Singapore, Spirituality, and the Space of the State: Soul of the Little Red Dot

Description

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.

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).

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. * Peter Van der Veer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany * This book is highly original, well written and interesting to various disciplines and a wider audience. * Hubert Knoblauch, Professor of Sociology, Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany * 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. * Jayeel Cornelio, Associate Professor and Director of Development Studies, Ateneo de Manila University, The Philippines *