Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

The research for Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State commenced with a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute (Religion and Globalization cluster) in 2007-2008, followed by more visits to Singapore during the summers and many conversations with colleagues both at National University of Singapore and at Nanyang Technological University, and many other institutes.

In this book, Joanne Punzo Waghorne examines spirituality in Singapore, showing how important the city state is for understanding contemporary global configurations of urban space, religion, and spirituality. She highlights how the formal religious spaces-temples, churches, and mosques-have been confined to allotted sites on the map of Singapore, whereas various “spiritual” organizations, particularly of Hindu origins and headed by a guru, continue to operate as “societies” classified by the government with other “clubs”.

These unconventional religiosities are not confined but ironically make their own places, meeting in ostensive secular venues: high-rise flats, malls, businesses, and community centers, thus existing in the overall space of religion, commerce, and the state. The book argues that State of Singapore also operates between the secular and the religious, constructing an overarching spatial regime that both accommodates and yet rivals the alternate spheres that spiritual movements construct under its umbrella.

Both spatial configurations challenge the presumed relationships between myth and reality, religion and commerce, the ethereal and the concrete, the sacred and the secular, on the levels of self, community, and polity. Singapore, now deemed a model for urban development in Asia, also offers an understanding of a new post-secularity and perhaps reveals where the urbanized world is headed religiously as well as economically.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Joanne Punzo Waghorne works in contemporary theoretical directions in the study of religion, new religious movements, globalization, and transnational migration. Spatial theory, visual studies, and urban studies inform her interdisciplinary approach which she works to integrate with her roots in history of religions and phenomenology (PhD from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago). Her concerns include re-visioning world religions/comparative religion in a post-colonial/post-modern era. Her publications contextualize these issues in contemporary urban India, Singapore, and in the Hindu diaspora. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Indian Studies have supported her fieldwork in India. During academic 2007-2008, she was a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellow and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute (Religion and Globalisation cluster), National University of Singapore. In addition to her publication on Singapore, her most recent work includes Shirdi Sai Baba temples in Chennai and Singapore as well as discussion on fieldwork within religious studies as a discipline.

C. J. W.-L. Wee is Professor of English at Nanyang Technological University. He has held visiting fellowships at (among other institutions) the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India and, in 2020, the National Humanities Center in USA. Wee is the author of The Asian Modern: Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore (2007) and recently published “East Asian Pop Music and an Incomplete Regional Contemporary” in the edited volume, Sound Alignments: Popular Music in Asia’s Cold Wars (2021). His present research interest concerns curatorial practice and regional formations of popular culture in relation to the idea of “Asia”.

Chua Beng Huat is concurrently Professor, Urban Studies Program, Yale-NUS College and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. His research areas include housing and urban studies, cultural studies in Asia, East Asian pop culture and comparative politics in Southeast Asia. His most recent book on Singapore is Liberalism Disavowed: Communitarianism and State Capitalism in Singapore. He is the founding co-editor of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.