Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State: Soul of the Little Red Dot
Ebook
This book examines spirituality in Singapore, showing how important the city state is for understanding contemporary global configurations of urban space, religion, and spirituality. Joanne Punzo Waghorne highlights how the formal religious spaces-temples, churches, and mosques-have been confined to allotted sites on the map of Singapore, whereas various “spiritual” organizations, particularly of Hindu origins and headed by a guru, still continue to operate as “societies” classified by the government with other “clubs.”
These unconventional religiosities are not confined but ironically make their own places, meeting in ostensive secular venues: high-rise flats, malls, businesses, and community centers, thus existing in the overall space of religion, commerce, and the state. The book argues that State of Singapore also operates between the secular and the religious, constructing an overarching spatial regime that both accommodates and yet rivals the alternate spheres that spiritual movements construct under its umbrella.
Both spatial configurations challenge the presumed relationships between myth and reality, religion and commerce, the ethereal and the concrete, the sacred and the secular, on the levels of self, community, and polity. Singapore, now deemed a model for urban development in Asia, also offers an understanding of a new post-secularity and perhaps reveals where the urbanized world is headed.
Explores popular spirituality including yoga in Singapore, relating it to how urban space has been ordered in Singapore and contributing to our understanding of urban religion.
Based on ethnography work completed over a decade
The first in-depth study of spirituality in urban Singapore, with most studies to date focusing on Western cities and migrant practices instead
Contributes to growing literature on both urban religion broadly and on Asian cities
List of Figures
Preface
1. Macrospaces and Microplaces
2. Statecraft and Cosmology-Making the Macrocosm in Singapore
3: Macrospaces-Guru Style
4. Yoga on the Move
5. Reading Walden Pond at Marina Bay Sands-Singapore
6. How is a Guru like a High-Rise?
7. Templing Gurus in Little India
Bibliography
Index
This is a gripping book on the utopia of Singapore from the unexpected perspective of religious studies: wide-ranging, surprising and exciting. A must-read for anyone interested in Singapore.
This book is highly original, well written and interesting to various disciplines and a wider audience.
Highly accessible, Waghorne's work takes its readers on a journey of Singapore's dynamism. This is a creative resource for anyone who wants to understand the enduring presence of religion in the life of the city.
- Title: Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State: Soul of the Little Red Dot
- Author: Joanne Punzo Waghorne
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2020
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350086579, 9781350283305, 1350283304, 1350086576
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350086579
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-09T03:08:47Z
Joanne Punzo Waghorne is Professor in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University, USA. She is the editor of Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity (2017) and author of The Diaspora of the Gods: (2004), and The Raja's Magic Clothes (1994).