Political ecology of death:Funeral reforms and the conflicts of land and emotion in Singapore
This paper explores the political ecology of death and emotion through the secular-ized funeral rituals reform in Singapore.Although scholars have recently acknowledged the roles of emotion in shaping environmental politics,religion and death as socio-affective forces have not been substantively engaged with by political ecologists.In this paper,we argue that death is inherently both a spiritual and ecological phenomenon,as it addresses not only the spiri-tual landscape of how people see the natural world,but also the affective tensions and struggles over what counts as a"proper"form of burial in relation to religion and nature.We first investi-gate the way that the Singapore state utilizes ecological discourses to secularize Chinese death rituals,such that the death can be separated from the transcendent spheres and incorporated into the environmental biopolitics.Second,we examine how Chinese Singaporeans negotiate the emotional tensions in relation to the secularized rituals and especially the sea burials.This paper brings the issue of death into dialogue with political ecology and reflects on its emotional capaci-ty in shaping environmental politics.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
