Death and the Afterlife

Kit Ying Lye is currently Senior Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Her research interests are mainly the Cold War in Southeast Asia, history and its remembrance, and death in Southeast Asian literature and culture, and Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume titled Reading Violence and Trauma in Asia and the World. Terence Heng is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of four books, including Visual Methods in the Field (2016), Of Gods, Gifts and Ghosts: Spiritual Places in Urban Spaces (2020), and Diasporas, Weddings and the Trajectories of Ethnicity (2020). His research ambulates through the intersections of cultural geography, visual sociology, and photographic practice, investigating diasporic Chinese identities, sacred space-making among Chinese Singaporeans, and visual methods.

Introduction: Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from a Global City-State

Starting out: The Chinese Funeral in Singapore

1. Mapping Regional Variations in Contemporary Singaporean Chinese Funerals

2. Saving the Woman: Female Rituals in Chinese Funerals

3. Living Next to Ghosts: Chinese Religious Practice and Strategies for Mediating Between Human and Supernatural

4. Chanting for Liberation: One Hundred Year’s History of Chinese Buddhist Funeral Rites in Singapore

5. A Chinese Funeral at a Void Deck

Death and the Practices of Death

6. De-sequestering Death in Everyday Life

7. Death, Mourning Online and Digital Remains

8. Arts Approaches to Death in Singapore: Considering Universality, Cultural Mediation, and Everyday Immersion

Afterdeath, Afterlife

9. Coca Cola for the ancestor: In/Convenient food offerings during Qing Ming at Bukit Brown Cemetery

10. Chinese Reinterment Practices in Singapore

11. Mobilising and Disassembling Domestic Deathscapes