State regulations and divine oppositions: An ethnography of the nine emperor gods festival in Singapore

Abstract

Studies of popular Chinese religions in Singapore have mostly focused on the relationship between Chinese religious practitioners and state regulations delimiting land for religious uses. Local scholars have also studied the state’s active construction of a domain within which local religions can operate, often rationalized as a means of maintaining harmonious relations between ethnic and religious groups. However, little attention has been paid to the symbolic spatial negotiations that exist between the gods and the Singaporean state. Through an ethnographic study of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival as organized by the Choa Chu Kang Dou Mu Gong, I analyze the tensions between the impositions of state authority upon the temple’s annual festival and the divine authority of the Nine Emperor Gods, as reproduced in the festival’s rituals and in the bodies of their spirit mediums. Borrowing Marshall Sahlins’ idea of inclusive “cosmic polities,” I argue that the Nine Emperor Gods, devotees, and state actors do not exist in separate “secular” and “divine” dimensions but rather, co-participate in the same complex society. By serving as a fertile ground upon which the divine bureaucracy of the Nine Emperor Gods is reproduced, the festival’s articulations of divine sovereignty provide a potent challenge to state-imposed imaginations of space and expand devotees’ understandings of agency from state-defined and into the larger cosmological order.