July 30, 2018

Can sacred spaces exist outside of religious establishments?

On 6 July 1973, the Sri Mariamman Temple which has existed since 1827 was officially deemed a national monument of Singapore. Along with the many iconic religious establishments on this island, the Sri Mariamman Temple is an example of a designated ‘sacred space’ – where religious practices are state-sanctioned.

In an article, Marking spaces as ‘sacred’: Infusing Singapore’s urban landscape with sacrality, published in International Sociology (2016), Professor Vineeta Sinha (South Asian Studies Programme) traces signs of the sacred that exist outside of these officially –approved spaces. She looks at the ways in which a spiritual worldview stands at odds with rapid urbanization and its resultant secularity, to say that in fact the urban is not an antithesis to the spiritual. In a country where the use of every square inch of land must serve a utilitarian purpose, the different ethnic and religious communities of Singapore find ways to embed the sacred into public spaces such as carparks and hawker centres. This coexistence of secular and spiritual points to the sophistication of religious communities in Singapore because it reveals how they accept the modernizing environment without compromising the space for their gods.

Harbouring that liminal space between boundaries such as legal/illegal and private/public, the altars and shrines in carparks, hawker centres, and commercial areas both resist and co-opt urbanization. They are taken care of by the community, and exist in spite of the notion that public spaces are intended to be secular. These signs of the sacred uncover the possibility of a secular and a spiritual worldview existing simultaneously.

Read the full article here.