Chinese Entertainment, Ethnicity, and Pleasure

Abstract

Early forms of entertainment in the Chinese immigrant society of Singapore took the form of festivals and festivities that invariably occurred on the streets. Celebration of festivals served religious and ethnic as well as moral functions, when values were reproduced and reinforced. People of the same kind gathered together to reproduce their ethnicity. Such festive events were as recreational as they were community-building and identity-bestowing. The character of leisure changed sharply when the entertainment went indoors, into amusement parks, cinemas, theaters, and dance and music halls. Leisure thus became less communal, more individualistic, more voluntary. Entertainment was becoming consumption, or consumption was displacing entertainment. One witnessed a profound moment of social transformation, because leisure had taken on a voluntary, individualistic character. The individual would labor to pay for his leisure and pleasure; pleasure was commodified -a sort of recreational consumption or consumptive recreation. At this moment of history, he reduced himself to a nonparticipant relationship with his objects of desire, maintaining a detached and alienated relationship with all, just like in the realm of work. The consumption of entertainment as offered later on the air, through radio and television, was made possible by the mediation of machines. Machines now came between the entertainer and the entertained, and created strangeness and anonymity. Increasingly, one listened to the radio, watched television, enjoyed a movie, all on one's own. A movie-goer faced the silver screen, alone, himself wrapped up in darkness. The completion of privatization of entertainment and leisure meant the ascendancy of the individual and the demise of community and tradition. YUNG SAI-sHING is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore. After his first book, titled Anthropology of Chinese Drama (in Chinese) in 1997, he is completing a second on the cultural history of gramophone records of Cantonese opera and music. His research interests include: traditional Chinese theater; anthropology of theater, print culture and popular novels, and the social history of Chinese opera in Singapore.

Live Streaming and Digital Stages for the Hungry Ghosts and Deities

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Festival Safety – Lessons Learned from the Stavanger Food Festival (the Gladmatfestival)

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