Abstract
Space for religious use is highly regulated in Singapore. Specific plots of land are reserved for religious groups to bid for, and create, “official” spaces of worship. However, religious practices continue to exist within “unofficial” sacred spaces, such as house temples and wayside shrines, negotiating and resisting the overt management of religion by the Singapore state. Scholars, including Vineeta Sinha and Terence Heng, demonstrate how sacrality infused into everyday secular urban spaces defies neat binaries of “sacred/profane” and “legal/illegal”, and how Chinese house temples or sintuas—temples located within public housing flats—sustain sacred spaces, despite being technically illegal under housing regulations. Drawing upon a series of ethnographic observations conducted over a year of four sintuas and their activities in Singapore, this paper explores the different ways through which sintuas produce sacred space as a response to spatial constraints imposed by the state. These include (1) re-enchanting everyday urban spaces during a yewkeng—a procession around the housing estate—with the help of a spirit medium; (2) using immaterial religious markers (e.g., ritual sounds and smells) to create an “atmosphere” of sacredness; (3) appropriating public spaces; and (4) leveraging the online space to digitally reproduce images of the sacred.
Highlights
Space is highly and systematically regulated in Singapore
As seen from the example described above, where Xie Jiang Jun “identifies” wandering spirits around the housing estate that devotees make offerings to, re-enchantment occurs because the embodied sacredness of the spirit medium allows him to inject sacrality into these everyday urban spaces, temporarily superimposing a layer of sacred space onto these everyday lived spaces, where for a transient moment, devotees engage in ritual activities, which suggest that the living and the dead cohabit the same space (Heng 2015)
While sintuas are technically not “placeless” or entirely devoid of real space, the significance of such an interpretation is that the online space allows for the fulfilment of what cannot be achieved offline and at lowered costs
Summary
Space is highly and systematically regulated in Singapore. Since its independence, the Singapore state has been preoccupied with economic development, modernization, and nation building. The state regulation of religious space in Singapore has resulted in what some scholars conceptualise as “official” and “unofficial” sacred spaces. Chinese house temples (or sintuas), the focus of inquiry in this paper, are an example of such “unofficial” sacred spaces. Operating illegally in public housing flats, sintuas face the challenge of having to produce and sustain sacred space to fulfil religious needs, yet do so in a way that allows them to evade undesired attention from the state. Religions 2020, 11, 349 paper, I argue that it is precisely this spatial precarity of sintuas that makes the temporary, transient, impermanent, and immaterial modes of producing sacred space imperative to sintuas, and worthy of scholarly attention, as such qualities enable sintuas to better manage spatial challenges. I present four such instances, namely, (1) temporarily re-enchanting everyday urban spaces; (2) creating an atmosphere of sacredness through immaterial religious markers; (3) appropriating secular urban spaces for religious merriment; and (4) leveraging the online space to digitally reproduce the image of the sacred
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