altar. In Figure 7.3B we see the main altar, flanked by altars for heavenly and underworld deities. This triptych of altars (along with a fourth to the Jade Emperor, positioned on the other side of the tentage), mimics the feel of a large temple with its dedicated sections and structures.

145

The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

The ebb and flow of sacred spaces 146

FIGURE 7.4A AND B

Cleanse and consecrate

But the presence and appearance of sacredness is not in itself enough. The spaces in which festivals occur must also be cleansed, consecrated and secured for the duration of the event. Figure 7.4A shows one of Nick’s followers using a huat soh (法索), a snake-headed whip that cleanses the space for deities to traverse. Each time a follower crosses the threshold into the tentage, the huat soh must be used again. In Figure 7.4B, Jeffrey, from Hai Lian Tua, secures a position for the heavenly armies in the prelude to his sin tua’s celebration for Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. Situated under a walkway bounding a small playground, Jeffrey and his followers repeat the ritual five times, representing five cartographical points, to ensure that the temporary site is spiritually secure.

FIGURE 7.5

Precarious places

Unlike many other sin tua, Hai Lian Tua held their events in a void deck under a block of flats for a number of years, owing to a lack of an open field nearby. This raises the risk of complaints from residents, and demonstrates the precarity of repeating events in the same space. The sin tua has had to move their venue at least once to an opposite block, and intend to move further away, finding a field with a tentage to reduce the risk of not being able to run public events at all.

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The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

FIGURE 7.6

Improvise

However, the physical structure of a void deck provides affordances for the sin tua to mimic a temple. Pillars and tarpaulin sheets are used strategically to create “rooms” where altars and other offerings are placed. The result is a hybridic space that to an unfamiliar observer, might interpret as a more permanent structure.

FIGURE 7.7

Compromise

But with affordances comes limitations and adaptations – rituals conducted in spaces like a void deck mean that a flurry of disparate activities take place simultaneously, in close proximity to each other. Doreen, Jeffrey’s cousin and a tang-ki, co-runs Hai Lian Tua. In this figure she has just entered into a trance, with her toh tao milling around her, robing her in the vestments of her deity.

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The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

FIGURE 7.8

Fleeting encounters

The multiple number of tang-ki present mean that each takes a specific role in an assembly line of rituals. Followers bring ritual objects to be blessed by one tang-ki, and are then themselves blessed or sanctified by another. They move from station to station, guided by toh tao around the venue. Nick (seated, right), who is visiting Hai Lian Tua, temporarily pauses his role in the assembly line to greet Doreen’s mother, a retired tang-ki who spontaneously fell into a trance as Zhong Kui (鍾魁), the king of ghosts. FIGURE 7.9

Sacred spaces as social networks

The reciprocity between Nick, Jeffrey, Doreen and other tang-ki is revealing of the informal social networks between sin tua. As semi-formal institutions, sin tua rely on each other for financial, social and spiritual support, lending spiritual capital to each other at important points in their respective calendars. The presence of multiple tang-ki generates additional performances of authenticity and efficacy to followers. Here, the three tang-ki “ban gong” (办公) do work by blessing talismans for, and consulting with, their followers.

The ebb and flow of sacred spaces 154

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The ebb and flow of sacred spaces

FIGURE 7.10

Winning favour

A follower of Bao De Gong kneels in front of Nick to receive a blessing. Earlier in the night, he won the auction to “sponsor” new vestments for Qi Tian Da Sheng, and thus the honour of dressing Nick in these vestments, as well as the social prestige of being a sponsor and auction winner. The auctions signal the climax of many of these events, where artefacts and sponsorships are sold to the highest bidder. The money is not just an important source of economic capital for sin tua, but also a form of conspicuous consumption for the attendees, some of whom bid into the equivalent of tens of thousands of sterling pounds for a single bottle of hard liqour.

The ebb and flow of sacred spaces 156

FIGURE 7.11

Informal ritual theatre

External events are frequently punctuated with highly performative rituals, perhaps both as a way to cement the significance of the event, as well as to validate the effort and cost of staging it. Hai Lian Tua transmogrifies ritual effigies of objects meant for the ancestors of its followers. The cage is so large it is sited away from the main staging area, accessed by a ritual yew keng (see Chapter 8) around the neighbourhood.

FIGURE 7.12

Making transience

Bao De Gong’s toh tao dismantle the stage at the end of the celebratory dinner and auction. As quickly as these structures appear, they disappear almost immediately, reducing leasing costs and complying with time-limited permits. The aftermath of events is muted and mundane, compared to the exuberant rituals that precede. They represent the return to the everyday, a routine restored.

8 MOVEMENT AND MOTION IN SACRED FLOWSCAPES

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Sacred flowscapes

Introduction In this final visual essay I will consider the shifting character of what I term to be “sacred flowscapes” – these are sacred spaces that ebb, flow and change in a rapid and sometimes unpredictable manner, jostled and cosseted by physical infrastructure, the agency of spirits, the whims of arbiters and the structures of the state. They manifest themselves in material and spatial practices, especially through movements and motions attributed by individuals to spiritual agency. Sacred flowscapes help us to understand what appears to be a chaotic performance of religion and/ or spirituality that is, instead, a reactive practice situated within plans and precedence. This concept allows us to better visualise the ways in which Chinese religion adherents experience and map the city with their actions. Up to this point, this book has considered sacred space as largely “static”, not in that sacred space is unchanging, but that such spaces tend to linger in a limited sphere of movement. Even when considering a tang-ki’s performed comportment as a bodily and mobile sacred space, these comportments have still largely been analysed within (or just beyond) the confines of their sin tua or the temporary tentages observed in Chapter 7. There are practices that exceed these spaces, but have rarely been documented or discussed because of their transient nature, making them difficult to observe, although Lim (2019) does touch on these briefly when he discusses the theatricality of tang-ki and their mediation through the digital devices of adherents. There is, however, an opportunity to conceptualise a mobile and mobilised space, one that is able to explain and capture the transience of flow. I call these spaces “sacred flowscapes”. The word “flowscape” is not novel – Edgeworth (2011) makes use of it in his archaeological analysis of rivers, and subsequently applies it to an understanding of how material objects and structures move through landscapes (Edgeworth 2017). In a similar way, Nijhuis, Jauslin and van der Hoeven (2015) have used the term flowscape in an architectural context, describing it as the “movement and flows” of “landscape infrastructures … (facilitating) aesthetic, functional, social and ecological relationships between natural and human systems” (ibid:7). To Nijhuis et al, landscape and infrastructure need to be less clearly defined in order to understand the way infrastructure is designed within landscapes (and vice versa). While my treatment of flowscapes looks more at social and sacred flows, it is worth acknowledging this definition in order to recognise the importance of the physicality of space to social movements. Here I will show how physical infrastructure is a multi-faceted interface for the spiritual imagination. Individuals accommodate, subject themselves to, overcome, undermine, subvert, are restricted by and interpret physical spaces in multiple and messy ways. The result is a sacred and social flowscape of ever-changing but organised chaos. Indeed, it is in that dichotomous spontaneity that individuals find the presence of gods and ghosts most authentic. Since individuals here believe that humans are unable to dictate the will of spirits (whether powerful deity or otherwise), movements or motions that defy human intention or prediction are often attributed to a spiritual presence or a spirit exercising their will. However, in order to discern such a presence, individuals continue to interact with material proxies of consociation (Heng 2020), which in these cases are either ritual artefacts or the physical landscape itself. With the former, scholars have noted how divining objects are an important part of both historical and contemporary Chinese religion practice (see Chau 2013, Smith 1961, Teiser 1995). Here, I will consider how the active use of artefacts in motion and whilst moving contributes to the making of sacred flowscapes. With the latter, individuals move in and through physical infrastructure, not quite making each space they transverse sacred, but rather performing sacred identities through their comportments – this of course is accentuated when led by a tang-ki (mostly but not always) and when transporting material proxies of consociation. “Flow” thus plays a significant role in this kind of sacred space. As individuals and objects move, so do they establish a rhythm of movement. Rhythm gives rise to trails, and trails make visible the spiritual imagination. The photographs in this chapter therefore attempt to make this argument of flow by visualising movement, unpredictability and transience. Some of these images are both deliberately and accidentally blurred due to the quickpaced nature of rituals and processions that I documented, many of which caught me (and sometimes followers) off-guard. They chart particular rituals and processions that happen outside and beyond the everyday spaces of sin tua and temples, and even further afield than the temporary tentages and setups observed in Chapter 7. The two

Sacred flowscapes 162

main rituals/festivals on display here are the act of yew keng and the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. Yew keng, literally translated as “to tour”, is a ritual walkabout performed by adherents, often led by one or more tang-ki, as a way to inspect the spiritual boundaries of the area to which the tang-ki is responsible for. In contemporary times, yew keng is also a means for sin tua to perform and affirm their networks and alliances by visiting each other. My previous work (Heng 2018) has shown how yew keng was a key way of individuals learning about their own spiritual city. The Nine Emperor Gods Festival, as noted elsewhere (Chia 2020, Koh 2019, Lim 2019), is an annual festival that takes place during the ninth month of the Lunar Calendar, after the Hungry Ghost Festival. It is especially popular in South-East Asia, and is also known as thetsakan kin che – or Vegetarian Festival in Thailand. In Singapore, the festival is celebrated by temples that venerate Dou Mu Yuan Jun (斗母元君), the Mother of the Big Dipper, and holder of the registrar of Life and Death, and the Nine Emperor Gods are believed to be her sons. Core celebrants embark on a month-long vegetarian diet prior to the event, and are readily identifiable during the festival in their all-white attire. The festival is punctuated with highly public and performative events by waterways, as well as numerous yew keng undertaken by temples, and it is these events that images in this visual essay will focus on.

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FIGURE 8.1

Going forth

Followers and guest tang-ki of Xuan Jiang Dian exit the sin tua’s grounds to begin the annual yew keng. Flowscapes are most apparent in transient, public-facing rituals such as yew keng. As mentioned previously, yew keng involves a procession of adherents, followers and leaders (especially tang-ki) through a public space. This might either be the area surrounding the sin tua’s everyday sites, or further afield. FIGURE 8.2

Flowing over

Gods in their material form (kim sin) often accompany yew keng processions and are carried on litters known as palanquins. When such processions encounter physical infrastructure, as in the case of a car parking barrier here, individuals simply find ways to flow over, around or under them. Like the offerings we saw in Chapter 4 and aesthetic juxtaposition, yew keng processions are an active layering of the spiritual imagination over planned spaces, but unlike static offerings, are done in a far more transient and mobile manner.

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FIGURE 8.3

Changing course

At a reservoir park, Nick contemplates the space around him as Di Ya Pek, a netherworld deity. This is at the midpoint of the inaugural yew keng for Bao De Gong. Their route planned and charted, Di Ya Pek spontaneously declares a new path to be walked, undermining well-laid plans. As the final arbiter and decision-maker, Nick and his deities actively and continuously shape the form and directions of their flowscapes.

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Sacred flowscapes

FIGURE 8.4

Motion is spiritual presence

At the same reservoir park, Tua Ya Pek, enthroned in a borrowed palanquin, sways back and forth in a survey of the space. The swaying motions made by the four valets denote the agency of the deity seated there. Porters who carry the sedan chair are said to be compelled to move by the desire of the enthroned kim sin, who to adherents does not simply represent their god, but is their god. In these cases, such objects exceed simply being proxies for consociation, and are instead (to their followers) material embodiments of spiritual-physical interaction.

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FIGURE 8.5A AND B

Lines of regulation and infrastructure

Despite the authority of a god’s presence and the malleability of flow, individuals still constrain and restrict their flowscapes according to state and legal infrastructure – for example, only crossing the road when given right of way at a traffic light and pausing to wait while onlookers in vehicles glance curiously by. These fleeting chance encounters the public have with yew keng processions is one of the significant ways in which the everyday collides with the sacred.

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Sacred flowscapes

FIGURE 8.6

Spirits flow

Flowscapes are also not just about the movement of individuals through physical infrastructure, but also the flow of spirits via the spiritual imagination of individuals. On a beach in the East of Singapore, a Taoist priest gathers lost souls from the sea to bring back to a tentage for chao du – an adaptation of Buddhist Ullambana rites. Souls will be preached to and nourished, in the hope they will let go of their anger and transcend their status, before being released back to the sea in a subsequent visit three days later. FIGURE 8.7

Physicality and fluidity

Water (and the sea) plays an important role in flowscapes in Chinese religion in Singapore. The Nine Emperor Gods Festival always begins and ends at a large body of water, the default route through which the gods are invited from and depart. Celebrants are pictured here emerging from being waist-deep in the sea, holding sacred ashes that the gods will inhabit for the duration of their stay.

Sacred flowscapes 176

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Sacred flowscapes

FIGURE 8.8

Enthronement, enthralment

The ashes are placed in enclosed palanquins, which, given the latter’s weight, are carried by rotating groups of eight individuals. In recent years, technology has provided greater affordances for performativity – LED lights adorn palanquins, giving off an almost carnivalesque aesthetic. When enthroned, the palanquins achieve the same kind of affect that the bodies of tang-ki have in constructing sacred space. Their movement, lighting and physicality a particular kind of performed comportment.

FIGURE 8.9A AND B

Flows of imagination

The lights are an affordance for visual researchers as well. Using a slower shutter speed, I capture the trails left behind by the swaying motions and rushing to-and-fro of palanquin porters. It is in these trails we “see” for the first time a spectral visualisation of secondspace – a visualised imagination.

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Sacred flowscapes

FIGURE 8.10

Mechanised flows

Light and movement spill from street to road to highway, as similarly decorated lorries and floats are specially hired to transport celebrants and palanquins to and from temple and ritual site. These vehicles are also used during yew keng – the scale of celebrants and palanquins means that minimal walking takes place between temples and is instead replaced with the trundling of traffic – lights flashing, music playing, offering to passers-by glimpses and glances of spiritual life.

FIGURE 8.11

Intangible flows

The Nine Emperor Gods Festival ends like many others, in a ritual of fiery transmogrification. Prayers and other paper effigy artefacts are loaded onto a craft, which is drawn further away from the shore and then set alight. Some temples make it a spectacle, others do so quietly. Regardless, this ritual epitomises the flowscapes of physical-spiritual interaction in the festival, where human, spirit, object, infrastructure and landscape collide.

9 CONCLUSION

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Conclusion

Introduction In this final chapter I will consider how the different concepts and arguments raised in this book better inform us about, and reveal to us the intersections of state and sacred space, of spiritual imagination and modern infrastructure, of performativity and regulation. My discussion will focus on three areas – one, the contribution of sacred flowscapes to issues around sacred space. Two, how the liminality of flowscapes further previous arguments I have made about ethnic identity formation amongst diasporic communities in nation-states. Three, the effectiveness of making this book an experimental balance between “traditional” social science analysis/description and visually-led creative practice. Instead of the format of visual essays that I used in previous chapters (an introductory text followed by a narrative series of images), I will intersperse my discussion with an eclectic series of images – a visualised, as opposed to visual essay. Too often, photographs in the social sciences simply reinforce or illustrate a point made by the text that surrounds it (see Harper 1988, Strangleman 2008). Of course, like other forms of visual material (bars, charts, maps), the positionality of an image inevitably means that it has the effect of reinforcement or illustration. But this chapter is a practical experiment in and of itself – like other chapters in this book, I position photographs between text, but use these here to reinforce and illustrate my arguments and analysis in a more abstract, evocative and interpretivistic manner. As such, I have chosen to very rarely explain or contextualise the photographs here (unless absolutely necessary), but rather allow the reader to make their own decisions about what these photographs might mean, over and above my own intentions.

Sacred flowscapes and the spiritual imagination In their review of the literature of the spatialities of religion, Bartolini, Chris, MacKian and Pile (2017) examine the various arguments and metaphors proposed by different authors about the ways religious spaces manifest and sustain themselves in the city. For example, they consider Wilford’s (2010) proposal that religion can “act as sacred islands … in the secular oceans of modernity” where these islands retain their own authority and autonomy (Bartolini et al 2017:340). They show how Cloke and Beaumont (2013) theorise and argue for a spiritual “battlefield” in the city – where the city does not destroy religion, but invokes it for engagement and other social interconnections. Bartolini et al (2017:350) propose that instead of seeing spirituality and modernity as polar opposites, “it is possible to argue that religion, spirituality, superstition, magic and the like are actually the stuff out of which modernity has been built, alongside the more usual suspects of progress, reason and science”, thus suggesting that there is no clear bifucation between sacred and profane, secular and religious. They conclude their paper by proposing a focus of future studies on three areas where spirituality and modernity intersect and/or collide – one, where there are evident boundaries between secular and spiritual, but to look beyond the classical arguments where the two are diametrically opposed. Two, where boundaries are “fuzzy and fluid” (Bartolini et al 2017:351) and three, points at which new forms of spirituality are emerging in concert with the modern condition. I argue that this book has to a certain extent addressed all three of these calls by offering the concept of sacred flowscapes, and particularly because of the way flowscapes are made within the restrictions that the modern nationstate global city imposes upon them. Sacred flowscapes are paths of social action and material interaction, often etching rhythmic trails that linger on and in physical infrastructure. They give us a new way of thinking about sacred spaces by introducing fluidity and flexibility – and in doing so satisfy Bartolini et al’s (2017) three-pronged call. Sacred flowscapes involve the collision of spiritual practice with modern infrastructure and regulations, but instead of treating them as complete opposites, demonstrate how one moves through and with the other. When faced with an obstacle (physical or otherwise), sacred flowscapes do not clash head-on, but instead subtly mould themselves to their circumstances. As such, we see the practice of Chinese religion and the making of sacred flowscapes in Singapore (and other similar nation-states, e.g. Malaysia) as something that has arisen from modernity, demonstrating a kind of fluidity that has enabled it to survive and sustain itself.

FIGURE 9.1

At the heart of making sacred flowscapes is the spiritual imagination – a social and cultural process that enables adherents to actively and convincingly engage with the spiritual world. Like the sociological imagination, the spiritual imagination looks beyond what is, to what could be. Personal and mundane things, people, spaces and actions are given spiritual depth. The act of exercising this spiritual imagination is rooted in practice, and reminds us of similar kinds of embodied spiritual work done by new-age practitioners in defining and imagining sacred space (Holloway 2003). In Holloway’s study, he considers how new-age practitioners bring the sacred into their everyday lives (blurring the often cited sacred-profane dichotomies of Durkheim (1915) and Eliade (1961)) through embodied acts such as meditation and other kinaesthetic movements. Such practices are neither place-bound nor institutionally regulated, and thus can occur at any place or any time, thereby making all spaces potentially sacred. As della Dora (2011) notes, more recent approaches such as that of Holloway (2003) and Maddrell (2009) argue for a kind of sacred space that exceeds strict ontological boundaries. And yet, despite evoking sacredness from and in the everyday (see MacKian 2012), individuals still draw lines, borders and thresholds in their spiritual imaginations, and still attribute degrees of sacredness to different places. For example, Jackson and Henrie’s (1983) study of sacred Mormon sites looked at how individuals assessed particular places as more sacred than others. Using a broad range of categories around mysticoreligious, homelands and historical typologies, Jackson and Henrie noted that places where spiritual interaction between individual and spirit (in this case, God) was assessed by individuals to hold the greatest sacred value. This is not to say that sacred space is always bounded, as my argument about flowscapes show, but to individuals involved, sacred space is something that occurs and may or may not persist. In other words, sacredness is not something that is always inherent in all places at all times. It

FIGURE 9.2

manifests, appears, dissipates, emerges, explodes. It moves through physical space, dependant on the imagination of individuals, and this is none more so obvious than in the machinations of flowscapes. The idea that sacred space is both fluid and “sticky” at the same time, subject to the agency of individuals (and spirits), means that we are able to use this concept to address the dichotomous nature of sacred space being simultaneously bounded and boundless. The exercising of spiritual imaginations contributes significantly to the occurrences of sacred flowscapes, but is also tempered by the structure of state regulation and physical limitations. Three ways of exercising a spiritual imagination are important here. The first is that spiritual imagination can be found through the interactions individuals have with the spiritual world through the material world, particularly material proxies of consociation. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 8, these proxies are conduits through which individuals discern the agency and will of spiritual beings. Instead of just communicating, spirits have the ability to affect circumstances around them – making them lively (Maddrell 2013). These material proxies that ignite the imagination are themselves given kinaesthetic characteristics – for example, the palanquins of the Nine Emperor Gods in Chapter 8 that enthrone deities move, and these movements compel their carriers to go along with the motions, generating more motion in a recurring feedback loop. The second way, as hinted in Chapters 5 and 6, are performed comportments. In that chapter I discussed in particular the comportment of tang-ki, and how their behaviour and aesthetic were crucial to both establishing themselves as spiritually authentic, as well as becoming the focus of their followers (whilst in a trance). Such a focus allowed for tang-ki to exceed the physical limitations of their sin tua, and in effect project a flowscape through their body. However, performed comportments are also apparent in adherents and followers alike. Toh tao, the closest followers and personal assistants of a tang-ki in a sin tua, are often dressed in the uniform of their group, with the most devoted going barefoot

FIGURE 9.3

like their leader. The carriers of palanquins are equally part of the latter’s swaying motions. Even outward signs of prayers and devotion paid to the gods by adherents are part of the performance of spiritual imaginations. These outward signs by everyday adherents form the third way of exercising a spiritual imagination, and when done en masse, act as a critical mass of increasing the spiritual capital of a tang-ki and their sin tua. One might be familiar with such outward signs in many other religious faiths – prayer, chants, hymns and trances would all certainly be counted. In the case of Chinese religion, one particular act is significant for the purpose of this analysis – the active witness and partaking of physical-spiritual transmogrification. This is where individuals watch, photograph, record, engage with and/or worship the processes by which physical objects become spiritual objects, and where spiritual beings become physical individuals. With the former, we see this readily in the burning of paper effigies, such that things that are tangible and embodied become fragmented and ethereal. The moment of burning for many adherents is crucial, it is the point at which gifts and offerings meant for the spiritual world complete their delivery. In other words, the burning allows individuals to visually confirm the transference of physical to spiritual realms. As shown throughout the book, such burning is only limited because of environmental regulations, and regularly occurs anywhere individuals wish to perform the act. Regulations are important for this analysis too, because they reveal to us the restrictions of modernity (see Dwyer, Gilbert and Shah 2013, Poon 2008) and where sacred flowscapes have arisen from and continuously adapt to. In Singapore and cities with ambitions like Singapore, the drive to become and remain hypermodern (Oswin and Yeoh 2010) lies both in relentless construction, destruction and re-construction of infrastructure, as well as the maintenance of existing spaces – where we see maintenance not just in the environmental, but also in the ideological sense. Purpose-built spaces must adhere to the purpose they were built for, so spiritual activity must either conform to that purpose, or subvert it through the imagination. Hence, void decks and tentages become

FIGURE 9.4

Old propaganda sticker in a shopping mall – “Chinese People, Chinese Language”

temples, sidewalks become altars, the body becomes divine, the street becomes spiritual. In the next section, I will discuss how the intersection of regulation and exuberance reveal the ways diasporic identities are negotiated between the individual and the state.

Sacred flowscapes, diasporic identities and the state In Figure 9.4 we see an old propaganda sticker in a shopping mall – “Chinese People, Chinese Language”. It is important to note that the individuals in this book are part of a larger Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora (Wang 1991), whose migration from China (especially during the colonisation-era of the 1800s) brought with them the many cultural forms of their point of origin (see Clifford 1994, Gilroy 1991). Today, Singapore remains one of the few nation-states where the initial minority migrant population is now the majority ethnic host population (Cohen 2008). Such numerical superiority might suggest that ethnic Chinese individuals in Singapore do not have the same problems that other diasporic communities have with their host societies, where the latter often dictates the ways the former shapes their identity – from language use to the wearing of religious symbols. But as others have noted (Kong and Yeoh 2003, Kwan-Terry 2000, PuruShotam 1998), ethnic policies in Singapore (often for the purpose of nation-building) have also skewed the formation of Chinese identities (and other ethnic groups) in particular ways. These policies have been well-mapped, and it is not in the purview of this book to repeat them, but suffice to say that the Chinese diaspora in Singapore regulate and police their collective identities in ways that we have witnessed other host societies do to minority diasporic communities.

FIGURE 9.5

In recent years, the realisation that a heterogeneous and more nuanced Chinese identity, rooted in stories of migration and Singaporean-ness, was politically not such a bad thing, and that regional variations were advantageous to policymakers seeking a collective consciousness (see Kong and Mani 1997, Kong 1999). The use of regional languages (i.e. “dialects”) began to re-emerge on national television (where once they were banned), regional clan associations with ties to specific geographies in China were celebrated as contributors to community cohesion, and glocalised ethnic identities more firmly expressed (see Montsion and Parasram 2018). All this has begun to emerge at a time where many postcolonial nation-states, Singapore included, have now established themselves as geopolitical entities in their own right (Ortmann 2009), and must now ask the wider questions of where they stand in the world (Velayutham 2007, Yuen 2005), particularly in relation to increasingly significant influences such as China (Chun 1996, Khiun 2003, Yang 2014a). This suggests that the tension between performing the identity of being a citizen of a nation-state and a member of a diasporic community will not go away easily, even when one’s diasporic community becomes the host society in a nation-state. The situation is further complicated when different waves of migration at different periods of time (see, e.g. Ang 2001, 2014, Tuan 1998), mean that contesting versions of ethnic identity emerge more forcefully in everyday life. The state, whether in Singapore or otherwise, continues to dictate and shape the ethnic identities of its citizens, and especially its migrants (Mahieu 2019, Rex 1995). Individuals often collectivise as a means to retain identities and cultural practices specific to their point of origin (see Fletcher 2015). Such practices are not always tolerated or encouraged, and attempts at retaining identities that contrast what the host society desires of the community (Hopkins 2011) is often portrayed as a refusal to assimilate, leading to accusations of foreign-ness (de Graaf and van Zenderen 2009). Even after

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significant periods of interaction, diasporic groups are still often grouped into monolithic categories when compared to their host society, a process that Ang (2014) argues to be a symptom of the workings of the contemporary nation-state. When faced with this, some communities find alternative ways to perform/remember their diasporic identities. Scholars have noted how diasporic communities make use of sacred spaces and practices in order to maintain memories and aspects of their diasporic identities (Hermanowicz and Morgan 1999). For example, Marchi’s (2013) study of the Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States exemplifies the use of ethno-religious festivals as a form of political communication to celebrate and inform host societies of ethnic identities, whilst others have noted the use of rituals as a performance and/or affirmation of collective identity (Hermanowicz and Morgan 1999, Reimers 1999). In what ways do sacred flowscapes contribute to our understanding of the way sacredness and diasporic identities intersect, especially in the context of state regulation? As mentioned in Chapter 4, I have argued that transient aesthetic markers were an important tool for individuals to resist state policies that sought to homogenise regionally heterogeneous ethnicities (Heng 2015). In nation-states where overt resistance from minority diasporic communities was difficult if not impossible, the use of transient aesthetic markers to perform alternative ethnic identities allowed individuals to temporarily (albeit unconsciously) subvert dominant narratives imposed on them. Transient aesthetic markers were both tangible and intangible, present in the act of spiritual place-making, or in the vocabulary of this book, the exercising of spiritual imaginations. Sacred flowscapes expand and more deeply configure the concept of transient aesthetic markers. Instead of just itinerant altars, selective ritual artefacts and performed resistance, we see a much wider gamut of embodied and imaginative practices that do not limit themselves to one particular area (my previous study was focussed solely on a suburban neighbourhood, ignoring the many other spaces where one witnesses the spiritual imagination at work). In other words, sacred flowscapes broaden the units of analysis in our mapping of heterogeneous diasporic identities at work on an everyday basis. By widening how we think of the way transience works as a form of resistance, we are then better able to apply these tools on a more global scale – sacred flowscapes can account for a variety of performative and embodied acts of place-making by diasporic individuals or groups, set within religious and/or spiritual narratives. It is not just the transience of flow that affords opportunities for diasporic identity making – a flow’s flexibility is a key tenet as well. Sacred flowscapes deepen our understanding of subtle resistance to dominant narratives of ethnicity by revealing a kind of strategic conformity. Like Tong and Kong’s study (2000) of the way individuals adapt home altars to modern social housing, strategic conformity is an act of compromise – it suggests that individuals recognise the existence of power imbalances and policy restrictions, so seek ways around and under the latter, rather than straight-on confrontations (this of course, fits very well with the analogy of flow). The vocabulary of the state (Loh 1998, Ong 2003) is used to evoke partisanship with the state – local, community, heritage, history are words often mentioned to me by tang-ki and sin tua, and certainly these are valid. However, they remain secondary to the act of worship, duty and dedication to spiritual beings and the spiritual world. In other words, flowscapes do not just flow through physical infrastructure, they also flow around the structures of policy and regulation. They do this by submitting to the dictates of the state – getting permits, abiding to noise pollution laws, burning effigies “responsibly” in state-approved burners – and by conforming strategically, they are able to sustain themselves. Conforming strategically has provided some intriguing propositions to understanding what Gilroy called the changing same (Gilroy 1991) and how the same “changes” and remains the “same”. Transient aesthetic markers supported the simultaneously repetitive and changing cultural norms and forms transported over geographical distances and boundaries. Objects and practices were shaped (and emerged) from modern conditions, for example, paper effigies of new objects such as smartphones and credit cards, but retained a same-ness in their purpose and efficacy. With strategic conformity, we see the “same” changing to a hybridised mix of spiritualism, adapted modernity and ethnic identity politics. Individuals attempting to retain aspects of identities linked to their specific point of origin (regional rather than national) appropriate the discourses and narratives that seek to subsume them. In other words, conforming in a flowscape is a performative means of survival, a necessary change to keep the same.

FIGURE 9.6

Some exploratory questions on writing the visual monograph As first discussed in Chapter 1, this book has been both an experiment and a proof of concept in establishing the visual as a primary way of communicating social scientific research. In this section I reflect on some of the challenges of doing this, as well as opportunities for further interventions. Key challenges surfaced in two ways – finding an adequate balance of practice and theory/image and text, and navigating the tensions between presenting coherent linear and chronological ethnographic narratives, versus making more thematic sociological arguments, and in so doing privilege one method (ethnographic observation) over others. I will deal with each of these in turn. When is a visual essay a visual essay, when does it become a visualised essay, and when might it be considered an essay with visuals? If the visual is prioritised as the primary mode of communication, does it mean that text must be numerically reduced in order to emphasise that priority, or does it mean that there needs to be a minimum number of photographs included to make them significant? Furthermore, when mapping out and discussing theory, how might one do that effectively while still minimising the use of text, so as not to diminish the impact of the visual? These are not easy questions to answer, particularly in disciplines where the use of text has been the dominant way of presenting one’s scholarly arguments. One could argue that such a dominance has created textual literacy at the expense of visual (and in some cases, numerical) literacy in some of the social sciences. This means that even if a visual essay is framed within a defined theoretical framework, one still needs to adequately explain, theorise and analyse to a degree that demonstrates scholarly rigour. If the quantity of text is diminished in favour of the visual, then one risks crossing the fine line between conciseness and superficiality. In writing this book, I argue that finding balance has not always been easy, and at some points not even achieved. The original intention was to develop a longer, text-focussed introduction mapping out my theoretical frameworks and chosen field of study, and then weave a series a of visual essays that presented arguments about sacred space, diasporic identities and the state, with a summative visual essay concluding the book. When compiling the visual essays, I realised that the amount of text I had dedicated to each chapter was enough to explain my

FIGURE 9.7

theoretical stance, but was not enough to fully explain my contributions to the literature. The result was to develop a “wordier” conclusion that addressed the implications of flowscapes to our understanding of sacred spaces, identity formation and social policy. But was this the right decision, or did it diminish my attempts at making the visual really count? That is something I still grapple with. The second challenge is methodological in that it raises the question of how best one communicates research using images, and the kinds of associated methods this entails. Is the visual monograph simply a printed version of an ethnographic film, and if so does it need a plot and a coherent storyline? Having a storyline implies particular ways in which photographs should be sequenced, characters developed, backgrounds rendered. But it also means for that to happen, ethnographic and participant observation methods are privileged over other qualitative methods that can and do incorporate the visual. What would a visual monograph look like without an ethnographic approach? What if the photographs were not about the observations of the photographer, but something else entirely? This is where there are further opportunities for different kinds of visual monographs – books involving creative methods that are not ethnographic, but nevertheless visual. These might include creative and participatory methods (Lomax 2018, O’Neill, Mansaray and Haaken 2017, Ward et al 2018) that make use of photography and other imagery are becoming increasingly popular. In many cases such methods de-prioritise the voice and gaze of the researcher, creating a more equal and democratic balance with collaborators, as opposed to informants (see Pink 2009). Photovoice (Liebenberg 2018, Ronzi et al 2019), a method where participants themselves create photographs, offers an opportunity for an anthology of participant-centric work.

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Towards a lyrical-visual sociology?1 In his treatise against what he called “narrative sociology”, where narrative sociology is the kind of rational, explanatory sociology found in both quantitative and qualitative approaches, Abbott (2007) calls for a kind of sociology that embraces the emotional aspects of social life – a descriptiveness that eschews attempts at providing a distillation and conceptualisation of social life, and instead reveal social life for all its messiness – both of joy and grief. Abbott maps out his concept of lyrical sociology in three stances – one, lyrical sociology is “engaged, rather than distant, and the engagement is an emotional one, an intense participation in the object studied” (Abbott 2007:74) and in so doing challenges the dominant disciplinary hegemonic requirements of distance between the researcher and their informants/collaborators. The second stance is location – where a sociological account of the researcher’s subject is highly personal. This differs from autoethnography or autophotography, where the object of analysis is the researcher themselves, but rather the reader is made aware of the intensely personal context, or as Abbott (2007:74) puts it, “the lyrical writer is acutely conscious of his or her self not just as author but as the person whose emotional experience of a social world is at the heart of his or her writing”. The third stance is what Abbott calls “location in time” (ibid:75) – this is where the sociological account is less concerned with presenting a concrete timeline of events, but rather a liminal and transitory period of existence, which may or may not persist. In other words, a lyrical sociology is about the personal connection of a researcher to their subject, avoiding detached explanation, and conveying a particular and liminal “state of being” (ibid:75) to the reader. In how lyrical sociology is presented, Abbott discusses a wide range of mechanics and mechanical difference between “narrative” and “lyrical” – intent, framework and language, but notes that the key difference is “that between story and image. Narrative writing centers on a sequence of events, or in the quantitative version, a sequence of variables. This sequence of events or variables explains the phenomenon of interest. By contrast, lyrical writing centers on an image or images. These are viewed in different ways, through different lenses, to evoke the sources of the writer’s emotional reaction.” (Abbott 2007:76) The image that Abbott was trying to evoke was not necessary visual/photographic, but rather a metaphorical picture of the stances (engagement, location, time in location) he has argued for. Images are not sequential or clearly explanatory, but rather abstract, emotional, and at times jarring and messy. I argue that such an understanding of lyrical sociology can be applied in part to what this book has been trying to evoke, particularly in the visualising of sacred flowscapes. This book started clearly in what Abbott would call the narrative tradition – it attempted to explain and rationalise the spiritual city from an interdisciplinary approach incorporating both sociological and geographical perspectives. Ensuing visual essay chapters were also couched within theoretical frameworks, and my role as an observing and documenting photographer meant a lack of deep, personal engagement. However, in trying to visualise sacred flowscapes and exploring/presenting more abstract and evocative photography, I propose that the concept of a lyrical sociology is very useful here. It opens up new pathways into the kinds of photographs that can be used in visual sociology and human geography – instead of photographs generated exclusively in a realist style (but not a realist paradigm, see Knowles and Sweetman 2004), aspects of a sociological text can be lyrical, expressing that “state of being”. In other words, even if an entire text cannot be wholly lyrical, we can work towards a lyrical-visual sociology, where lyrical photographs can act as a climatic bookend to more “mainstream” forms of writing and visual narration. This kind of bookend is also a response to other work calling for a more descriptive and/or empirical sociology – in their discussion of sociology’s theoretically-driven agendas, Besbris and Khan (2017:147) call for a more descriptive, empirically-driven approach – arguing that “most papers should not advance a new theory of the world (and) such demands for theoretical development impoverish the discipline both substantively and theoretically”. Effectively demanding quality over quantity in the number of theories permeating the field, Besbris and Khan interrogate the theory of cultural capital, showing how repeated iterations and retheorisations of the term have led, in

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their words, to the term becoming “(a) theoretically rich yet vacuous terrain” (ibid:151). Besbris and Khan also make some broad (and, some would say, bold) recommendations for transforming the discipline, with the most radical of these involving publications focussed purely on description and “novel empirical findings” (ibid:152), mimicking the variety of theoretical and empirical outputs in other disciplines. This is by no means a foolproof answer to the theory-heavy focus of sociology (and other social science disciplines), because it might simply be trading one overquantification (of theory) for another (of empiricism). The neoliberalisation of higher-education sectors around the world implies that if one can make more, one should make more. But this does not mean the idea of empirically-intense, thickly described sociology is not something that should be explored. Indeed, in the same issue of Sociological Theory, Mears (2017:144) makes a similar call to Besbris and Khan, writing that “a different starting point would begin with the premise that good sociology captures interesting and important things happening in the world: thick description, a faithful rendering of details, and textured accounts of how people experience the world”. I argue that the visual lends itself well to thick descriptions, details and texture. It provides affordances for new ways of creating descriptive, empirical sociologies. If Berger (2008) showed us new ways of seeing in the social sciences, then the visual gives social researchers new ways of showing. How, then, can lyrical photographs create new ways of showing, rendering social and cultural textures that resist verbalisation, no matter how eloquent? In this book, the answer is two-fold. First, it can be evidenced in the textures of movement and traces found in more abstract (and less realist) images, particularly those in Chapter 8, where I have taken a certain level of artistic license in visualising sacred flowscapes. The second is to create a creative bookend of uncontextualised, uncaptioned, textural photographs, where the only contextual hints are the preceding chapters in this book. Thus, the final set of photographs in this book attempt stand by themselves, offering to capture the social, cultural, emotional and spiritual flows of sacredness, landscape and diaspora.

Note 1 I am very grateful to Jeff Guhin for a series of tweets discussing the issues of narratives in sociology, citing the texts that this section draws upon.

EPILOGUE

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INDEX

4D 66 Absence 6 Adherent 3, 5, 7, 13, 18, 39, 48, 83–4, 92, 97, 100, 104, 109–10, 126, 135, 161, 165, 169, 188–90 Altars 4, 56, 70, 85, 109–10, 119, 121, 126, 131, 136, 140, 142, 149, 193; Hidden/Backstage 26; Itinerant 59–64, 74, 193; Roadside 12, 61–3; Spirit 4, 12, 83, 92, 109; see also Sin Tua; Temporary 66, 191 Aesthetic 7, 12–13, 29, 135, 161, 177; Appropriation 110, 136; Marker 13, 21, 59–60, 97, 193; Juxtaposition 59–80, 165 Ancestor worship 3–4 Ancestors 3, 12, 39, 43, 48, 59, 79, 156 Ancestral tablet 48, 53 Artefacts 5, 6, 7, 13, 96–7, 109, 110, 155; Ritual 84, 104, 135, 161, 184, 193 Ashes 7, 51–2, 175, 177 Assemblage 39 Auctions 25, 97, 109, 155, 158 Authority 3, 5, 83–5, 136, 170, 187 Bao De Gong 136, 155, 158, 169 Bartolini, Nadia 6, 13, 39, 187 Bones 49, 51–2 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 83 Buddhism 3, 4 Buddhist 4, 7, 59, 60, 79, 175 Bukit Brown Cemetery 12, 40, 42, 43, 104 Burn / Burning 3, 39, 43, 48, 59–60, 62, 63, 74, 79, 190, 193 Candles 59, 61, 63 Capital 3, 5, 83; Spiritual 3, 12, 83–4, 85, 92, 95, 96, 98, 104, 109–10, 135, 153, 155, 190; Economic 3, 8; Cultural 3, 83, 97, 196 Capitalism 8 Celebrants 135, 162, 175, 181

Cemetery 12, 40, 42, 43, 104 Changing same 193 Chao Du 60, 175 China 4, 40, 59, 83, 189, 191, 192 Chinese popular Religion 4 Chinese religion 3–5, 6–7, 9, 12, 13, 18, 39–40, 109, 161, 175, 187, 190 Common Corridor 33 Comportment 7, 12, 59, 83, 84; Performed 85, 92, 104, 109, 135, 161, 177, 189 Conduit 12, 189 Confucianism 3 Consumption 7, 9, 21 Conspicuous 48, 155 Continued/ Continuing Bonds 6, 12, 39, 79 Cultural forms 9, 59, 191 Deathscapes 6, 39–40 DeBernardi, Jean 4, 12, 83 Deity 7, 12, 83–4, 85, 92, 97, 109, 112, 126, 135–7, 142, 146, 149, 161; Earth 43, 70; Underworld 92, 100, 117, 168 Di Ya Pek 100, 168 Dialects 83, 192 Diaspora 191, 197 Diasporic 4, 9, 59; Communities 9, 39, 187, 191–3; Ethnicities 3, 9; Identities 9, 13, 191–3 Divine 39, 40, 56, 95, 109, 110, 117, 191 Dou Mu Yuan Jun 162 Ethnic Group 9, 191 Ethnographic 7, 10, 12, 17, 60, 194–6 Everyday Life 4, 5, 10, 17, 35, 39, 192 Exhumation 12, 40, 43, 49, 53, 56 Folk Religion 59, 83 Freedman, Maurice 4, 136 Fu De Zheng Sheng 70

235

Index

Ghosts 3, 4, 6, 161; Ancestral 59; Child 74; Hungry/ Wandering; see Hungry Ghost Festival; Marriage 4; Needs and Rewards 53–4, 66; Toilets 53 Gilroy, Paul 191, 193 Gods 3, 83, 109–10, 112, 161, 189; Child 117; Materialised 165; see also Kim Sin; see also Nine Emperor God Goddess of Mercy; see Guan Yin Good brothers 59 Good luck 54 Greenblat, Cathy 10, 11 Guan Yin 79, 131, 146; Nan Hai 131 Hai Lian Tua 136, 146, 149, 153, 156 Harper, Douglas 9, 10, 11, 187 Hei Bai Wu Chang 100 Hell Money 43, 61 Hierophany 5, 6 Holloway, Julian 5, 13, 109, 187 Hong Cai 98 Host Society 9, 70, 74, 192, 193 Housing Development Board (HDB) 29, 32, 33, 63, 135, 136 Hungry Ghost Festival 5, 12, 21, 59–60, 66, 79, 135, 137, 162 Hybridity 9 Identity 3, 9, 13, 18, 25, 59, 112, 135, 195; Cultural 21, 32; Diasporic 13, 191–4; Ethnic 3, 9, 59–60, 70, 74, 79, 83, 187, 193; Performance of 59; Sacred 161; Spiritual 109 Idols 5, 6, 92 Incense; Sticks 7, 59, 61, 100 Infrastructure 70, 170, 184, 190; Physical 13, 161, 165, 175, 187, 193 Ingold, Tim 7 Interdisciplinary 11, 196 Jade Emperor 126, 142 Ji-Tong 83; see also Tang-ki Joss sticks 59; see also incense sticks Kim Sin 5, 109–10, 136, 140, 165, 169 Kim Zua 43, 62, 63, 74, 104; see also hell money Kong, Lily 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 17, 40, 74, 109, 126, 135, 191, 192, 193 Kopitiam 33 Landscape 12, 13, 18, 70, 74, 161, 184; Spiritual 59, 197 Latour, Bruno 39 LED lights 177 Lorries 181 Lyricism 196–7 Mackian, Sara 6, 13, 39, 187 Material proxies of consociation 12, 39–40, 161, 189 Migrants 9, 10, 40, 192 Migration 9, 10, 17, 70, 191–2 Modernity 3, 13, 17–18, 21, 40, 56, 66, 187, 190

Monkey God 92, 99, 140 Mundane 3, 6, 18, 39, 43, 60, 121, 158, 188 Neatness 21, 42; Cultural 21 Netherworld 48, 59, 168 Networks 6, 8, 136, 153, 162 Nine Emperor Gods 7, 162, 189; Festival 7–8, 13, 162, 175, 184 Palanquin 7, 165, 169, 177–8, 181, 189, 190 Paper effigies 3, 39, 59–60, 61, 190, 193 Pauwels, Luc 9–11 Personhood 48, 83 Photobooks 10, 12 Photographs 3, 6, 9–14, 187, 194–7 Pile, Steve 6, 12, 13, 17–18, 39, 187 Pink, Sarah 10 Place-making 5, 6, 12, 17, 59, 104, 193 Points of Praxis 40 Portrait 10, 48 Presence 6, 7, 39, 64, 104, 110, 153; Sacred 136, 146; Spiritual 6, 59, 161, 169; Godly 12, 100, 161, 170; of the Dead 39, 70; of Transient Aesthetic Markers 59–60, 64 Profane 39, 110, 187, 188 Pudu 59 Qi Tian Da Sheng 99, 140, 155 Qing Ming Jie 43, 48 Remembrance 12, 39, 43 Ritual 3, 5, 6, 7, 13, 18, 39, 59–60, 83, 100, 104, 109, 135, 146, 158, 165, 181, 184; Agency 161; Theatre 85, 156; Objects/ Artefacts 7, 153, 156, 161, 193; Processions/ Parades 161–2 Roadside offerings 61 Rose, Gillian 9 Sacred 3, 9, 13, 34, 39, 60, 66, 92, 170; Flowscapes 161–2, 187–193, 196–7; Objects 142, 175; Mark 96 Sacred Space 3, 5–9, 17–18, 126, 177, 187, 190, 193, 194, 195; and the State 7–9; Arbiters of 12–13, 83–4, 104; as social networks 153; Intimate 109–10; making of 60, 74, 136; movement of 135–6; regulation of 17; Unofficial 26, 135 Sacredness 3, 66, 83, 98, 136, 146, 188, 193, 197; Hidden 34; Secular 60; Embodied 109, 119 Shan Cai Tong Zi 95 Shrines 35 Sin tua 4, 12, 13, 83–4, 92, 95, 97, 98, 104, 109–10, 117–19, 121, 126, 131, 135–7, 140, 146, 149, 153, 155, 161–2, 189, 190, 193 Social Policy 13, 195 Soul 48 Spirit Medium 3, 7; see also Tang-ki Spirit-possession 3, 5 Spiritual Imagination 6, 9, 39, 48, 60, 66, 119, 161, 165, 175, 187–193

Index

236

State 3, 5, 12, 13, 19, 21, 29, 56, 79, 109, 135, 161, 187, 191, 194; Nation-state 3, 12, 13, 17, 21, 59, 192, 193; Space 5, 17–18, 25–6, 109; and sacred space 7–9; Narratives and discourses 13, 17, 39–40, 59–60, 74, 193; Restrictions and regulation 170, 189, 193 Strategic Conformity 9, 193 Sun Wukong 99, 140 Syncretic 59

Transience 13, 59, 84, 158, 161, 193 Transient Aesthetic Markers 12, 13, 21, 59–60, 193 Transmorgrification 3, 39, 43, 62, 156, 185, 190 Tua Pek Kong 70 Tua Ya Pek 92, 100, 169

Tai Su Yah 79 Talisman 7, 96 Tang-ki 4, 12, 13, 85, 92, 97–100, 104, 109–10, 126, 131, 135–6, 149, 153, 161, 162, 165, 189, 193; As embodied spiritual capital 83–4; Body of 112–18, 177 Taoism 3, 4; Zhengyi 4 Taoist Priest 53, 175 Temple 4, 6, 25, 83, 84, 181; Aesthetic 13, 109–10, 135–6, 142, 149 Thaumaturgical 95, 110 Theoretical framework 11–12, 194 Toh Tao 84, 85, 104, 149, 153, 158, 189 Tombstones 48 Topley, Majorie 4 Town Council 59, 66, 135 Traces 60, 74, 197 Trance 12, 25, 29, 83–5, 92, 104, 109, 112, 119, 121, 126, 135, 149, 153, 189, 190

Vestments 83, 84, 85, 135, 149, 155 Visual Essay 9–12, 40, 60, 109, 110, 136, 161, 162, 187, 194, 196 Visual Monograph 7, 11–13, 194–5 Void Deck 32, 64, 66, 135, 146, 149, 190

Ullambana 59, 60, 175 Urns 48, 59, 109

Woods, Orlando 5, 6, 8, 9, 17, 109 Working-class 5, 12 Worship 3, 5, 7, 12, 104, 190, 193; Ancestor 3; Deity 6, 70, 83; Tang-ki 12; Spaces 109 Wu Fu Tan 109 Xuan Jiang Dian 118, 165 Yew Keng 13, 156, 162, 165, 168, 170, 181 Zhong Kui 153 Zhong Yuan Jie 59; see also Hungry Ghost Festival