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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Asian Studies
Book Review: Becoming Better Muslims: Religious Authority And Ethical Improvement In Aceh, Indonesia (By David Kloos) & Chinese Ways Of Being Muslim: Negotiating Ethnicity And Religiosity In Indonesia (By Hew Wai Weng), Charlotte Setijadi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Indonesian Islam has earned something of a bad reputation in recent times. Amid reports of rising intolerance against religious minorities, terrorism attacks, high-profile blasphemy cases and the growing political influence of hard-line Muslim groups, it is easy to take an alarmist stance and assume that Indonesia’s approximately 225 million Muslims are heading down the path of puritanism. Indeed, even seasoned analysts of Indonesia often forget that Indonesian Islam is heterogeneous, and that the everyday experiences of Muslims from different socio-cultural backgrounds are extremely diverse. This is why Hew Wai Weng’s and David Kloos’ respective books are much-needed additions to contemporary …
Jailangkung: Indonesian Spirit-Basket Divination, Margaret Chan
Jailangkung: Indonesian Spirit-Basket Divination, Margaret Chan
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Chinese spirit-basket divination, which dates to the fifth century, would have been lost to the world had it not been reincarnated as Indonesian jailangkung. The term is the homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong [菜篮公, vegetable basket deity] and unambiguously links the Indonesian practice with the Chinese. Contemporary Chinese divinatory methods have replaced the clumsy basket planchette with the handier tri-forked branch or a pen held in the medium’s hand, but a spirit-basket still features in jailangkung and remains the key element in involutions of the prototype. For example, Nini Thowong’s spirit-possessed doll, is essentially an anthropomorphic effigy …
Restoration Of An Ancestral Temple In Guangzhou, China: Re-Imagining History And Traditions Through Devotion To Art And Creation, Ling Ma, Orlando Woods, Zhu Hong
Restoration Of An Ancestral Temple In Guangzhou, China: Re-Imagining History And Traditions Through Devotion To Art And Creation, Ling Ma, Orlando Woods, Zhu Hong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Rapid modernization has brought about massive changes in the urban and rural landscapes of China.While many old places and ancient buildings have been pulled down and replaced with more modernalternatives, others have been protected and restored. These include ancient ancestral temples, animportant cultural space in China. Previous research has shown how different level governmentsand rural communities work together to restore ancient temples, but didn’t bring to light artisticand non-government financed and patronized cases of restoration projects. This article adoptsa bottom-up perspective to examine a case in Guangzhou how an individual artist transforms anancient ancestral temple into a new cultural space. …
The Heritage-Making Conundrum In Asian Cities: Real, Transformed And Imagined Legacies, David Ocon
The Heritage-Making Conundrum In Asian Cities: Real, Transformed And Imagined Legacies, David Ocon
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The process of heritage-making is farfrom straightforward. Defining the meaning of heritage in young nations and citieswhere land availability is limited is a challenging exercise. It often crossesthe paths of history, religion, memory-shaping, development, andidentity-building. It requires fluent communication channels between civilsociety, local organisations and governments. Willingness to cooperate from allthe parties involved is essential; dialogue a must.In land-scarce or densely populated Asiancities, expansion and growth is colliding with the preservation of legacies, thepast and memory. This paper examines regional case studies from Hong Kong,Manila and Singapore, where preservation of cultural patrimony, development anddaily life follow conflicting paths. It sheds …
(Re)Producing Buddhist Hegemony In Sri Lanka: Advancing The Discursive Formations Of Self-Orientalism, Religious (Im)Mobility And 'Unethical' Conversion, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explores how Buddhist groups in Sri Lanka attempt to suppress conversion to Christianity. Conversion to Christianity can dilute the power and legitimacy of Buddhist groups, which has caused them to promote a discourse of ‘unethical’ conversion. My argument is that such a discourse is self-Orientalising in nature, and is designed to enable the (re)production of Buddhist hegemony in Sri Lanka. By constructing Buddhists as vulnerable and in need of protection, the hegemonic actions of Buddhist groups are validated. These constructions serve to restrict the religious (and socio-cultural) mobility of Buddhists, and to legitimise the persecution of Christians through …
Nurturing The Cultural Desert: The Role Of Museums In Singapore, Su Fern Hoe, Terence Chong
Nurturing The Cultural Desert: The Role Of Museums In Singapore, Su Fern Hoe, Terence Chong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The absence of official platforms and institutions such as museums and visual arts spaces; while the artistic amateur scene was flourishing, there were no museums or national galleries where collections of the best local and regional artworks could be found, appreciated and studied by artists and citizens. This cultural desert was the result of the government’s attention to bread and butter issues. How, then, did Singapore transform from “cultural desert” of yesteryear to a city with 51 museums and 118 art galleries in 2013, as well as an arts scene that saw more than 3.2 million visitors to the national …
The Arts And Culture Strategic Review Report: Harnessing The Arts For Community-Building, Su Fern Hoe
The Arts And Culture Strategic Review Report: Harnessing The Arts For Community-Building, Su Fern Hoe
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
The Arts and Culture Strategic Review (ACSR) was initiated in 2010 to chart the next phase of cultural development in Singapore. The final report, which was released in 2012, appears to propose a paradigm shift in focus for arts and cultural policy making in Singapore: from the desire to manage the arts and cultural sectors into profitable creative industries to the utilisation of the arts and culture as expedient tools for social cohesion and community building in Singapore. This shift has resulted in government programmes placing (renewed) importance and emphasis on “community arts” as a cultural activity. This chapter critically …
Whose Blue Heaven? Musicality In The Early Japanese Talkies, Richard M Davis
Whose Blue Heaven? Musicality In The Early Japanese Talkies, Richard M Davis
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article focuses on the advent of synchronized sound production in Japan in 1931 – three years later than the United States – and the generative ambiguities of how sound and music’s relationship to film was figured in that year’s anxious discourse. I argue that this ‘belatedness’ is echoed in relationships of on-screen image and offscreen sound, noise, and music in two important early sound films, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (Gosho 1931) and A Tipsy Life (Kimura 1933).
Global Ambitions: Positioning Singapore As A Contemporary Arts Hub, Su Fern Hoe
Global Ambitions: Positioning Singapore As A Contemporary Arts Hub, Su Fern Hoe
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This chapter has two objectives. The first is to critically interrogate the state’s efforts in utilising the visual arts as a means to position Singapore as an international arts hub and marketplace. As Kwok Kian Woon and Low Kee-Hong have noted, “Singapore’s cultural policy has everything to do with staying on top as a focal node in the late-capitalist world system of the new millennium” (Kwok and Low, 2002, p. 154). This chapter offers an overview of the programmes and initiatives introduced by the state from the 1990s to the present in order to encourage the entry of international art …
Lessons In Global Commerce (From An Early East India Company Employee), Emily Soon
Lessons In Global Commerce (From An Early East India Company Employee), Emily Soon
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
International trade hurts local communities. It causes economic hardship at home and destroys the environment, while the culture of consumerism it fuels is destroying our values and way of life. Similar sentiments to these recur across the media today: this so-called backlash against globalisation is said to have contributed to Brexit and the rise of Trump, and to have transformed the shape of political movements across the world. This pent-up frustration seems to be quintessentially twenty-first century, the disillusioned rant of a world no longer charmed by the siren song of free trade and borderless commerce. And yet, the sentiments …
Strategies Of Salvation: Evangelical Christian Praxis And Sites Of Degradation In Sri Lanka, Orlando Woods
Strategies Of Salvation: Evangelical Christian Praxis And Sites Of Degradation In Sri Lanka, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper demonstrates how disasters create sites of degradation – potent spaces of upheaval and engagement – that are readily filled and exploited by evangelical Christian groups. In doing so, it explores how disasters provide opportunities for evangelical groups to gain a foothold in localities where Christian presence, and evangelical praxis, may otherwise be restricted. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Sri Lanka throughout 2010–2011, two comparative case studies are presented that reveal the strategies of evangelical Christian praxis in and through sites of environmental and political degradation. Specifically, the case studies reveal how evangelical groups pursue ‘outside‐in’ and ‘inside‐out’ …
Buddhism Co. Ltd? Epistemology Of Religiosity, And The Re-Invention Of A Buddhist Monastery In Hong Kong, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong
Buddhism Co. Ltd? Epistemology Of Religiosity, And The Re-Invention Of A Buddhist Monastery In Hong Kong, Junxi Qian, Lily Kong
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This article re-theorises the relationships between secularity and religiosity in modernity. While geographers have recognised that the secular and the religious are mutually constituted, this article pushes this theorisation further, arguing that the religious and the secular are in fact hybrid constructs that embrace simultaneously the sacred and profane, the transcendent and the immanent. Albeit the significant advancement in disrupting enclosed epistemologies of secular modernity, relatively less work has sought to theorise the possibility of religion as a hybrid operating at the secular–religious interface. Focusing on the ways in which a non-Western religion, Buddhism, performs entangled relationships between religiosity and …
Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-Cultural Encounters In East Asian Film [Book Review], Espena Darlene Machell
Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-Cultural Encounters In East Asian Film [Book Review], Espena Darlene Machell
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
In this exceptional book, Felicia Chan dives deep into the complexities of cosmopolitanism and cinema, questioning the meaning of ‘foreignness’ and aspirations of ‘belonging’ in the global context. Grounded on the premise that transnational cinema, or cinema in general, is an important platform for the production, imagination, and interrogation of cosmopolitan ideals, the book focuses on East Asian cinemas from China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, challenging notions of definitive cultural boundaries. The book offers a way to understand cross-cultural encounters that emphasises the nuances and subjectivities of cultural imaginaries that cinema itself advances and challenges at the same time. …