Necropolitics of Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore

January 29, 3:00pm - 4:30pm
Mānoa Campus, Moore Hall 258 and online

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In this ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Ruth E. Toulson uses death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, exploring the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies of colonialism and consequences of whirlwind capitalist development. In doing so, she offers a new anthropology of death, one both more personal and politicized.


Event Sponsor
Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Outreach Coordinator, 8083910759, cseasor@hawaii.edu,

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