Between the sea and the shore: mediating the Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The Chinese diaspora brought tablets and effigies of their Taoist gods with them when they migrated to Southeast Asia. Temples in the region hold annual festivals to evoke this passage from the sea to the shore, assisted by makeshift sets, props, and generators with floodlights. In this article, I examine the durational performances of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Singapore, which consist of people and deities moving in processions. What does it mean to perform spirituality between the sea and the shore? What happens when this coastline is constantly redrawn with land reclamation? There is a mobile imagery described here: technological media transport yet circumscribe the spiritual to the material stage onshore as devotees invite the deities to land. The spiritual is eventually pulled back, leaving behind its residue (ashes, footprints on the sand, talismans) as the deities depart. Spirituality performed along the coast through technological mediation reveals the contemporary nature of these religious practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Procession
• religious practice in Singapore
• public performance
• multi-media ritual
• religious festival
• digital technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Citing Barry Truax’s notion of ‘soundscape’ to denote how “the individual and society as a whole understand the acoustic environment through listening” (Truax 2001, xviii), Sykes attempts to “theorise some processes that facilitate contestations over the place of sound—particularly sounds marked ‘religious’—in the streets of ethnically diverse global cities” (2015, 381). In my case, I attempt to theorise such processes by observing the performative environment, where the individual, the state, and society co-perform in both mutual and contested ways, as Sykes observes.

2. YouTube video. “蔡厝港斗母宮 Highlights 2014.” Accessed 26 February 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIP6dRAjEAc

3. When referring to spirit mediums as possessed by god, spirit or divinity, I am caught between choosing the passive voice and the active voice to describe a spirit possession. Such a muddled description can also be seen in earlier definitions of spirit possession. A definition provided by Erika Bourguignon describes a spirit-possessed person as being “changed in some way through the presence in him or on him of a spirit entity or power, other than his own personality, soul, self or the like” (1976, 8). This locates the person as objectively as possible as the central subject by which a ‘spirit entity or power’ transforms the person.

4. A ‘Singpass’ is a unique password that is entered at a sign-in portal for citizens to gain access to government web sites; it is also an example of how the digital is now embedded in citizens’ interactions with the state, acting as gatekeeper to the passages between ‘sites’ in order to bring about those interactions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alvin Eng Hui Lim

Alvin Eng Hui Lim is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is also Deputy Director and Technology and Online Editor (Mandarin) of the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A|S|I|A, http://a-s-i-a-web.org/) and Editor of Theatre Makers Asia (http://tma-web.org/). CORRESPONDENCE: Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. 7 Arts Link, Block AS5 #05-02, Singapore 117570.