Marking spaces as ‘sacred’: Infusing Singapore’s urban landscape with sacrality

Abstract

This article looks beyond ‘places of worship’ as sacred spaces in an effort to discover/uncover other urban sites/spaces/locations where sacred indicators have been inserted and embedded. The author argues that tracking ‘signs of the sacred’ is a productive and inclusive mapping of urban religiosity, capturing ostensibly everyday secular spaces which are marked by sacrality and efficacy. These urban sites are ethnographically messy, colourful and energetic spaces, where city dwellers create urban worlds to express, experience and enact religiosity. They defy neat categorization and challenge such binaries as ‘private’/‘public’ and ‘legal’/‘illegal’ and ‘sacred’/‘profane’, to name just a few dichotomies. Instead, these sites ‘made sacred’ are ‘out of place’ and the disarray one encounters here is reminiscent of Mary Douglas’s notion of dirt as ‘matter out of place’. Their liminality signals their ambivalence and connotes them as dangerous and as spiritually charged.