Abstract
In this article, I examine how Singaporean Chinese families and funeral professionals work together to ritually manage the meaning and consequences of a death by suicide. While the now dated literature on Chinese mortuary practice emphasizes the formality and rigidity of death rituals, during fieldwork I noted many moments of confusion within ritual, moments of innovation, when relatives broke away from the already uncertain ritual script, and moments of deceit, when relatives conspired with funeral directors to hide the reason for a death. Through an examination of three funerals for suicide victims, including two cases in which the fact that the death was a suicide was hidden, I suggest that a focus on moments of confusion and of innovation paradoxically better captures the dynamism and efficacy of Chinese funeral rituals: here indeterminacy is indispensable to ritual form.
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Notes
Note Brown (2003) for a detailed discussion of the emergence of performance as the dominant analytical trend in recent engagements with ritual.
These are the elements of ritual as defined by Tambiah (1979).
See Brown (2003) for a detailed discussion of these theoretical shifts.
See Santos 2006 for a more detailed account of the influence of functionalism, particularly structural functionalism on the anthropology of China, particularly the anthropology of kinship.
Tong does report disagreements and confusions at funerals between family members (2004, p. 74) but sees these as separate from funeral ritual itself.
Because of the shortage of land in Singapore burial is now near forbidden and cremation highly encouraged. Thus, urns containing ashes are stored in niches in multi-storey columbaria. Private columbaria, which offer more elaborate provisions than state facilities including, for example, air-conditioned niches, are a recent ritual innovation.
Many Chinese Singaporeans no longer practice traditional religion and significant numbers have converted to Christianity. I did not observe any funerals where the family members of a suicide victim were Christian but in other funerals, particularly when some family members were Christian and some Taoist or Buddhist, there were significant tensions surrounding the correct performance of rites. Many Christian relatives, for example, refused to offer incense to the dead or bow before the corpse, much to the distress of other family members.
When men first arrived in Singapore in the 1830s, clan groups, based on shared dialect use or place of origin in Mainland China, were formed to fulfill the tasks of the family, particularly to ensure correct burial and ancestral worship. From the 1890s, women were allowed to migrate and thus nuclear and stem families began to emerge and these families reclaimed ritual roles The clan is still described as a brotherhood, but the relationships are not imagined as being as close as those of the family, thus the clan group was not blamed for the death of Han Tek.
Contact with corpses is avoided as bodies are regarded as polluting. Pollution is described as presenting a physical threat and believed to lower fertility in men. Funeral professionals use red paper to act as a protective barrier when they grip handles of the coffin or lift the corpse. Visitors to a funeral are careful not to touch the body or the casket. Family members do, as I describe, touch the body but this is to show their willingness to take on pollution. Such willingness to put aside their own safety is considered a display of family loyalty which makes clear their suitability to claim inheritance (Watson 1982).
It is in the death worker’s financial interest to make funerals as elaborate and thus as expensive as possible. For a “good” death “selling up” is standard practice. For example, there was significant pressure in the funeral director’s office to sell the most expensive coffins, rather than the thinner coffins designed for cremation. The paper goods maker kept a book of photographs of ritual objects he had made and encouraged conspicuous consumption by noting that a senior politician had recently purchased a particular ritual item for the funeral of his mother. For suicide deaths, however, such behavior was absolutely unacceptable as the corpse was considered too dangerous to risk him or her being angered.
In other contexts, the distinction between good and bad deaths and between an honorable or shameful suicide is highly significant (Note Picone, this volume). However, here all suicides are shameful at their core, either because they directly shame others (the ‘old-fashioned’ suicide) or because there is no longer any real honor in commuting suicide to spare others a burden as such an act suggests that the family is not sufficiently “modern.”
Rice signifies the patriliny and thus this act ensures the family’s future fertility. Note Thompson (1988).
The Chinese Diaspora in Singapore comes mainly from the Mainland’s Southeastern provinces from the 1830s onwards. These early migrants spoke many dialects (most frequently Hokkien, Hakka, and Teochew), and came from regions with differing ritual practices. Hence, although some funeral directors do alter funerals slightly to reflect what are understood to be the ritual particularities of each dialect group, funerals are an amalgam of partially remembered ritual actions. .
Those I worked with often described themselves as Buddhist, but their religious practice combined elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Ancestor worship, and animism, they saw no religious text as central to their religious practice. The labeling of ritual practice as Buddhist is a result of government policy to reform labeling if not ritual action (Kuah-Pearce Khun Eng 2009).
Funeral ritual is necessary to transform a corpse into an ancestor and without correct ritual the danger is that a corpse will become a wandering hungry ghost. In the Singaporean context, while the people I interviewed still believed that ritual was necessary and transformative, not merely symbolic or an act of memorialization, they also believed that ritual efficacy could not be guaranteed in Singapore. This was because of lack of knowledge as to correct ritual form and particularly because government policy (the banning of extended wakes, the destruction of cemeteries, the forbidding of burial, and the fact that offerings could not be burnt in front of niches in columbaria) had made correct following correct ritual extremely difficult. For many of those I worked with creating and maintaining a relationship with ancestors was seen as impossible. See Toulson (2012) for a fuller discussion of these issues.
This attitude is changing. Note the discussion surrounding the shamefulness of Poa Beng Hong’s death.
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Toulson, R.E. Ritual Vicissitudes: The Uncertainties of Singaporean Suicide Rites. Cult Med Psychiatry 36, 372–390 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9254-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9254-2