DEATH AND RELIGION IN SINGAPORE
In Singapore, our response to death appears to be one combined with spiritual beliefs and modern” options”. Technology now plays a significant role in efforts to increase and enhance the quality of our lives, as evidenced by stage counters, rest monitors, and health screening, despite the fact that we have not yet frozen our heads.
However, some people’s philosophies of death still bear a significant portion of the gloss of medicalization.
We just finished a task documenting Foreign spiritual death customs in Singapore with the assistance of Kit Ying Lye and Janice Kam from the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
We interrogated people figures as well as funeral directors, and we found a clear sense of continuity between religion and culture.
Funeral services frequently have a significant symbolic significance, particularly when they retain the deceased’s liberty and transfer their position from elder to ancestor.
THE ARTS AND COMMUNITY’S CHARACTER IS TO TACKLING DEATH TABOOS
Suicide may be less frightening thanks to community activities. A growing number of funeral directors, artists, and civil society activists in Singapore are among the people who do n’t shy away from discussing death in the public domain.
A decade-long project like” Both Sides, Now” by ArtsWok Collaborative ( together with Drama Box until 2022 ) has engaged seniors all over Singapore to create art and engage them in discussions about “living well” and “leaving well” according to research conducted by anthropologist Jill J. Tan.
Additionally, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students ‘ activities like Dying to Communicate and Living Wants encourage people to speak to their parents about suicide at home.  ,
Similar initiatives are being carried out all over the world, including The Great Grief Festival in the UK, which brings along writers, scholars, and artists to discuss various aspects of death in contemporary society. Here, panellists do not just talk about death in an intangible, natural method, but actually consider death from compassionate, creative beliefs that in some ways, gives life to death.
Suicide is not easy to talk about, think about, or perhaps engage physically with. However, we must develop more creative ways to control death if we do n’t want to live in fear.
The solutions to this are not just in science and technology, but in the things that make us individual- our creativity, compassion and emotions.
At the University of Liverpool, Terence Heng is the University’s Senior Sociology Lecturer. The National Library of Singapore will display his new co-authored book, Death and the Afterlife: Multidisciplinary Perspectives in a Global City ( Routledge 2024 ).