Religion by Daniel P S Goh
Pentecostal Megachurches in Southeast Asia: Negotiating Class, Consumption and the Nation, 2018
In this chapter, I analyse, comparatively, the teachings, practices and growth of Faith Community... more In this chapter, I analyse, comparatively, the teachings, practices and growth of Faith Community Baptist Church (FCBC) and New Creation Church. I selected these two because of their diverging trajectories. I argue that it is their new teachings on the old concept of grace in Protestantism that underpin why they engage differently with the modernity, under conditions of globalization, experienced in Singapore. Whereas FCBC engages the nation-state and seeks sovereignty inspired by Lawrence Khong’s teaching on “extreme grace”, New Creation Church engages the capitalist market and seeks liquidity, drawing on Joseph Prince’s teaching on “pure and unadulterated” grace. Taken together, I argue that the two churches reflect the cultural contradictions faced by Singapore society in state-led globalization. Leaders of the two churches are vying to become the Christian prince who would master the realities of power in Asian capitalism
Regulating Religion: Norms, Modes, and Challenges, 2019
SOJOURN, 2010
In the context of Christianity’s rapid growth in post-colonial Singapore, why has Pentecostalism ... more In the context of Christianity’s rapid growth in post-colonial Singapore, why has Pentecostalism replaced liberal Christianity as the dominant form in the last few decades? Going beyond existing cultural explanations of Pentecostal affinity with Asian folk religions and the modernization thesis, I look at the Church as social movement, as social Christianity engaging, specifically in Singapore, the post-colonial developmental state. Pentecostalism became popular after the state consolidated its rule in the 1980s and suppressed nascent liberal Christian movements. This is because, compared to its fundamentalist evangelical competitor, the Pentecostal development of Asian contextual theologies of spiritual warfare and blessings provided young Singaporeans with practical ideologies to make sense of the spiritual telos of the post-colonial nation and engage the developmental ethos of the state. Singaporean Pentecostalists are at the crossroads today, faced with a decision between the social justice emphasis of liberal Christianity and fundamentalist moral activism.
Asian Journal of Social Science, 1999
In the past two decades, the dramatic growth of Protestant Christianity in Singapore, fuelled by ... more In the past two decades, the dramatic growth of Protestant Christianity in Singapore, fuelled by the worldwide Christian Charismatic Renewal, has attracted sociological attention. This paper discusses the historical development of Singaporean modernity and the concomitant rise of the existential self. The argument is that increasing distantiation of individuals from rationalizing societal and cultural institutions in modernity leads to increasing self-consciousness and simultaneously, the transcendentalization of the individual's phenomenological consciousness. This condition threatens to reveal the constructed nature of erstwhile-reified social objects and categories, allowing individuals to realize freedom while posing anguish. The latter is postulated as driving individuals to resolve their existential selves using transcendent or transient cultural resources. Based on ethnographic data from six months of fieldwork, this paper argues that Protestant Charismatic fundamentalism...
Asian Journal of Social Science, 2009
Asian Journal of Social Science, 2009
The past fifty years have seen continuing anthropological interest in the changes in religious be... more The past fifty years have seen continuing anthropological interest in the changes in religious beliefs and practices among the Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore under conditions of rapid modernisation. Anthropologists have used the syncretic model to explain these changes, arguing that practitioners of Chinese "folk" religion have adapted to urbanisation, capitalist growth, nation-state formation, and literacy to preserve their spiritualist worldview, but the religion has also experienced "rationalisation" in response to the challenge of modernity. This article proposes an alternative approach that questions the dichotomous imagination of spiritualist Chinese religion and rationalist modernity assumed by the syncretic model. Using ethnographic, archival and secondary materials, I discuss two processes of change — the transfiguration of forms brought about by mediation in new cultural flows, and the hybridisation of meanings brought about by contact between differ...
Proselytizing and the Limits of Religious Pluralism in Contemporary Asia, 2013
Recent scholarship on secularism has focused on the mutual constitution of the secular and the re... more Recent scholarship on secularism has focused on the mutual constitution of the secular and the religious. “Secularization” is not the inexorable march of rationality as religion fades into pockets of enchantment, but the historical outcome of modernizing projects defning the secular as public principle vis-à-vis religion as private reason and instituting this division in differentiated public spheres and life-world domains (Asad 2003; Salvatore 2007; Taylor 2007). Much of the leading work on secularization to date has focused on developments within the context of the modernizing West. Consideration of Asian cases will help illuminate the imbrications of secularization with religious and ethnic pluralism in the making of postcolonial and capitalist societies, therefore elaborating the complexities of secularism beyond its civilizational focus on the historical legacies of Christendom. It is to this end that I analyze the contemporary struggle of evangelical Christians with pluralist secularism in Singapore in this chapter.
Handbook of Religion and the Asian City, 2015
International Sociology, 2016
The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studie... more The relationship between the sacred and the urban remains understudied. This special issue studies this relationship by focusing on urban religious aspirations in diverse globalizing Asian cities. The approach builds on the sacred geographies and sociology of secularization literatures. It is argued that religious practitioners respond to urbanization by inventing new conceptions of the urban to make sense of secularizing spaces. In turn, the secularizing spaces free up religious practitioners from the constraints of their traditions to innovate new practices to sacralize the urban spaces, in which the new conceptions of the urban play a crucial role. The direction and content of the innovations are driven by the aspirations of the religious practitioners with regard to the city and this provokes sacred politics challenging the state and capitalist market and aspirational contests to claim and control urban spaces vis-a-vis religious competitors, in which practitioners make use of state-market processes to do so.
International Sociology, 2016
This article seeks to explain the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Hong Kong and Singa... more This article seeks to explain the rapid growth of evangelical Christianity in Hong Kong and Singapore over the last few decades in the adaptation of Christianity to the secular urbanization experienced in the two cities. The author argues that Christian responses involve both the innovation of Christian territorial practices to meaningfully navigate and engage the planned city as well as community practices seeking to produce place-bound Christian community life. The author shows that the innovation was driven by the postcolonial aspirations of Christians reacting to state-led urbanization to resolve decolonization crises in the 1970s and 1980s. Local churches with differing theological beliefs experimented with various hybrid territorial-community spatial practices adapted to the respective urban contexts. When urban redevelopment was intensified by the respective states to transform Hong Kong and Singapore into global cities, the Christians contributed and participated in the reurbanization and globalization of the two cities.
Urbanisms by Daniel P S Goh
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013
Mobilities, 2010
Celebrated as a leading luxury hotel in the world, the Raffles Hotel stands as a monument to Sing... more Celebrated as a leading luxury hotel in the world, the Raffles Hotel stands as a monument to Singapore’s status as a global city of commerce. The century-old Hotel also represents successful postcolonial heritage conservation. Drawing from archival and published sources, I analyze the Hotel as a changing cultural form in the historical transformation of Singapore by the circuits of global capital, from imperial capitalism, through the postcolonial development of national capitalism, to the current phase of neoliberal globalization. Together with developments in the surrounding urban heart of Singapore, Raffles Hotel is a space of cultural disjuncture transfiguring through the three ages of capital. I argue that the Hotel took the dominant form of white male domesticity in British Singapore, nostalgic authenticity in the postcolonial period and cosmopolitan hybridity in the current global phase. In each phase, the form elided the racial, class, gender and sexual contradictions of transnational capital and produced social relations of relative mobility. It shows that the global city is not made by transnational capital but by the developmental state harnessing economic flows for global city-making with the ensuing spatial-cultural politics in tow.
TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2014
The three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Str... more The three cities of Malacca, Penang and Singapore share a century-long history as the British Straits Settlements, with similar multicultural traditions and urban morphology of dense shophouse districts. In the post-colonial period, these have been the basis for the production of heritage for urban renewal, civic identity formation, and international tourism. Yet, each city has approached the production of its history as heritage in different ways. The differences have been specified in terms of whether heritage production has been led by the state, market or civil society, and criticised as ideology or ambivalently interpreted as formative of identity in the face of globalisation. As colonial port-cities integrating into or becoming a new nation-state, I argue that the production of heritage in the three cities is driven by the politics of post-colonial identity interacting with the political economy of urban redevelopment. I argue that the production of heritage is one facet in the production of space and an increasingly important one in globalising Asian urbanisms. We can specify the differences in production of heritage space in the three cities in terms of the orientation of imagination and the ends of production. I show that the three city-states have been interpreting its history for heritage production in either Asian or cosmopolitan imaginations and configuring its heritage production for either political identity formation or economic product development, or a mix of both. The differences, I demonstrate, are caused by the differing politics of post-colonial identity and economic development involving the three cities.
Ethnography, 2015
This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities – Mumbai, Seoul, Sin... more This special issue seeks to highlight the ways in which diverse Asian cities – Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore – exceed current urban theorization. Modest, but nonetheless more than-local re-theorization, can proceed from such empirical excess, which itself can only be derived from sustained ethnographic examination of cities in all their diversity. Relatedly, we cast Asia as a frontier for ethnographic strategizing – where, rather than merely importing and applying methodological tools from elsewhere, new ways of ‘doing’ cities emerge from reflexive engagement with emergent urban forms and ways of life. Considering diverse urban contexts in Asia, we foreground the aspirational dynamics of cities and ethnographic approaches to studying them. This has produced findings that have pushed the theoretical understanding of aspirations beyond Arjun Appadurai’s initial formulations in three ways. First, breaking from the dichotomy of pastness and cultural futures, the authors have found pastness making up important ingredients for aspirations. Second, the urban middle classes could very well express subaltern aspirations for and with subaltern groups, and it would be a mistake for us to ignore the sense and sensibility of the middle classes on account of their purported lack of subalternity. Third, the capacity to aspire is primarily achieved in the embodied production of space and limited by the same.
URBAN ASIAS Essays on Futurity Past and Present, 2019
Agency has been the recurrent subtext in this book, weaving a rich thread through the diverse ref... more Agency has been the recurrent subtext in this book, weaving a rich thread through the diverse reflections on the warping of urban space-time in Asia. A conclusion cannot possibly do justice to the depth and breadth of the essays. In any case, we reject the idea of a unitary urban Asia or an identifiable Asian urbanism. But neither do we want to offer many urban Asias or Asian urbanisms, like so many colorful trajectories making for a splendid Orient. Thus, my purpose here is less to draw conclusions about existing and coming realities and more to plot the lines of consciousness that are emerging from the cities and urbanities discussed in the essays.
Race and Multiculturalism by Daniel P S Goh
Management of Success: Singapore Revisited, 2010
Singapore Perspectives, 2010
Multiculturalism in the British Commonwealth Book Subtitle: Comparative Perspectives on Theory and Practice, 2019
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Religion by Daniel P S Goh
Urbanisms by Daniel P S Goh
Race and Multiculturalism by Daniel P S Goh