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Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Ruth Tolson about her book titled Necropolitics of the Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025, which takes us into the world, Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries in Singapore to investigate a really interesting question. Can a state make its people forget the dead? That sounds like maybe a theoretical question or an abstract philosophical one. But as we're going to be discussing, that's pretty literally what is in the process of happening or trying to happen. We're going to talk about that in Singapore. So there's all sorts of different kinds of people we're going to be discussing and belief systems and practices that are all kind of coming together together in a really interesting way. Ruth, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
Thank you, Miranda. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I am as well, and I think probably a good place to start is if you could introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book and why the Singaporean World of the Dead is quote, in the midst of a revolution.
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
Well, as you mentioned, my name is Ruth Tolson and I am from the UK originally. That's where I received my training. But now I teach in the United States States at an institution called Maryland Institute College of Art, which is in Baltimore, where I'm also an assistant dean. So I have a wonderful job where I'm teaching anthropology, which is my home discipline, to highly creative, interested and interesting art students. This book, well, it's been a long time in the writing. I began fieldwork in Singapore, although not on the subject of this book, in 2020 2003. So a long, long time ago now. And I was deeply interested by Singapore as a place. You have this tiny island nation, this city state that is relatively recently independent. It became independent in 1965. A place that never really wanted to be a nation. It happened through a series of accidents. A place that, that add to its founding had really no natural resources, not even a natural water supply. A place that isn't bound by a connection to one particular ethnic group. It's highly multi ethnic. And yet you have the place that in such a small span of time has become one of the wealthiest, most educated, most peaceful nations in Southeast Asia, particularly if you compare it to its neighbors, Indonesia and Malaysia. So I've heard Singapore because of the degree to which it is a planned city in every way, not just in its buildings, but in the intimate life described, I think by the sociologist Brenda Yeo as a social science experiment of a state. So it's an interesting place anyway. And when I first got there, then one thing that people were talking about, as an anthropologist, I'm always interested in what do people want to talk to me about. One thing that was a subject of hot debate was the fact that the state has said they were going to destroy every cemetery but one. So I knew the old literature on Chinese burial practices, that for the Chinese population and that the Chinese population, Singaporean Chinese, is the dominant majority population in Singapore. I knew from the literature that to bury the dead was absolutely sacred. When you buried your dead, not only were you respecting them, respecting their memory, but in some ways you were creating your own future, your future health, your future happiness, your future wealth. So immediately I had questions about what happens when burial goes away? How does that work? How do people respond to that? What's it like to go and dig up your parents or your grandparents graves? And then I Also discovered that the extremely rich, extremely. I mean, this is a world of care and respect for the dead and the bereaved. The world of more recent Singaporean death, of everyday death, was also a world that was in the midst of a revolution, was a place where what Funerals looked like 20 years ago, they do not look like at all today. And yet when I asked funeral directors, they said, well, we do these things because this is tradition. This is what it means to be Singaporean Chinese, to be Chinese here. And yet they also said, everything has changed, nothing is the same. So I had questions about how do you live with these changes? What causes them? What's the state's hand in this? I knew already this was a highly interventionalist state, a state that you could describe as paternalistic at best, authoritarian at its very worst. So how does the state get in, into those everyday, ordinary relationships between the living and the dead?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
A very interesting context indeed, and a whole bunch of questions there to investigate. So are there any further questions we want to throw into the pot as we continue our discussion?
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
I mean, I think one of my questions, yes, is about the state. What is the state's power? Another question is, I'd imagined, and I think as anthropologists, sometimes we look for moments like this. I'd imagine that families would be absolutely torn apart by digging out their dad, by not being able to mark funeral ritual properly, properly in quotation marks. That was always up for debate. And I did find some of these families and I write about them in the book, but the vast majority of people in Singapore do not care. Singaporeans are practical above all things. They say, you know, we are a nation with, we're very short of land. Of course, accommodation for the living should replace accommodation for the dead. They're a nation where people will, you know, quite commonly say, oh, no, I don't believe in this stuff anymore. Or they'll say, yes, I used to have ancestral tablets, the tablets that you put on an altar in the home to remember the dead, but they start to look a bit dated. I just put them away in a drawer. So how to write and think about the impact of these policies on people who don't seem impacted at all. And then you have a bigger question, which is that I read, and I do see my book is in conversation with this. I read the extensive literature on necropolitics, on the political manipulation of dead bodies. And what I noticed about this highly important literature is that generally, generally, as a rule, it focuses on a certain kind of debt. So you have the deaths of political leaders. What is the meaning of the preserved body of Mao still there in Tiananmen Square in Beijing? Or you have a focus on the dead who die in context of violence, perhaps of war, perhaps of genocide, perhaps of regime change. So I'm thinking there of the work of somebody who I'm lucky to count as a friend as well as a colleague, Sarah Wagner, who is an anthropologist who has written about the bodies of the missing in both Srebrenica and more recently in the Vietnam War. So you had to focus on a particular kind of dead body. But my sense was that these questions in necropolitics and this way of thinking about how the way states exert their power through the debt also applied to ordinary people living ordinary lives, dying ordinary deaths. So then I wondered, well, why do I think that's the case? Is that true? And how does the state get in? How does the state get into these moments where a family are in a backroom funeral parlor in a small street in an area of Singapore, choosing a casket, choosing the color of drapes, thinking about how many days do we want this ritual to be? What do we want to do with the body after it's cremated? All these questions which seem personal to that family, not political at all. I began to see in my fieldwork that they, too, were political. So those are really the things that drive my work. I should say something too, that when I was writing the book and doing the fieldwork, I really wanted to write something that helped us, helped me help my students think about anthropological methods. So this book is based on long involvement with multiple people in Singapore. And what I wanted was that death never became merely a data point. Sometimes I would read books on death, good books, but it would be easy to forget that somebody actually died, that a family were left bereaved. I think of, for example, that a really key text in the field, one of the first texts on the modern funeral industry, on the Japanese funeral industry. And while it's a brilliant book about how those businesses work, you get a sense that we could be describing any business. And I wanted to really keep in mind that this is not any business. These are real debts, real losses. And so it is not just anthropological data. Sometimes in theorizing, and this, I think, applies to anthropological theorizing generally, we skip over to meaning. So we look at the haunting and appearance of ghosts, and we stay straight away. Or really, this is about a response to capitalism. There's a way to say, you know, that. That, oh, you know, you look at death and you look at Death ritual. And it's really about something else. And I do do that. I say, you know, death is in many ways about politics, about identity. But I wanted to slow that process and really spend some time in both writing and in field work with the corpse, with the family, with the tears. So not to rush to theorizing in the way that I wrote, those are.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Some very important aspects of what you discuss in the book and also how you talk about it as well. So thank you for adding that piece too. I think, therefore, it would make sense to go to talk about some of those families and kind of what that process is like and as you said, not skip over the sort of straight to the cemetery or graveside, but what happens before that? So what happens when someone dies in Singapore? Who is involved? What do they do? What are these sorts of personal decisions that families have to make?
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
So in Singapore. One thing I think is to note about Singapore, for those perhaps who are less familiar with the context, is that even though Singapore is this harmonious, multi ethnic nation, which is something Singaporeans really stress, it is still a nation that in life and in death is divided on lines of ethnicity. So when somebody dies, almost always their first call will be to a funeral director, if they're Singaporean Chinese, and to a funeral director who for the most part deals only with Singaporean Chinese funerals. People in Singaporean Malays who are Muslim. Their funeral rites are organized through religious institutions. And then there are separate funeral directors who address the needs of Singaporeans, Indian population who provide Hindu services mainly. And the first call is quite often to the funeral director, so his family, you know, there's a death, perhaps a death at home, perhaps a death in hospital or in hospice, calls the funeral director, who will begin the bureaucratic process, just like in many other nations, of ensuring that we have a death certificate, ensuring that the right paperwork is filed. And then the family will come into the funeral shop. One place where I did a lot of my thinking is a place, an industrial estate in Singapore, a small street that is lined with funeral palace. And in those little shops where you'll also see wakes are happening, rituals are happening, they'll meet with the funeral director in their office and they'll make decisions about what kind of casket, how many days, what time will we go to the crematorium, how many nights of ritual will we have? Will the ritual be performed by Buddhist or Taoist officiants? And so I began to see that the funeral director's role partly in guiding through this process. So you have a series of Inchoate desires. This sense of, I think this is what my mother would have wanted, but, you know, we didn't discuss it. That's very common in Singapore and Chinese families, not to talk about death, not to plan for it. And the funeral director takes these scattered desires and shapes them into, into quite narrow, available ones, guiding the family through that process. And the funeral director also, in some ways, is a teacher in grief. Somebody who will be beside the family and say to them, both in words and in ritual guidance, now is a time when you can cry, yes, this is appropriate, you know, to so to give them that guidance. The body will then be prepared. I spend a lot of time in mortuaries. I have a background in funeral science, in mortuary science. So a lot of time with those morticians who embalm the body. Because even though now an extremely high percentage, almost all Singaporean Chinese are now cremated, which is a really big shift from the beginning of the nation, the 1960s, when burial was the ideal and dominant practice. So the body is going to be cremated, but first it will be embalmed, because viewing that body, spending time with that body, performing rituals around that body for perhaps one, perhaps three days in that funeral parlor or in where people live, the blocks of flats, HDBs, they're called, where most people live, have an open area in the basement area. You could hold the funeral there. So you either choose a funeral parlor funeral or an HDB funeral. You have those days of ritual around the dead and then you follow that body to the state owned crematorium, you have a final service there where the body is cremated, and then you return the next day, perhaps to pick through the bones which are then placed in a columbarium. So those are the ritual steps. And at each point there are decisions to be made. There are decisions which seem small, but which I argue are these points where people are coming up against what is possible, what is possible to do and desire that is deeply connected to the identities and rules they've lived with. So one thing that I'm not saying that the book is called Necropolitics of the Ordinary, but what I'm not saying is that in the funeral parlor people are saying, I'm going to make these choices because I'm Singaporean Chinese. I mean, that is absurd. You know that the middle of grief is not the point when you are articulating key things about your ethnic, religious, linguistic identity. It does not work like that. But what happens is that everything you've lived with through life, every single state decree that you've tried to meet on what your family should be like, which language you should speak, what you should really desire. All those ways that you've been shaped and pushed against the boundaries in life come up again in the decisions that are made at a funeral. So it becomes highly politicized, but in this very, very subtle way. Not in a where the state is coming in top down and saying, you must do this. The state has surprisingly little to say about funeral rites, what happens in that funeral parlor, but in a way that in the discussion between the death worker, whether the mortician, the funeral director, the Taoist official, the Buddhist monk and the bereaved, you are dealing with a set of possibilities that are shaped by life. One thing that I notice when I think of particular cases is that I think I can tell you of an example. And it's an example of an old man. Mr. Bao, whose daughter had a really quite troubled life. She'd never married. She never finished education, even though she was in her 40s. And her life had been punctuated by mental illness. In the end that the daughter was admitted to hospital and then released. Immediately after her release, she committed suicide. And what happened then was that the old man found himself just unsure as to how to appropriately grieve. On the one hand, he had deeply loved his daughter. He said to me, she's the daughter that I never had to lose. I didn't lose her to marriage. I didn't lose her to moving away. It was just us. But she was also a daughter who, you know, he still subscribed in his mind to those ideas of the ideal family, of ideal achievement that the state emphasizes again and again. And she, his daughter and their family unit had been so far from the ideal. And so he struggled in that moment with the question of, you know, how do I cry for her? He said, you know, I will cry because I've been crying for her all my life. You know, will you write about her, say that she was a good girl? He, you know, he still viewed her in this childlike manner. But the funeral was so difficult because he just did not have an appropriate way to grieve because this, in some ways, a bad death. You know, suicide is always a bad death. A bad death, you know, is also one where children die before parents mirrored what others had judged as a bad life. And these two things came together in. In the moment of tension at the funeral.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's a whole bunch of things all going on together that have to be held in a moment that's already very difficult. Is there anything about what you've just described to us that we need to further understand? If we sort of zoom out and take a historical perspective on what you've just told us about?
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
Yes, I mean, one thing that we're also looking at there is this question of what ritual should I have and what should I do? What are the exact steps? And if you look again back into the older literature on Chinese funeral ritual, and this ritual of this type is very rarely performed in Singapore, perhaps you might find it very occasionally performed in and in the most rural areas of mainland China, there's this very, very particular way of performing ritual where you perform ritual on the basis of your status within a family. So when we think of who should grieve for this woman, by which I mean who should ritually perform mourning, well, in the traditional and again, I put that in parentheses in the traditional way of thinking, it should have been perhaps not even a younger brother because a male is higher status than a female, but perhaps the brother's son. So had there been A nephew. He would have been the person to perform ritual. But there was no brother, there was no nephew. So this traditional ritual, which in some ways the father wanted and held onto, could not be performed by his family. And then you have the fact that the state has been inconsistent on really these matters of traditional ritual and matters of Chinese identity. So straight after independence, then there was a time when the state emphasized, speak English. Forget that you are Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, Singaporean India. We are just Singaporeans, and speaking English and turning to the west will be our way into prosperity and wealth. And this was a time when, for instance, Chinese language universities were shut down. There was this idea that these universities were a hotbed of communism. Any connection to mainland China was viewed as deeply problematic. So it was a real emphasis on speaking English. Turning towards the West. Not much later, a couple of decades later, Lee Kuan Yew, the visionary founder of Singapore, shifted his emphasis and he said, no, no, the problem with Singapore is that we are losing our Asian values. We are becoming just like the West. Whereas it was our Asian ness. And what he meant by Asian ness was defined in a very particular way. That would be our advantage. He said, you look at Japan and Korea and those governments don't have the problems we are having of becoming too Westernized because they've kept their languages, they've kept their histories. So then there was a point where in language policy and in identity policy, there was an emphasis that Singaporean Chinese people should speak standard Chinese, what in Singapore is referred to still as Mandarin, not other dialects, which might remind them of the fact that they come from other places in, in Singapore, in mainland China, but speak Mandarin. So you'd have this united vision of Singaporean Chineseness, very bound, very constrained, but that was it. So you went from being a Singaporean, true Singaporean, speaking English, to being somebody who had betrayed their values to then have to speak a particular Chinese dialect. You have these shifts back and forth. And you see this shifts back and forth not just in language policy, but in family policy. Straight after independence, the family form emphasized and valued was the nuclear family. Until Lee Kuan Yew realized that in a place without a developed welfare state, then we've got to shift that up a little bit. So now the emphasis on the stem family. So you have these policies heavily enforced, which shift back and forth. And you have people like this old man grieving his daughter who just cannot keep up. You know, they cannot be ideal Singaporeans. Very, very few people can. And these mixed up feelings about their identities, about what they should desire about whether the ways they were living were okay. These mixed up feelings, which are part of this wider political context that imbues every part of life and of death, come out in these very, very difficult moments in funerals. There's another example in that chapter, which is of the death of somebody who in many ways had become the ideal Singaporean, was the death of a man who was a professor at the National University, somebody who had gone away to a highly prestigious US institution for his PhD, who had returned, who married and had a wonderful wife, two young daughters, and somebody who seemed in his professional life and his family life and his linguistic abilities to be the ideal Singaporean. And yet when he died, his parents regarded his death as richly impossible because he had done the unfilial thing of dying before them. And his parents wanted a funeral which in many ways had these elements of a more of an older Chinese family structure. So they organized the funeral, but they did not attend. And his young daughters were left to perform funeral rites in front of all these mourners in a language that they did not speak. In this case Hokkien, a dialect of Singaporean Chinese which the state has really tried to crush, but which some Singaporeans hang onto as it connects them to a particular history, a particular group of people, a particular place in mainland China. So these little girls were performing a ritual for a father. They just lost that they did not understand something that to them and to their mother was just deeply painful. That emphasized their grief. The whole funeral, even for this person who seemed to have lived an ideal life, became this point of tension about the impossibility of Singaporeanness.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
These really strict top down ideas of kind of what one should do come through in so many ways in the book. So I'm glad you've discussed here and I'm wondering if that's the answer to some of the. Or I guess my next question, something I was curious about in reading it, which was the fact that nearly all corpses in Singapore are embalmed and then cremated. This really seems to be like quite uniformly the procedure that's followed. Is that because it's one of these top down dictates about what should be done?
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
No, And I think this is the really interesting thing. So you have this highly interventionist state, but an area where it is not highly interventionist is in terms of funeral rites and treatment of the body. So you look at the legislation in Singapore on embalming, on what to do with the courts, and the legislation is extremely slim. And most of the legislation that exists we could put it within the remit of public health. So there's legislation on what do you do with bloodied gowns and gloves that come from an embalming, that kind of thing. And the fact you have to have good ventilation in rooms where you're going to be using embalming fluids. So very, very much public health. There's also some rules about space. So mortuaries and funeral parlors can only be in certain places on the island, so that nobody looks out of the HDB window and sees a funeral parade. So they're kind of within industrial estates, mainly with other dirty businesses. And there's rules about the use of the area underneath the HDB for funerals. So how do you reserve that space? Space, make sure that your tenting doesn't spill out onto the sidewalk. But you have a focus and you look at the law, you look at where the state could directly come in, and there's very little legislation. The state is not legislating that. And then you have the puzzle of embalming. If you look around the world, embalming is something that is going out of fashion. And particularly for cremation. Why would you embalm a body that is being cremated? I'm based in the US now, and you look at the embalming in the US and for a lot of people, embalming is not something they choose anymore. Open casket is not something they choose anymore. There are exceptions in the US for example, African American funeral funerals are often centered around the beautifully embalmed, beautifully dressed body to be viewed. It's a really pivotal moment. You see embalming more in some communities than others. So now in the US and across Europe, although it's shifting more in Catholic communities and in Protestant, but you look across the globe and you see embalming as something that is in decline and embalming not really for processes of preservation. That's interesting too. Generally, if you were going to cremate a body, then why embalm doesn't make sense? There is one practical reason, and that is that many of these small funeral parlors don't have refrigeration. So in Europe or in the US or in some of the really the biggest businesses in Singapore, then between death and viewing, and then finally after cremational burial, then the body would be refrigerated, and that's how you stop decay. But most Singaporean parlors don't have that. So for practicalities, then, embalming keeps the body. It holds it for those couple of days. But my argument is that the embalmed body is something that has replaced deeply meaningful rituals that are no longer possible. So it used to be that all of the ritual was focused through time, over a long, long period on burial and on the grave. So for years you would go back to the grave, you would go at the grave sweeping month to clean the grave, you would go there to speak to your dead. It was really, really central. Maybe too, you would have the ancestral tablet at home that held another part of the soul. So you have this long term relationship with the dead that was set in space. Now everything that needs to be done in that relationship, everything that needs to, all the goodbyes that need to be said, all the sense that needs to be made happens around the preserved body in those one to three days before the body is cremated. I think one pattern you notice actually of ritual generally is that ritual's timing either speeds up or slows down. You look at, for instance, in places where ritual needs used to be met by the harvest and so happened annually. Now there isn't the harvest, there's wage labor. So the speed of ritual has really increased. So you see in Singapore, that ritual that used to be spread in time and space, centered on burial and the grave, is now concentrated in both time and space in that funeral parlor around the corpse. This also brings something up that I think is important to say. I read so much on ritual. I think we're assuming something that maybe is not the case. Two things, really. One is that ritual is inherently conservative, slow to change. I just don't think that that is true, even though you'll read it again and again. The second is that when ritual changes, the things that are kept are the things that matter most. I also don't think that's true. You look at Singaporean funeral ritual and there's a variety of things, both material culture and actions that are kept. But it would be a mistake to look at those things and think, oh, yes, we've held on to where meaning really lies and got rid of what was surplus, unnecessary. It just doesn't work like that.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I would in fact like to ask you about some of those specific practices, material culture especially, to get into that in a bit more detail. You talk in the book about sackcloth, for example, or other bits of sort of paraphernalia. Why are those so important to funeral practices? Do they have significance or what's going on with these particular bits of the practice?
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
I suppose I've always been drawn to material culture. The first book, an edited volume that I did with a Wonderful Classicist Sara's Newby was on the materiality of mourning. What are those objects that connect us to loss and to grief? And I also have a background in museum studies, something that I continue to teach. So I've always been drawn to the. The material. And my thought is that everything matters, not matters, as I mentioned, because it's what we hold onto, but that everything matters because it means something. So one of the examples that I look at in the book is of sackcloth. So you go back to photographs from the 1970s. In the book, I have photographs from the 1950s. And you see that at the funeral, those who were closest to the person who died, so ideally, again, that the children, ideally, the eldest son, would be dressed in these sackcloth gowns. And then, you know, so these gowns made of sackcloth, also a sackcloth hat or hood, also sackcloth sandals, which were very, very thin piece of sackcloth with tar and then with ribbons. And there is some variation, actually, in the style of sackcloth gowns dependent on dialect group. Dialect is important in Singapore dialects such as Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Cantonese, which people spoke and which linked them back to particular areas in the mainland. So these costumes varied by dialect, and their colors and textures varied in terms of which generation you were with the closest generation wearing this sackcloth. And that's described in the older literature as really showing. Using your whole body to show the extent of your grief. So not only is sackcloth, it looks this dull, sack, sad fabric, but it was rough to the touch, so much so that you can read. And my older interlocutors told me about wearing sackcloth. And you wore it for many days after the funeral, during the funeral, rather days when you slept on the floor, sleeping little by the side of the corpse. And the sackcloth would make your wrists and your ankles bleed. So this was the whole body showing grief. And yet now sackcloth has been replaced by a small patch, about two by two patch of sackcloth fabric that people pin on their sleeve. And when I spoke to the funeral director, and I was like, doesn't this really matter? Wasn't it that sackcloth mattered so much? What has changed here? I remember that she said to me, oh, Ruth, these people are grieving. Haven't they suffered enough? And she also said, think of it now like boutonnieres at a wedding, buttonholes at a wedding. It just shows who's related to who. Now, that seemed to me to be a tremendous shift and again, one that Singaporeans would dismiss in terms of, of course, Much, much more practical. These people have suffered enough. Why would we do that? Funeral directors also didn't like sackcloth gowns because, you know, you had to buy them, you had to store them, you then had to get rid of them. They were just like a lot of hassle. But for one thing, it isn't that suffering has disappeared entirely. Still, relatives will walk behind the hearse in bare feet or in stocking feet. Still you have many hours of being on your knees before the casket. So we're not seeing. We're going from a world where ritual is suffering to one where it is not. And we also have these elements that are kept. So we have this element of the sackcloth patch that is kept, and we also have this element of other colors of patches. So there's a distinctive attachment to some patches which is a little. A much smaller patch of red. And what red means. And what red meant is. Red is. We think of red in Chinese society as a celebratory color. You know that the bride's dress is traditionally red. Red is not celebratory. Only red is also a marker of protection. It's a marker of distance. And now and in the past, people who are involved in the grief but don't have to take on the weight of grief, the real work of grief, because they're distanced, because of marriage, wear the little red patch. So, for example, if a father dies, his married daughter, who in her marriage now has little taste to her parents in law and to her husband, would wear sackcloth with red. So you have this signaling again of these ideas about grief and ritualist work. It is taking on the labor of the transformation of the dead. And these colors show that. So this is not about, you know, oh, we used to have this practice that has meaning and it has gone completely. It's something far more complicated and far more interesting. I think you also have. You have a lot of other ritual items. I mean, when I sometimes look at my fieldwork notes, they would be lists of things, just storerooms full of things at the funeral director, where when you go to an exhumation, there's a great big shopping list of things that are required. And one thing that I noticed was when you look at the things. So you look at the things that are kept, you look at the things that are discarded. The things that are kept are sometimes the things that say very little at all. One of the people that I worked with extensively, a young mortician, a person with a lot of personality, a lot of opinions, a brilliant young woman, said, to me. Oh, Ruth, all the funerals now are just Buddhist bland. She was describing this sort of boring ritual, she felt, that didn't carry much meaning. And the ritual items there, she felt, were kept because they didn't really say anything at all. They weren't going to offend anybody. And items that might have held real meaning but might have said something problematic about who you were, what you valued, had vanished. So you had this really complicated, rich ritual world. But the meaning of objects is not straightforward.
- [43:36]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So we should obviously make sure then not to fall into the trap of saying that. Well, because the ritual objects have changed, therefore, that also means beliefs about death and commemoration have also changed. Right. We don't want to draw the line that directly. Is that correct?
- [43:49]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
Yes. I mean, if you think about it anyway, you know, I think about funerals I've worked on and attended. You know, in Europe, in the UK and the us, people put all sorts of things in coffins. Everywhere people put all sorts of things in with their dead. The meaning of these things is not clear. You look back into archeology. You cannot dig up historic graves and presume that the grave goods there provide an easy reader guide to what was valued in life. It doesn't work like that in the past and it doesn't work like that now. It's interesting. These objects matter, but it's complicated, too.
- [44:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's definitely far enough. And as you said, more interesting. Right. When things are complicated, Gatorade is the.
- [44:36]
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- [44:50]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
You've given us a number of examples of ways in which grieving is difficult in this context you've described for us. Are there any other reasons we should understand that grieving is difficult in Singapore that we haven't mentioned already?
- [45:04]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
One of the things that I think, you know, I sometimes wondered is this just the nature of grief, that you just can't do it properly. I think any of us might think of our own grief. You know, it's not as if after a funeral you think, oh, job well done. You know, you can't really say to yourself, oh, you know, I lost my friend and I'm. I'm grieving properly for her. You know, it never feels. Never feels complete. And in Singapore, as I mentioned, there are all these examples of, you know, grieving that is difficult because of difficulties in families. You know, you're grieving and not just a bad death, but what is judged by others to be a bad life. But there's something else too, and this applies especially to Singapore, but it also applies to other societies and it is that Singapore is a society that is going through incredibly rapid transformation. You go back and you've been away for two years. You go back and you find vast parts of the island completely unrecognizable. So you have this whirlwind pace of change. And what that means, and this also is because of language policy, is that you have a really marked generation gap. So you have particularly grandparents and grandchildren who the grandparents grew up in a completely different world, in a city that looked completely different. They grew up speaking languages that now their grandchildren do not speak. And so there is this big gap between generations. And that gap between the generations also makes it difficult to come together in grief. Grief is something that we do together. You think about how sometimes ritual actions. So if you go, say to a Catholic mass, and even if you don't believe you're going through the. The motions of being down on your knees and up, of saying the words, if you go to a Chinese Buddhist film in Singapore, even if you don't believe, you go through the motions of getting down on your knees, touching your forehead to the floor, walking around the casket. There are these physical things that we do together which sort of allow us to grieve together. It's unspoken, it's bodily. And that is really difficult in Singapore because there is not a shared, I'm borrowing William Reddy, the historian's term here. There is not a shared community of sentiment. People don't get what others mean in their bodies and their actions. Because of this whirlwind pace of change and because of this state that has been so interventionist and has shifted so much that older people and younger people live and know completely different worlds.
- [48:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that speed is definitely a factor as well as the sort of top down dictates of it that you've been telling us about. And that speed means that there are some aspects of what the state is mandating that we can investigate. I mean, you have gone and investigated, but we can't even necessarily answer at all yet. I mean, we don't even know. Can you tell us what some of these questions are that are raised by, for example, the state's mandate around exhumations?
- [48:26]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
Yes. So I do one day know what will be the. I was thinking recently, what does it mean to be the last cemetery? So now that there is only one active cemetery in Singapore and people who have to be buried there for religious reasons are buried there. But every year more land is cleared at that cemetery than is used. So that cemetery itself is going less and less and less. I don't know what happens when you are at the last cemetery. I think that that is an interesting question. One of my big questions, and I suppose this is a question for all researchers, for all anthropologists. One of my questions for this book, and it's one of the questions I end on, was when should I stop? Because already since I finished this book, and of course, writing takes time, publication takes time, Singapore has changed again entirely. I was talking to one of my main interlocutors about the images in the book and I sent her an image which I was like, I was going to use that image to show what a modern, what a contemporary funeral setup looks like. And she wrote back and she said, ruth, this is awfully old fashioned. So just in the gap between finishing writing and again, then everything has changed again. Everything has changed again. So that is the questions, when do I stop? What are the long term consequences of this? That I cannot answer. I cannot answer. I always, you know, sometimes you feel with fieldwork that you could go on forever. And particularly when you're working with people who are as interesting and warm and funny as the people that I was lucky enough to speak with then it's difficult to know when to stop.
- [50:25]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I can imagine that's very true in this particular context. I wonder, as a final question on the book, how much do you think these questions around tensions about limited space around the place of the dead, both literally and kind of in societal behaviours? Is this specific to Singapore, which has a pretty particular way that the government gets involved with these types of things? Or is this something that kind of. Lots of places that have this issue of really densely populated urban areas also kind of have some of these tensions too?
- [51:02]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
I think this is sort of a yes and no question. On the one hand, there are, and this is something that I'm writing about in future, actually. On the one hand, there are multiple cities that have run or will soon run out of space for the dead. You look at the island of Manhattan, full, you look at Hong Kong, people are waiting for six years to even have somewhere to put cremated remains. You also know that when we look to Asia, we are seeing nations that will be the first, looking at Japan particularly, that will be the first to reach the demographic tipping point where suddenly you have far more death than you've ever had before. That comes with an aging population, a really declining birth rate. So there are multiple places that just will have to face the question, what do we do with the dead? We are out of room. Then you have the fact that this question of, well, how particular is Singapore? So if you were to go to, say, for example, other Chinese majority places in Southeast Asia, so if you were to go to, say, Penang in Malaysia, if you would go to certain parts of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, you would see rituals that looked pretty much like the rituals in Singapore for two reasons. One, that these, when funeral directors are in conversation or inspired, then these are the people who are talking to each other. So sometimes a very modern but very Chinese funeral in Singapore is described as KL style, Kuala Lumpur style. So there's this, you know, interchange, this communication of this Asian funeral world. And that's one reason these rituals look the same. And you have this shared paths of descent. So these are Chinese people who came to different places in Southeast asia in the 1830s onwards and came from particular places in mainland China, speaking particular languages. So they have those commonalities. So you have all that. But at the same time, you have the fact that the nature of the Singaporean state, the nature, as I mentioned, of these shifting interventions, of this impossibility, means that something that would be performed the same in both, say, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, in Singapore, each ITE is loaded with different meaning because of everything it is made to hold.
- [53:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very, very interesting to think about. And as you said, this is something you're continuing to work on. Is there any upcoming work you want to highlight?
- [53:57]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
So it's very difficult to leave behind working on death because it is so interesting. And I have some plans for future death walks. And. But a little over a year ago, I was fortunate enough to go somewhere which the book, Jonathan Parry's book, came out in 1994, death in Benares. But India was a book that changed my life. As an undergraduate. I read that book and I just thought, wow. So I was fortunate enough to go to Benares, Varanasi, the most sacred Hindu city of the dead, and to talk with Indian colleagues there. That is this remarkable world of death that is also under that India's leader Modi has plans for. So the site that is becoming even more politicized. So whether my future might take me to other places, I don't know. I'm interested in the Baltimore world of death. You have this highly fraught, highly racialized deathscape here. Also this year I'm writing a novel. I'm writing a novel about a funeral home in the northwest of England, sort of about the family there and about the tensions at that time. So it's lovely to. I always enjoy writing. I think of the Clifford Geertz quotation where he says, I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing their writing as an anthropologist. That's me. So I'm going to take some time to write another kind of book. But then I also, in the long term, think I'm drawn to strange little projects. So I found out recently that at very, very high percentage, something like 70% of the paper recycling in the United States happens in a particular town in Malaysia. I just found this mind blowing. How did that happen? What did this mean? And so I began to think about writing a book and there are others working on this topic, but that's really on the social life of rubbish, the social life of trash. And my thought in the beginning was, I want to know when you put that stuff out for recycling, where exactly does it end up and how. Whose people's, whose hands touch it and what is going on? That these relationships were established and it might seem at first you've always worked on death, Ruth, and that you want to work on garbage. No, rubbish. Actually, I think what I want to work on is the things that are essential but hidden, those things in our society that must be there in order for the society to function. Whether that's, you know, collecting the rubbish or dealing with the debt, but that we tend to hide, we don't want to think about. And actually highly enmeshed material, social, spiritual worlds. So maybe you'll see me in future wading through some recycling.
- [57:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that sounds like a number of very different and very interesting projects. So best of luck pursuing all of them.
- [57:15]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
Thank you. It's just been a joy to speak to you today, Miranda. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
- [57:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Likewise. And for any listeners who want to get more into what we've been discussing, the book that we've been talking about is of course titled Necropolitics of the Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore, published by the University of Washington Press in 2025. Ruth, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [57:38]
Dr. Ruth Tolson
It's been so much fun. Thank you, Miranda.
- [57:53]
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Dr. Ruth Tolson
Oh, come on.
- [58:05]
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