The visual sociologist

Terence Heng, a visual sociologist on Chinese wedding rituals, spirit mediums, grave exhumation rituals and other exciting stuff. For me the camera is essential to my work. It is how I interact with my subjects. It is how I tell their stories. It is how I understand their relationships. Just as a statistician would say “I need numbers,” a visual sociologist needs images to make the work come alive. I shoot first, theorize later. I look at a particular social phenomenon, say, roadside altars or mediums, and then I say, “That’s really interesting: I wonder what that says about identity?” For the first few months I just take photos, just experience what’s going on. Once I have the photos, they become like field notes. I look at the pictures and ask, "What is the data telling me?" And then I build my theory around that. I was a professional wedding photographer before I started my Phd. I had previously majored in economics and for me research was all about linear regressions etc. So when my professor told me that photography could be considered a research method as well, it was a surprise to me. As I was going to shoot a friend’s wedding over the Christmas holidays, I thought of using that as my data [for a thesis on Chinese wedding rituals in Singapore] and that got me started on my career path. I try to understand what it means to be Chinese. How does it get transported in diasporic movement from China to Singapore? How does it change in a global city? Also, what does it mean in the context of Singapore, where the diasporic community is the state (unlike in Britain or the United States)? There was an active effort to homogenize Singapore’s Chinese community during the 1970s and 1980s, while we were trying to build a nation state. Once-heterogeneous Hokkien, Teochew, and Cantonese-speaking communities were homogenized into a single “Chinese” community. Street signs couldn’t be in dialect, old taxi drivers had to speak Mandarin, there was no dialect on radio or TV. So I was very curious about how identity came to be performed in wedding rituals and other religious rituals and also how it was expressed in the context of the nation state narrative of a single Chinese community. I have “diasporic guilt.” My Mandarin is awful, my dialect is even worse. I can’t speak Teochew, but my late grandmother would forget sometimes and she’d talk to me in dialect. I’d respond with a blank stare until my mother would yell from the kitchen, “He can’t speak Teochew!” and my grandmother would switch to Mandarin. In some ways, that’s partly a price we’ve paid in Singapore for economic progress.

Taiwan and China have a heavy influence on the way rituals are carried out in Singapore now. These rituals aren’t static. By reading and watching media from Taiwan and China, Singaporeans are beginning to import cultural forms from these countries. You can see the active syncretization of Taiwanese rituals in Singaporean weddings and other rituals. For example, you may have seen groups of people dressed up as military generals, carrying weapons and dancing in front of temple altars. That seems to be a Taiwanese, not Singaporean, custom.

Right now I’m studying Tang-kis (spirit mediums) in Taoism. When they go into a trance, they are possessed by a deity from the Taoist pantheon. When they are possessed, they have the powers to bless, to give advice and to give winning lottery numbers. I’m also photographing midnight exhumation rituals at Bukit Brown cemetery. The narrative of land-scarce Singapore is as follows: we don’t have enough land, we have a lot of cemeteries, the cemeteries are not doing anything but holding the dead, so we have to exhume them and place the cremated remains in columbariums. Bukit Brown is a very important part of Singapore because many of our business pioneers are buried there. It’s said to be the largest Chinese cemetery complex outside China—around one hundred thousand graves. The government is building a road through it, and so graves are being exhumed. But you can’t just exhume someone without doing anything. First things first, you have to make some offerings to the earth deity watching over the grave Then the priest will chant to inform the spirit in the grave that they are moving their home to another place. If we don’t do that, the spirit will not know where to go. And then after that comes a ceremonial breaking of the grave, where the descendants have to turn around—they can’t see it. After you’ve exhumed the remains, you put it through a wash of rice wine, giving the individual a symbolic cleansing. Then the remains are cremated and reinterred in a columbarium. Singaporeans need to be aware of their heritage beyond playgrounds and nostalgic neighbourhoods. Heritage is something that is embedded into our everyday lives – the mundane, repetitive motions we go through. We may think that a graveyard is “dirty” or unimportant, a place the young grudgingly visit once a year to pay respects, but these and other spaces form the fabric of our identity. They are single threads of memory that are woven into a tapestry of an immensely rich culture.