1st Edition
Death and the Afterlife Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City
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.
Introduction: Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City-State
Kit Ying Lye and Terence Heng
Starting out: The Chinese Funeral in Singapore
1. Mapping Regional Variations in Contemporary Singaporean Chinese Funerals
Kit Ying Lye, Janice Kam, Terence Heng
2. Saving the Woman: Female Rituals in Chinese Funerals
Kit Ying Lye
3. Living Next to Ghosts: Chinese Religious Practice and Strategies for Mediating Between Human and Supernatural
Janice Kam
4. Chanting for Liberation: One Hundred Year’s History of Chinese Buddhist Funeral Rites in Singapore
Jack Meng-Tat Chia
5. A Chinese Funeral at a Void Deck
Dingwei Tan
Death and the Practices of Death
6. De-sequestering Death in Everyday Life
Terence Heng
7. Death, Mourning Online and Digital Remains
Alvin Eng Hui Lim
8. Arts Approaches to Death in Singapore: Considering Universality, Cultural Mediation, and Everyday Immersion
Jill J. Tan
Afterdeath, Afterlife
9. Coca Cola for the ancestor: In/Convenient food offerings during Qing Ming at Bukit Brown Cemetery
See Mieng Tan
10. Chinese Reinterment Practices in Singapore
Yew-Foong Hui
11. Mobilising and Disassembling Domestic Deathscapes
Kelly Chan and Terence Heng
Biography
Kit Ying Lye is currently Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her research interests are mainly the Cold War in Southeast Asia, history and its remembrance, and death in Southeast Asian literature and culture, and Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume titled Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World.
Terence Heng is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of four books, including Visual Methods in the Field (2016), Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (2020), and Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (2020). His research ambulates through the intersections of cultural geography, visual sociology, and photographic practice, investigating diasporic Chinese identities, sacred space-making among Chinese Singaporeans, and visual methods.
