The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of ...railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and 'traces'.
Anthropology is a flourishing discipline in Southeast Asia. This book makes visible the development of national traditions and transnational practices of anthropology across the region. The authors ...are practising anthropologists with decades of experience in the intellectual traditions and institutions that have taken root in the region. Three overlapping issues are addressed in these pages. First, the historical development of traditions of research, scholarship, and social engagement across diverse anthropological communities of the region, which have adopted and adapted global anthropological trends to their local circumstances. Second, the opportunities and challenges faced by Southeast Asian anthropologists as they practise their craft in different political contexts. Third, the emergence of locally-grounded, intra-regional, transnational linkages and practices. The book contributes to a 21st-century, world anthropologies paradigm from a Southeast Asian perspective.
Sustaining a Hindu universe at an everyday life level requires an extraordinary range of religious specialists and ritual paraphernalia. At the level of practice, devotional Hinduism is an embodied ...religion and grounded in a materiality, that makes the presence of specific physical objects (which when used in worship also carry immense ritual and symbolic load) an indispensable part of its religious practices.
Traditionally, both services and objects required for worship were provided and produced by occupational communities. The almost sacred connection between caste groups and occupation/profession has been clearly severed in many diasporic locations, but importantly in India itself. As such, skills and expertise required for producing an array of physical objects in order to support Hindu worship have been taken over by clusters of individuals with no traditional, historical connection with caste-related knowledge. Both the transference and disconnect just noted have been crucial for the ultimate commodification of objects used in the act of Hindu worship, and the emergence of an analogous commercial industry as a result. These developments condense highly complex processes that need careful conceptual explication, a task that is exciting and carries enormous potential for theoretical reflections in key fields of study.
Using the lens of ‘visuality’ and ‘materiality,’ Sinha offers insights into the everyday material religious lives of Hindus as they strive to sustain theistic, devotional Hinduism in diasporic locations--particularly Singapore, Malaysia, and Tamilnadu--where religious objects have become commodified.
Vineeta Sinha is Associate Professor and teaches at the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She obtained her M.A and Ph.D in Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore, (Singapore University Press & Nordic Institute of Asian Studeis 2005).
1. Setting the Scene: The Scope of Research 2. Mapping Spaces and Objects: Disapora Hinduism and Prayer Items 3. Visualising Divinity: Statues, Paintings & Photographs 4. Homes for Gods: Prayer Altars for Family Shrines 5. Flowers for Sale: Flowers for Worship 6. Sustaining Festival Hinduism: Deepavali and Tai Pucam 7. Spirituality and Commerce: Theorising the Complex Ties
This article looks beyond ‘places of worship’ as sacred spaces in an effort to discover/uncover other urban sites/spaces/locations where sacred indicators have been inserted and embedded. The author ...argues that tracking ‘signs of the sacred’ is a productive and inclusive mapping of urban religiosity, capturing ostensibly everyday secular spaces which are marked by sacrality and efficacy. These urban sites are ethnographically messy, colourful and energetic spaces, where city dwellers create urban worlds to express, experience and enact religiosity. They defy neat categorization and challenge such binaries as ‘private’/‘public’ and ‘legal’/‘illegal’ and ‘sacred’/‘profane’, to name just a few dichotomies. Instead, these sites ‘made sacred’ are ‘out of place’ and the disarray one encounters here is reminiscent of Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Their liminality signals their ambivalence and connotes them as dangerous and as spiritually charged.
The construction of transportation infrastructures in Malaya is a crucial part of the global story of industrial capitalism, which is intertwined with the unprecedented movement of labour in the ...nineteenth century. By 1932, an elaborate and inter-connected railway network had materialized in Malaya, including on the island of Singapore. This chapter historicizes the railway networks that were constructed in Malaya using Indian, Chinese and Malay labour. Picking up on the discussion in the previous chapter, here I elaborate on the overwhelming historical demand for immigrant Indian labour globally and in Malaya. Even though it was challenging to secure labour, recruitment
The birth of the railways transformed traditional patterns of movement and altered existing travel routes, enabling the rapid movement of freight, animals and people over large distances. Globally, ...the development of the railways was intertwined with the boom in demand that followed the Industrial Revolution as well as European colonial projects. Specific features of the first Industrial Revolution — such as the introduction of steam power and the exploitation of coal and iron mines — facilitated the birth of the earliest railways. Britain was a major player in pioneering the building and management railways in parts of Europe as well
Conclusion Sinha, Vineeta
Temple Tracks,
08/2023, Volume:
16
Book Chapter
Open access
This book has argued that a history of railway construction in colonial Malaya is a powerful lens for analysing the interlocking accounts of Indian labour migrations, and the sacralization of these ...landscapes by labouring communities, who also constructed the region’s modern rail transportation infrastructure. Moving between these intersecting narratives, I have charted railway-building and religion-making efforts of labourers and the consequences these carried, through colonial and postcolonial moments in Malaysia and Singapore. Turning to and mapping my research on diaspora Hinduism in these regions over two decades, I have inserted myself consciously into the book’s narrative, sharing details of my
Railways and Religion Sinha, Vineeta
Temple Tracks,
08/2023, Volume:
16
Book Chapter
Open access
A historical perspective, with a focus on the transformations in transport networks and religious infrastructures, has been productive for probing the religion-railways interface in Singapore and ...Malaysia. This chapter narrates the contemporary story of the colonial railways grounded on Malayan soil, more than a century ago. Here I argue that scrutinizing railway modernization projects in these regions highlights the encounters of religious and cultural elements with economic and technological developments. Expectedly, this interaction has taken multiple forms with diverse outcomes – some anticipated, others not so. As I have demonstrated earlier in the book, the construction of railways and the
Against the backdrop of global migration narratives and colonial railway histories outlined in the two previous chapters, the discussion here is focused specifically on the working and living ...conditions of railway labourers who built and maintained railways in Malaya. Selected archival materials and ethnographic data are used to unpack the work of this cluster of railway labourers and detail their worksites and living spaces. In a colonial context, manual labour was organized into gangs headed by a mandore (supervisor, foreman, inspector), akin to the organization of British navvies. Satya has observed that: ‘The organisation of large bodies of workers into
