Using the large-scale exhumation of graves in Bukit Brown Cemetery, Singapore in 2013, Ruth E. Toulson states the premise of what she labels “necropolitics of the ordinary” and offers to examine the ways Singapore Chinese grieve their dead against the backdrop of Singapore's approach to sustaining economic and urban growth. Through a series of fieldwork conducted intermittently between 2003 to 2015, Toulsen offers her interpretation of the ways space, shifting demographics, and national policies interweave to affect its Chinese citizens’ approaches to death and its practices.
Across five chapters, Toulsen attempts to understand and explain the evolution of Chinese death practices from elaborate and distinct rituals to simplified and “Buddhist bland” performances that some have regarded to have no essential meaning (p. 77). Drawing from studies by academics such as Brenda Yeoh, Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce, and well-referred scholars of death studies such as James Watson, Toulsen presents to her readers an interpretation of how postcolonial urban and economic policies continue to influence evolving Chinese death practices.
Chapter 1 offers a sketch of what death practices and rituals look like in modern Singapore in the early 2000s, a period which also saw the transition of several undertakers and casket companies helmed by 2nd or 3rd generation undertakers. This puts in context the increasing different approaches and perspectives to death and it practices by both practitioners and regular Singapore Chinese.
Chapter 2, the strongest chapter, provides an intimate and aesthetic look into the process of cleaning and embalming the dead. Through her interactions with a young embalmer, Toulsen considers how and why the acts of caring for the dead has shifted from the immediate family to professionals. Readers interested in the evolution and urbanisation of Chinese death rituals will find this chapter interesting although it is glaring that Toulsen did not consider how public health regulations post SARS have accelerated the enforcement of proper handling of the deceased by licensed professionals.
Chapter 3 focuses on the significance (or lack thereof) assigned to death rituals and their paraphernalia, with Toulsen suggesting that Chinese death practices in the last decade have evolved into something that she refers to as “protestant Buddhism” (p. 89) with little attempt on her part to decipher the rituals that have adapted to Singapore's multiculturalism.
Meanwhile chapter 4 attempts to examine the supposed state interventions on private emotions and their impact (albeit indirect) on the way Singaporeans grieve for the dead. Using the case of a single father's struggle to properly grief for his late daughter who struggled with mental health issues, Toulsen makes the leap to argue that Singapore's policies such as population control measures and the discouragement of Chinese dialects impede one's ability to grief the dead. Toulsen is right to argue that the language policies have altered the ways one performs and understands death rituals previously performed in the dialect one is born into but there is not enough information about the stated case that points to language and shrinking household sizes as main causes of his frustrations and added grief. Moreover, her failure to consider the complexity of gender and social hierarchy that informs many death rituals (such as unmarried women being denied elaborate funerals), and a minimal acknowledgement of how the stigma of mental illness has impacted the way a single father grieves requires readers to assess the robustness of her claims.
Chapter 5 returns to the exhumation of graves in Bukit Brown Cemetery and Toulsen attempts to answer the question of how Singapore Chinese can memorialise the dead that are housed in multistorey columbarium. While she focuses on her interlocuters claim that they will not be able to and do not want to continue with tomb sweeping after the reinterment of their ancestors to prove her point, Toulsen has not considered how majority of Singaporeans continue to pay respects to their ancestors in new ways annually since cremation as body disposal was accepted as norm.
It is understandable that for a book of this length, Toulsen is unable to go into deeper discussions of how regional cultural exchanges have played a significant role alongside land use and language policies in Singapore. However, local readers or readers familiar with Singapore Chinese death practices would find a considerable number of observations and claims confusing. While the observations put forth by Toulsen and via her interlocuters offer an intimate look into modern day Chinese practices in Singapore, her observations of Singapore are at times outdated (her last visit was in 2015) or even suspect. Take for example, her claim that residents in Sin Min neighbourhoods (which are in close proximity of undertakers/casket companies) gather in the evenings to watch “historical miniseries broadcast in Chinese and dramatizing the myths of the Monkey Gods who travel through time to imagined Chinese worlds” is flawed with her conflation of Chinese myths into the same story of Journey to the West (which has only the one Monkey God), suggesting to readers that she is unfamiliar with the myths that have influenced beliefs about the afterlife and the death practices she is studying (p. 30). Similarly, the claim that residents avoid the void decks of public flats where funerals are commonly held because they are also “imaged as place of danger, always the scene of a snatch theft or a violent beating” and also “the site of other activities decreed “deviant”: homosexual encounters, illicit affairs and prostitution” (p.31). With no evidence other than a fictional poem, her observations compel local readers to consider if she had indeed observed this often in Singapore or if she simply had unreliable interlocutors shaping her perspectives.
Regardless, the book offers a decent examination of how something so personal as death and the process of grieving is susceptible to larger external forces. Toulsen's observations and at times odd interpretations of how Singaporean Chinese grieve the dead offer some useful material that adds to the study of current Singapore Chinese death practices. The approach of interpreting evolving Chinese funerary practices in the context of state policies and interventions is interesting and pertinent but some of these claims of national interventions on ethnic and religious practices are often left under-examined. This creates the impression that she could be pandering to narratives about a draconian Singapore government and its passive citizens even though she attempts to provide more recent updates to her observations in the epilogue. Readers who wish to learn more about death and dying in Singapore should read the book with caution and take care to investigate the claims in order to avoid falling into the trap of reinforcing a ‘colonial’ approach to death and dying in Singapore.
