This article examines the phenomenon of the 'merger' of places of worship on the island nation-state of Singapore, and raises sociological questions regarding the rationale for such sharing of space for emergent styles of religiosity. The ethnographic material comes from two such cases of merger. involving Hindu and Taoist religious traditions in Singapore. These data allow us to abstract broader issues of conceptual relevance to the understanding of religion under conditions of modernity. My argument is that the practical requirement of merger in a shared physical location creates a literal and sym bolic space, as well as a context for interaction between individuals, communities and ultimately modes of religiosity. This context is both constraining and liberating at the same time, but I do not see modernity as eroding or diminishing religiosity. Rather, one observes that the formal rational, instrumental logic also facilitates innovations, inven tiveness and creativity in the religious domain, producing a vastly altered religious landscape. This challenges and impels us to move beyond a reductionist choice between the secularising or the sacralising effects of modernist forces on religious practice.
The paper begins by documenting the meanings the labels ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Taoism’ carry locally and highlights the complexities and ambiguities in discussions that invoke them. I then present data which demonstrate significant points of convergence between these two religious traditions, viewed as ‘ethnic religions’ and asserted to be ‘different’ in the Singaporean context. The turn to the organisational domain is instructive in revealing how ‘Hindu’ and ‘Taoist’ institutions have talked about their respective religions in the public sphere. This focus allows me to highlight overlaps in the two sets of discourses, to ask why these affinities should exist and to reflect on the sociological implications of such a phenomenon.
This article looks beyond ‘places of worship’ as sacred spaces in an effort to discover/uncover other urban sites/spaces/locations where sacred indicators have been inserted and embedded. The author argues that tracking ‘signs of the sacred’ is a productive and inclusive mapping of urban religiosity, capturing ostensibly everyday secular spaces which are marked by sacrality and efficacy. These urban sites are ethnographically messy, colourful and energetic spaces, where city dwellers create urban worlds to express, experience and enact religiosity. They defy neat categorization and challenge such binaries as ‘private’/‘public’ and ‘legal’/‘illegal’ and ‘sacred’/‘profane’, to name just a few dichotomies. Instead, these sites ‘made sacred’ are ‘out of place’ and the disarray one encounters here is reminiscent of Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Their liminality signals their ambivalence and connotes them as dangerous and as spiritually charged.
This article reflects on the significance and relevance of continuing discussions and debates on the `opening up' of the social sciences. It argues that a balanced and comprehensive restructuring of the social sciences today entails a simultaneous attention to the philosophical, intellectual apparatus as well as the administrative and organizational frameworks of social science domains. The actual mechanisms and practices for reform can only be identified through attention to the structures of knowledge production in the non-West. The article connects contemporary calls for `opening up' with earlier calls to decolonize and decentre the social sciences, by focusing on the theme of critique and its role in the restructuring exercise. The article also itemizes a variety of everyday strategies and procedures through which social scientists can begin to affect the practice of the social sciences. Thus the article stresses that, apart from the conceptual and political critique of the social sciences, absolutely crucial to the `opening up' project are the everyday, ordinary, mundane acts that practitioners of this field can engage in in their day-to-day task of being a sociologist or anthropologist.
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