Events

CHAIRPERSON

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

ABSTRACT

“To know Singapore is to know where the urbanized world is headed.” Erik G. L’Heureux
“The Singapore model… is now poised to metastasize across Asia.” Rem Koolhaas

Singapore is an embarrassing success story. Celebrating fifty years of independent last year, Singapore’s stunning achievements merited only scant attention in the American media and in academic circles. Currently Singapore in some surveys ranks third in the world, the United States is ninth in some surveys by GDP (PPP) per capita. Yet twenty years ago the famous architect Rem Koolhaas bemoaned Singapore’s “blandness and sterility” (1995, 1017) and the stinging critiques continue. Recent blogs and online letters write of Singapore as a “Soulless Success”. Singapore supposedly illustrates “what happens when everything goes right”.

As soon as “soul” comes into play, no scholar of religion can remain silent especially after almost a decade of following the many religious-spiritual movements in this city. When I hear, or read such comments, I ask, what is the soul that Singapore supposedly lacks? But what intrigues me the most in these critiques: Singapore’s landscape is—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps vaguely intentionally—presented as a religious problem. The very success of Singapore seems to be some, a miracle and for other a monstrous inversion of development. But pro or con, the very being of the city, its landscape and—to borrow a term— its inscape (Panikkar 1991) seems in question and often with presumed crucial consequences for the world.

Taking my que from a brilliant exhibit at the Singapore Art Museum, After Utopia: Revisiting the Ideal in Asian Contemporary Art, I will consider Singapore’s landscape (both real and imagined) at its two ends, the macrospace of the State with its own secular cosmology and the many microplaces within the ubiquitous HDB flats and commercial buildings where I have attended numerous spiritual mediations/rituals. Here practitioners share a feeling that these practices radiate outward to remake something in the world—not policy, not ideology, not roads or streets but something—a change of the larger consciousness in the world, an invoking of energy, a quieting of space? Much of this may answer the question: How do people live within an ordered yet constantly changing, a pragmatic yet utopian cosmological world that is Singapore.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Joanne Punzo Waghorne is Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. This paper is part of a long-term book project on new Hindu-based religious movements in Singapore beginning in 2007-2008 when she was Fulbright-Hays Fellow and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at ARI. Returning to Singapore regularly, she has the published directly on the research: “From Diaspora to (Global) Civil Society: Global Gurus and the Processes of De-ritualization and De-ethnization in Singapore” in Hindu Rituals at the Margins, edited by Tracy Pintchman and Linda Penkower, University of South Carolina Press, 2014; “Reading Walden Pond at Marina Bay Sands—Singapore”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 82, 1: 217–247; “Engineering an Artful Practice: On Jaggi Vasudev’s Isha Yoga and Sri Sri Ravishankar’s Art of Living” in Gurus of Modern Yoga, edited by Ellen Goldberg and Mark Singleton, Oxford University Press, 2014. Her edited volume Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity, ARI-Springer Asian Series with Springer was published in 2016.

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