Full Description
What insights can we gain from the rituals, actions, and interactions around death and the afterlife? This edited collection offers a multidisciplinary perspective on how individuals and collectives "do" death and interact with the dead.
Through case studies of Singaporean Chinese religion communities, the authors bring a myriad of knowledge and experience from eight different but interconnected disciplines to examine, map, document, and theorise the practices of death and the afterlife. Heritage here is not just a point of nostalgia or historical snapshot, but becomes a significant resource for the shaping of and grappling with diasporic and contemporary Singaporean Chinese identities. This edited collection moves beyond "western" sites of knowledge by offering a series of multidisciplinary perspectives on death practices, drawn from research with individuals, groups, and organisations that identify themselves as Singaporean Chinese, and the spaces and places often referred to as "Chinese Singapore".
This collection will appeal to a wide and diverse audience of scholars, students, and practitioners. In particular, key target audiences would include, but are not limited to those interested in Asia, particularly Chinese studies and Chinese migrant/diasporic communities, and scholars in sociology, history, anthropology, and social/cultural geography.
Contents
Introduction: Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City-State
Starting out: The Chinese Funeral in Singapore
1. Mapping Regional Variations in Contemporary Singaporean Chinese Funerals
2. Saving the Woman: Female Rituals in Chinese Funerals
3. Living Next to Ghosts: Chinese Religious Practice and Strategies for Mediating Between Human and Supernatural
4. Chanting for Liberation: One Hundred Year's History of Chinese Buddhist Funeral Rites in Singapore
5. A Chinese Funeral at a Void Deck
Death and the Practices of Death
6. De-sequestering Death in Everyday Life
7. Death, Mourning Online and Digital Remains
8. Arts Approaches to Death in Singapore: Considering Universality, Cultural Mediation, and Everyday Immersion
Afterdeath, Afterlife
9. Coca Cola for the ancestor: In/Convenient food offerings during Qing Ming at Bukit Brown Cemetery
10. Chinese Reinterment Practices in Singapore
11. Mobilising and Disassembling Domestic Deathscapes
