part0016

In the patrimonial state, the typical ramifications of administration and judiciary created a realm of unshakable sacred tradition alongside a realm of prerogative and favouritism. Especially sensitive to these political factors, industrial capitalism was impeded by them in its development. Rational and calculable administration and law enforcement, necessary for industrial development, did not exist… Rational entrepreneurial capitalism, which in the Occident found its specific locus in industry, has been handicapped not only by the lack of a formally guaranteed law, a rational administration, and judiciary, and by the ramifications of a system of prebends, but also, basically, by the lack of a particular mentality. Above all it has been handicapped by the attitude rooted in the Chinese ‘ethos’ and peculiar to a stratum of officials and aspirants to office .

There is… not the least operation, the least industrial or financial mechanism - that does not reveal the insanity of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality: not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of this pathological state, this insanity, ‘the machine works too, believe me’. The capitalist machine does not run the risk of becoming mad, it is mad from one end to the other and from the beginning, and this is the source of its rationality .

I woke up about six o’clock in the morning and crawled out from where I had been sleeping, at the back of and under one of the altars we had set up in a large ‘tentage’ for the three-day shrine celebrations. Three of the members, who had also been staying at the site overnight, were still up and playing cards. After a shower, we all went for breakfast. We had been working hard for some time preparing for this yearly celebration [the birthday of the god] and I felt the excitement of the event. We carried the idols carefully from the shrine through the market-place to the ‘tentage’. One woman prayed [bai] to the idol that I was carrying. Once the celebrations started, particularly on the Saturday, we were very busy. I was put in charge of the photography. On the first day Yu Huang Dadi, the main god, was invited down to the celebration, helped by the prayers of Taoist priests. In the evening, Wei went into trance, cut his tongue and used the blood to mark talismans for the next year. On the other days, other gods of surrounding shrines were invited to attend the celebrations.

An opera group was present, mainly to entertain the deities but also to entertain the people who participated in the celebrations. On Saturday, the dragon troupe arrived as well as the music troupe of drummers and gong players. Five tang-kis were present, Wei and another tang-ki from the Redhill shrine, Anna and two tang-kis from local shrines. Once the five tang-kis started going into trance, the scene became alive as each of the tang-kis darted up from their chairs when possessed by their own deity.

We then had the procession [H. iu-keng] around the neighbourhood with the flag bearer, the dragon and music troupe, the idol of the main deity of the shrine strapped to a sedan chair and all of the shrine members following. We stopped at various points along the way, known to be where angzang [dirty things-evil spirits] could congregate, and the tang-ki performed rituals to make the place safe.

We also met up with people from several other shrines and swapped joss sticks with them. Once we arrived back, the tang-ki of the shrine commenced hitting his back with a large ball with small nails in it. Incense paper [symbolic of money] was then burnt. All this happened in the close vicinity of the traditional marketplace. While ‘lucky numbers’ were not given out to buy lottery tickets at this celebration, I attended other celebrations where they were.

On a previous visit to Singapore, I had visited the Singapore stock exchange to become acquainted with the life of a person who had spent a considerable part of his life working there. From memory, there were lights and numbers flashing from the front of the building and people crowding around the front of the building calling out numbers and raising their hands like in a game of housie. Thousands, if not millions, of dollars, could be made or lost in minutes. The atmosphere was tense and fused with an anxious excitement.

I also spent a day on a boat that served as a casino. The boat was moored outside of Singapore waters. All the rooms of the boat were crowded and had a festival atmosphere [renao] about them; fruit machines were to be found in two rooms and card and dice games in another two large rooms. Here, again, people won thousands but also lost thousands of dollars. While not having much money to gamble, I managed to lose one hundred dollars on the fruit machines. Occasionally, I sat on the outside of the ship reading a book, and then I used to wander into the casino rooms with the book under my arm until some people saw it and started shouting at me. I had not realized it was unlucky to have a book in the casino rooms as the sound of the word for book, ‘shu’, resembles the sound of the word, ‘shu’, meaning to lose.

Singapore was founded in 1815 as an entrepôt market town caught up in a global capitalist economy. From the beginning of its foundation, the country was concerned with wealth production and a dominant discourse became that of economics. Opium and arms were important items of trade in Singapore’s early history. The mainstay of the economy up to the 1950s was the hundreds of traditional Chinese businesses run by families (Trocki 2006: 162). Trocki points to the importance of these families in regards to status and patronage for Chinese society at that time (2006: 162).

After World War II, there was much unemployment, low wages, overcrowding and poverty. Political unrest developed and there was the growth of a large left-wing movement. The People’s Action Party [PAP] aligned itself with the Chinese left but after winning the elections in 1959 started to draw away from and eventually suppressed its left wing element. The PAP’s economic policy was to move the emphasis of the economy away from entrepôt trade and import substitution to industrialization, manufacturing and export-oriented growth. It also moved away from supporting local capital for Chinese business entrepreneurs to being dependent on international capital, particularly of large multi-national companies in the United States and Japan (Bello and Rosenfeld 1990: 293). Visscher points out that this policy was a victory of formalized modernity over some organic tradition. The former elite, consisting of Chinese-speaking capitalists, lost their power, and new political elite appeared, all in the name of rationality, efficiency and the abstract state (2002: 244).

Foreign companies gained certain privileges such as infrastructure subsidies and tax incentives over local businesses for establishing themselves in Singapore, (Bello and Rosenfeld 1990: 8, 291). By 1985, foreign-owned companies produced 54.5% of the output of manufacturing and employed 41% of the workforce compared to locally owned companies that produced 20.3% of the output and employed 33.5% of the workforce. In 1962, locally owned companies had produced 45% of the output and employed over 66% of the workforce (Trocki 2006: 167). A trained, disciplined workforce was created and any labour dissent muzzled thus giving multi-national companies access to a low cost disciplined labour force.

From 1979, there was a change of emphasis in the Government’s policies of supporting labour-intensive industries to supporting the higher value-added production of high-tech industries (Rodan 1989: 142-188). After a downturn in the economy in 1985, there was again another change of direction towards developing the service sector of banking and finance, transport, communications, tourism and supporting small to medium sized enterprises, largely owned by local Chinese people (Rodan 1989: 189-194; Trocki 2006: 175-176). Rodan, appropriately, refers to the plans to develop Singapore as a financial centre as a scheme to make Singapore a ‘financial supermarket’ (1989: 191).

Since achieving independence in 1965, Singapore has experienced rapid economic growth. In 1998, it was rated by the World Bank as having the highest purchasing power [adjusted] per capita income in the world (Chia 2001: 239). From the 1960s to 1999, there was an average growth rate in the economy of 8.6%. This rate was three times as fast as the growth rate in the United States (Krugman 1994: 7). The growth rate fell to 5.4% in 1999 after the regional financial crisis but reached 9.9% in 2000. It fell again after 2001 to 1.15%. By 2004, it was 8.3% and in 2006 was 7.7%. Singapore has had low unemployment rates since 1977 when full employment was reached. In 2001, unemployment was 4% and in 2006 it was 2.7%.

Singapore can be considered as one of the capitalism’s success stories. i However, it has been economists and political scientists that have carried out most of the work on capitalism, globalization and economic development in the South East Asian region. Berger, though, points to the need for anthropology and sociology to be involved in this work, as, according to him, the dominant discourse on development, derived from economics and political science, stresses the rationality and objectivity of its methodology and analysis and leaves out of account notions of culture and of history in understanding these processes (2004: 3, 12). The anthropologist Hefner says, ‘…culture and social relations are intrinsic to politics and the economy, not free-standing social spheres’ (1998b: 5). He adds to these subjects that of cultural psychology (1998b: 3). Hefner takes the concept of ‘embeddedness’ from the sociologist Granovetter to develop the view that the market is embedded in culture and social relations. ii Ong (1999) is also of the opinion that a subject such as anthropology, through its focus on agents and cultural practice, improves investigations into such processes as globalization [trans-nationality] and capitalist systems of economics. Miller (1997), in his ethnography of capitalism in Trinidad, concentrates on the economic factor of consumption and shows the usefulness of an anthropological approach to capitalism.

The legal scholar, Schroeder (2004), takes a Lacanian/Hegelian approach to developing an ‘erotics of the market’ in which the concepts of desire and jouissance [enjoyment] are key terms. We could add here Bataille’s (1989; 1991) three volumes, THE ACCURSED SHARE , as a work that emphasizes the erotic nature of the market.

It is very easy living in or visiting Singapore to come to believe in the rationality and efficiency of the Singaporean way of life. It is easy, also, to come to a complete antiestablishment view of Singapore, seeing it as just a totalitarian, authoritarian country that is strictly controlled, as if ‘desire’ and enjoyment did not exist. However, I believe my association with tang-ki shrines has enabled me to see a more complex way of life, one where a local culture or cultures are present, each of which has their own peculiar form of jouissance or enjoyment, related in various complex ways to both capitalism and globalization, both influencing it and being influenced by it.

The Comaroffs (2001b), in their chapter on millennial capitalism, undermine the notion of the rationality of the capitalist system. They point to contradictions within the system and to a millennial aspect of capitalism that promises salvation to its subjects [subjects of consumption], which increasingly includes the whole world. They speak of the outcome of the hegemony of capitalism being:

…its impulse to displace political sovereignty with the sovereignty of ‘the market’ as if the latter had a mind and a morality of its own; to reorder the relationship of production to consumption; to reconstruct the essence of labour, identity, and subjectivity; to disarticulate the nation from the state; to reduce difference to sameness by recourse to the language of legality; to elevate to first causes ‘value-free’ technological necessity and the ostensibly neutral demands of economy; to treat government as immanently undesirable, except insofar as it deregulates or protects ‘market forces’; to fetishize ‘the law’ as a universal standard in terms of which incommensurable sorts of value – of relationship, rights, and claims – may be mediated; to encourage the rapid movement of persons and goods, and sites of fabrication, thus calling into question existing forms of community; to equate freedom with choice, especially to consume, to fashion the self, to conjure with identities; to give free reign to the ‘force of hyperrationalization; to parse human beings into free-floating labor units, commodities, clients, stakeholders, strangers, their subjectivity distilled into ever more objectified ensembles of interests, entitlements, appetites, desires, purchasing ‘power’ .

The Comaroffs also speak of ‘occult economies’ that have grown up alongside millennial capitalism and that appeal to magical means of creating wealth, whether legal or illegal (2001b: 21-27). They talk about the rise of ritual killing, witchcraft and zombie conjuring in South Africa (2001b: 20).

In 1993, in Malaysia, a Malay bomoh [spirit medium], her husband and a helper were arrested for the killing of a Pahang state Member of Parliament. He had been persuaded to lie upon the floor with his eyes closed waiting for money to fall down on him. Instead, it was an axe that came down on him. His money was taken and his body dismembered. All three people involved were put to death by hanging in 2001 (BBC News World 2001).

Weller describes the rise in the 1980s of occult practices, without the extremes already mentioned, amongst spirit mediums in Taiwan. He sees the rise of this phenomenon paralleling the rise of a type of a gambling economy which the Comaroffs call ‘casino capitalism’ – where values such as hard work and savings no longer account for profits (2001: 220-223). He calls to our attention dubious spirit medium cults where spirits such as an executed bank robber are worshipped and the distribution of potentially winning lottery numbers takes place (2001: 222). He describes spirit medium shrines as, ‘profit-making petty capitalist enterprises’ and as ‘… a celebration of the individualism and competition of the market’ (1998: 93).

However, while some of what the Comaroffs associate with capitalism can be found in Singaporean society, they can be considered to be too universal in their views, seeing both capitalism and globalization as unitary phenomena. For example, Singapore’s valuing of the free market has not done away with the power of the State as the Comaroffs suggest happens in capitalist economies. According to Trocki, the State is just as powerful, if not more powerful than before (2006: 180).

Milton Friedman thought Singapore’s success as an economy was due to free market policies and economic liberalism (Lim 1983: 754). In 2005, Singapore was second to top in the list of the world’s ‘most free’ markets (The Straits Times: January 5th, 2005). However, John Kenneth Galbraith thought Singapore’s success was due to State interventionist policies (Lim 1983: 754). Nevertheless, while Singapore may have a free market in some areas, the intervention of the State in the economy is extremely high. For example, the State operates various companies called government-linked companies, the major ones under the control of the Lee family (Trocki 2006: 174, 180).

The capitalism of Singapore can be seen to be not so much neo-liberal capitalism but state or command capitalism or even a Chinese type of capitalism as outlined in Redding’s (1990) book THE SPIRIT OF CHINESE CAPITALISM . Sometimes this capitalism has been associated with Confucianism (Kahn: 1979). While the free market as well as the opposite, state intervention, have been seen as accounting for Singapore’s economic success, culture and race have also been cited as factors that can also help account for this success. Kahn (1979), Redding (1990), Weidenbaum and Hughes (1996), Haley, Tan, and Haley (1998) all favour the view that there is something in Chinese culture that accounts for Chinese achievement in the economic arena.

Hodder (1996) argues against this ‘culturalist’ viewpoint. He points to circumstances and events such as European colonialism, communism and Japan’s economic growth as accounting for the economic success of the Chinese. Curiously, given his thesis, he also points out the desire of the Chinese to achieve material success as a factor (1996: 22), although he does not explain why this desire is there amongst the Chinese or how it came about in the first place.

Still, I tend to agree with Hefner (1998b), Li (1998), Crawford (2000) and Yeung (2004), amongst others, that capitalism, as played out in a particular cultural contex, creates its own form, one being a Chinese form of capitalism. Yeung (2004) uses the term ‘hybrid capitalism’ as the form Chinese capitalism takes. It involves for him the coming together and interaction of various factors such as Anglo-American capitalism, globalization, local context and cultural aspects. He attempts with this label to get away from an essentialist understanding of the nature of Chinese capitalism. Yao (2002) also criticizes the essentialism inherent in the idea of a Chinese capitalism based on a Confucian ethic. In his ethnography of a small business community in a town in Sarawak, he, occasionally drawing on psychoanalytic ideas, shows that Chinese capitalism is more complex than any one formulation can convey. He points out that Chinese capitalism is formed by several factors acting together. These include the contextual environment of any particular example of capitalism, myth and ideology, ‘Orientalism’ and the creation of a Chinese ‘other’ by the West, an answer to an anxiety stemming from an immigrant status as well as historical traditions.

The Chinese form of capitalism is often associated with the patriarchal family and with guanxi associations (Hefner 1998b; Li 1998; Crawford 2000). Guanxi relationships are networking relationships, sometimes referred to as ‘bamboo networks’, built on particularistic, relatively non-hierarchical relationships of trust and reciprocity, rather than on legal authority, duty and obedience (Hamilton 1998: 57-60; Hefner 1998b: 1516; Smart 1993). For Yao:

Guanxi exchange is a mobile and contradictory mode of transaction in which [Chinese] actors attempt to recruit the pleasures of sociality from an exchange of pragmatic significance, just as they, in reverse, insist on extracting material gains from an ethical framework of a social relationship .

Fei (1992) considers guanxi relationships to be the basic ordering principle of Chinese society. These aspects of a Chinese form of capitalism go against Weber’s characterization of capitalism as associated with the demise of personal relationships. Li (1998) and Yeung’s (2003) work on capitalism in Singapore suggests these aspects of Chinese capitalism are still important for Singaporean society, despite high State involvement in the economy of Singapore.

Interestingly in the light of Weber’s work on capitalism, Debernardi states that it is in the syncretistic blend of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism as it informs popular religion that we find a base for the capitalist spirit amongst the Chinese, which Weber did not find in any of the three Chinese traditions by themselves (2006: 54). The Chinese immigrants to Singapore, as Elliott points out, were, overall, enterprising poorer people and not the scholarly and so were not weighed down by Confucian traditions that militated against extreme capitalist ideas and practices. iii Status was seen in terms of wealth rather than education and this is the situation today, according to DeBernardi, of the Chinese community in Malaysia and, according to Oxfeld, of Chinese people in India. I would say the same of the Chinese in Singapore. Both Oxfeld and DeBernardi also note that status is not dependent on wealth alone but is also dependent on the wealthy channelling some of the wealth back into supporting their own families for the sake of their lives both in this world and the next.

Status also involves contributing to social functions and community facilities (Oxfeld 1993: 98, 106; DeBernardi 2006: 57-60, 65-67), and one could add temples and shrines. The Ang Mio Kio shrine had the support of two wealthy entrepreneurs both of whom had been helped by consulting with Anna. Wealth and money, therefore, are not signifiers of greed or badness [the love of money being the root of all evil] as in some ascetic groups within Christianity, Buddhism and also of Communism but a signifier of one’s worth [similar to a Calvinistic ethic] and good fortune, from where one can go on and gain even more merit by helping others. Such a value is dissimilar to the Calvinistic one, though, in that there is no moral restriction on enjoying some of the profits in this world and also transmitting them to people in the other world.

One sees in tang-ki spirit medium worship an example of one local culture [although this is not unified and there may be differences between shrines] that has a relationship to the wider cultural arena, including the capitalist system that underpins the economic system of Singapore. There are four main positions that can be taken up in looking at this relationship:

In the Ang Mio Kio shrine, one man engaged me in a joking relationship about money. The story revolved around our robbing a bank. He would greet me and then say something like, ‘Where were you today? I thought we were meant to be down at the bank at 8.00 A.M.’ I replied, ‘Oh, sorry. I was too tired, I had to sleep in. Can we do it the day after next as tomorrow I have to go swimming?’ On another occasion, I replied that I was down at the bank but I got the wrong bank. I found the joke amusing and interesting in thinking of two men in their fifties engaging in this form of banter about robbing banks.

I had a joking relationship over money with another person in the shrine. In this joking scenario, I would buy both a car and a small business that he would manage while I was overseas. Often when seeing me, he would return to this joke and ask me what I thought. I would say something like, ‘Yes let’s do it’ but then would say, ‘Oh, but first I should tell my wife as she makes all the decisions in our family about money’, after which we would both laugh. This joke started to be ongoing and, later, not so humorous to me.

I believe, though, that these joking conversations were attempts by the participants to try to engage me in conversation in the only way they could. Both these men were involved in small businesses, one in a small shop and the other in catering. The man involved in catering was unemployed when I first met him, but later on in the year he found work again through, he said, the help of going to see Anna and through her consulting with Guanyin. The other man had to give up his shop and went on to decorating, working for someone else, a much more difficult job.

Anna’s husband, on one occasion, overheard the second man talking to me about the proposed [imaginary] business scheme and told him off, thinking I had taken him seriously. However, on another occasion, Anna’s husband, himself, asked me whether I was interested in buying a franchise for a product that seemed to exercise a person without the person actually having to exercise [perhaps a sign of the inroads of postmodernism in Singapore]. He thought it could augment my psychoanalytical practice back in the UK. Another person at the shrine asked if I was interested in Amway catalogue products. Tony had tried to interest me in the company selling American health products and for me to join up and become a manager.

At first, I was slightly offended by these invitations to involve me in some type of commercial concern, thinking that the people involved had overstepped the limits of friendship I thought I had established. The companies referred to seem to be networking or pyramid selling companies, get rich quick schemes, at least for those at the top. These companies can be seen to be involved in ‘making something out of nothing’, which, to a certain extent, mimics the process of capitalism. On further consideration, I started to understand both the joking relationships and the wish to involve me in business relationships as a way of establishing a guanxi relationship, where we could both get something out of the venture whether on an imaginary level or not.

Some of the people at the shrines had small businesses in which other people from the shrines also sometimes worked, even if part-time. In speaking about the Malays of Negeri Sembilan in contrast to the Chinese, Peletz says of them that ‘…kinship and business do not mix’, similar to Li (1998) speaking about the contrast of Chinese and Malays in Singapore [to the latter I could add European societies], and he stresses that for the Chinese they do mix (Peletz 1998: 182-183). I would add friendships and guanxi relations to kinship relations and say that for the Chinese these do mix with business concerns. Peletz points out another difference between Chinese and Malays - the Chinese, in contrast to the Malays have a strong concern in providing their children with a ‘nest-egg’ so they can improve their lot in life (1998: 182-183).

Christopher’s (a person who consulted Anna) father had reached the peak of his career as a successful businessperson and high-level manager of a large Japanese based company. Instead of retiring from the company as he had to under the laws of the country he was then in, he carried on as manager in the same country in its office in Singapore. His plan is to spend the next five years working to save up enough money to buy houses for his four children, who live in different parts of the world. A considerable sum of money had already been spent sending his children to overseas universities. He had also managed to acquire a good sales position for Christopher’s cousin, who no longer felt he could work in the science industry. This initiative helped to overcome a long relationship of rivalry with his brother-in-law and to obtain prestige within the family network. Christopher’s father told his nephew how well he would get on in this position as a sales person depended on how well he used the network of friends and acquaintances he had built up while at university. Therefore, even though these people are working in a large multi-national business, family and guanxi relationships are still important.

Historically, the immigrant Chinese formed associations for mutual support and economic purposes. These associations were called kongsis and overlapped with secret societies [sometimes engaged in criminal activities] and were involved in business, social and religious activities (Trocki 1990: 13-15). Trocki characterizes these organizations as based on the notion of a sworn brotherhood that arose in South East Asia as a result of a lack of a family relationship and a lack of a Confucian ordering of the world [an example of a sworn brotherhood relationship is seen in the Chinese novel ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS (1990: 13). It is interesting that today some people in Singapore still associate tang-ki shrines with secret societies, although I did not see any signs of them being secret societies. On one occasion, however, when I visited a large temple complex in Malaysia, the person who showed me around said his temple was not a secret society but that 70% of the shrines in the area were.

Wealth and money is an area of particular concern to people in the shrines when talking about fate and luck. Oxfeld points to the pervasiveness of the use of monetary symbolism in both popular Chinese religion and in the Chinese way of life (Oxfeld 1993: 94-107). On the altar of Anna’s shrine, as in many shrines, is a statue of Cai Shen Ye, the god of wealth. In some Taoist shrines in Singapore, winning lottery numbers are often requested from the possessed tang-ki. Anna, however, said that she was totally against ‘gambling’. For her mahjong was gambling while buying lottery tickets was not. However, at Anna’s shrine, if someone wins a prize in a lottery the number is attached to the altar. It does not seem to matter to most people that a number can be given out by a tang-ki and people still do not win, as many people see this as a sign that they did not have any luck at that particular time, rather than blaming the deity or the tang-ki. Here are some other situations relating to money that I came across:

• One medium’s husband spends over a hundred dollars a week on lottery tickets and is quite sure he is going to win as he sees signs all around him – numbers on boxes in temples or receipts, friend’s phone numbers – that, when used to select lottery numbers have won large sums of money.

• Numbers from receipts given out by one shrine were often used to buy lottery tickets. One morning when I arrived at the shrine, the members told me that the number of one of my receipts had won second prize in a minor lottery and they were quite incredulous that I had not bought a ticket. They concluded that I was rich enough already.

• In a Sunday paper, one article was headed, ‘I’m sorry you’re dead, but please let me strike 4-D’ (The Newspaper On Sunday, 2005). The article is about some people attending the funeral of a young murdered woman to obtain lottery numbers, despite not knowing the person. They used the murdered woman’s age, the number plate of the vehicle and the number of the pallbearers as the numbers of the lottery tickets they would purchase.

• At the monthly service for the ‘soldiers’ who help the deity in their work, bundles of paper money built up in the form of a fortress are burnt. This ritual enables a payment or reward to be made to the soldiers who have helped the deities. At one point in the ritual everyone circles around the money and shouts Huat Lah, which I was told means, ‘prosperity comes, you got lucky, you strike the lottery’.

• One particular image that captured my attention was a photo by Oxfeld, taken while researching a Hakka Chinese business community in India, of a life-size paper model of a car with cellophane windows with a model paper chauffeur in the driver’s seat and filled with bundles of paper money in both the front passenger seat and the back seat. This model was burnt as an offering for a recently dead relative of the person who had the model made (Oxfeld 1993: 105).

Some of the symbolism of various fruit used for offerings on the altars mean wealth or luck or both [the Cantonese word for mandarin orange is ‘kum’ and the Cantonese word for gold is ‘kum’ pronounced in a different tone]. The Mandarin word and Hokkien word for pineapple is ‘huangli’ and ‘onglai’. The word ‘Wang’ in Hokkien means prosperity. ‘Lai’ means ‘comes’ and the ‘ang’ sound in Hokkien means red. ‘Red’ means good luck. The symbolic meaning of pineapple then is ‘luck comes’ or ‘prosperity arrives’. One cake often seen on altars is called ‘fa gao’ [H. huat kueh]. The word for cake [gao] also means high and symbolizes high fortune that rises like this cake when baked.

Gates (1987) work on this theme of wealth is very interesting. She sees the Chinese celestial system as being run on a capitalist system where the ‘other’ world is linked into the earthly economy. She describes a Chinese belief that for a soul to be reborn it has to find a body and a fate and that to do this it has to contract a ‘mystical debt’ from the celestial treasury. While some of this debt is paid off during life on earth, the rest, plus extra money for various spirits in charge of the treasury and other departments, can be paid off by relatives on earth burning paper money (Gates 1987: 266-270). Gates heads her paper with a folk simile gained from an unpublished document by Rohsenow, ‘The earth god runs a bank; money opens the way to the gods’ (1987: 259).

It is difficult to be entirely sure of the meaning of the strong interest of the people involved in tang-ki shrines in wealth. This interest is not confined to Taoist shrines but seems to be part of a more general theme in Chinese society. At times, my thoughts went to the Comaroffs (2001) and Weller’s (2001) work on millennial capitalism where the preoccupation with money and wealth in some religious groups is seen as paralleling what happens in the wider market and as a celebration of capitalism.

It would be easy to see the interest of shrine members in gambling and lotteries as an exemplification of a type of ‘casino capitalism’, especially as one of the main topics of public concern in Singapore, when I was there, was whether to make casinos legal. This debate became quite public. The Government decided, in the end, to make them legal as this would bring much investment to Singapore. Ironically, to my way of thinking, the head of the Institute of Mental Health estimated that eight extra psychologists, four counsellors, specialized family therapy units and shelters for recovering addicts would be required to deal with the negative effects of opening a casino (2005 The Straits Times).

Many Singaporeans have investments from which they have both gained and lost a considerable amount of money. One medium told me that she had lost over a million dollars in stocks and shares. Anna spent some considerable time telling me that if her husband had followed her advice regarding investments [gained from the deities in dreams] they would have made a lot of money. It must be emphasized here that both Anna and her husband are fairly sophisticated when it comes to knowledge of markets and investments as both have worked in the financial sector, and Anna’s husband still does.

However, while this interest in money amongst people in the shrines can be seen as going along with and endorsing the capitalist spirit of Singapore’s economy, it can also be seen as a counter-hegemonic discourse that by way of parody [rather than pastiche which it could be mistaken for] goes against this economic system and the ‘casino capitalism’ where one puts in a lot of hard work and gets nothing from it. Oxfeld comes to a similar conclusion. She says of gambling amongst the Chinese people she studied that it, ‘…simultaneously mimics and revolts against, reinforces and ultimately undermines the compulsions of the market with which they must necessarily deal with in their daily life’ (1993: 120).

While one can see the rise in interest of the cult of Toa Ji A Pei [the opium-smoking spirits from hell], who give out lottery money as being associated with an occult economy, one can also see these figures as parodying the capitalist system. After all, the story of these two spirits is one of brotherhood and mutual help for each other, not one of exploitation. Tang-ki worship, then, can be seen similarly to Taussig’s analysis of the devil in regards to ‘commodity fetishism’ and capitalism in South America, which he sees as symbolizing ‘important features of political and economic history’ (Taussig 1980: xi).

There is a type of Chinese capitalism operating in South East Asia that is different from other types of capitalism in regards to reliance on family bonds and guanxi relationships and how these articulate with the local context. It is shown here that there is also a difference, at least as far as we see it in tang-ki shrines, in the factor of jouissance and enjoyment. Capitalism, particularly early market capitalism, has often been taken as a puritan ethic where enjoyment is prohibited or postponed. This is explicit in Marx, Weber and Simmel’s accounts of capitalism.

Lacan says that within the capitalist economic system enjoyment or jouissance is expropriated by the master for his own pleasure, which then locates it in the discourse of the master. This jouissance he calls ‘plus de jouir’ [surplus-enjoyment]. Lacan goes on to characterize contemporary capitalism as being where this surplus jouissance is not expropriated by the master but is reinvested in the productive process. The objects of enjoyment [consumer products] have themselves taken up the position of agent or master with a superego imperative being at play where one has to enjoy at any cost [the prohibition on prohibition], thus creating an entirely different economy of enjoyment from the past and perhaps with different symptoms. Perhaps, the term ‘a permissive society’ can be used here to characterize this type of society. In this discourse, the position of agent is not the traditional master nor father figure but the bureaucrat or, as Brousse argues, the market, thus making it also part of the discourse of the university (Brousse 2006: 258). Alongside this bureaucratically led university discourse go procedures, protocols and evaluation procedures that guide a person as to how they should go about enjoying their life (Brousse 2006: 256).

It can be considered that in Chinese capitalism as I came upon it in Singapore, there is still the master discourse operating, as seen in the power of the State, alongside the discourse of the university, but that what one sees is neither the prohibition on enjoyment nor the injunction to enjoy. Nevertheless, there is present a jouissance within the centre of the capitalist venture. One sees this in the enjoyment of the joking relationships mentioned earlier. One also sees it in the interest in lotteries. When one person at the shrine won a hundred dollars, an immediate state of enjoyment, if not ecstasy, could be seen on her face. It was enjoyable also marching round the pile of paper money that was being burnt for the soldiers each month, literally seeing money go up in smoke [like a modern potlatch ritual] and shouting Huat Lah in the expectation that wealth might come. There was an enjoyment in going to the casinos.

On one occasion, five people accompanied me to interview a medium, but only one stayed while I was interviewing him. On going out after the interview to see where the other people were, I heard the sound of laughter. The others were with another medium trying to obtain winning numbers for the lottery. As against my interview, the involvement with the other tang-ki was very enjoyable to those involved. The enjoyment was present whether they won or not. We also see in the metonymic associations of various symbols with aspects of wealth an enjoyment or pleasure in the pure wordplay of the signifiers and the creation of meaning by association. While Lacan generally associates metonymy with desire and a lack of satisfaction, we see in this metonymy here a jouissance of language itself. In the capitalist discourse of the obsessional, the Puritan puts aside for the future the means by which he can enjoy. In Chinese society, at least as seen in tang-ki worship, the enjoyment is already there no matter the hardship. While there is an end in view in many of these practices of trying to gain more money, the means is not just a means but also part of the end; it is enjoyed. Perhaps one could say of the Chinese that they both have their cake and also eat it.

Bataille (1989, 1991) also thought of enjoyment being the antitheses of capitalist logic and that they could not go together. His concept of ‘the sovereign’ can help in one’s understanding of the Chinese system of capitalism and the factor of enjoyment. Bataille’s notion of sovereignty is that of the free subjectivity of one who consumes [enjoys] rather than produces and who lives in the present rather than in the past or the future (Bataille 1991: 197-199). He associates it with the miraculous, with ecstasy, as well as with the enjoyment of the end rather than the means (Bataille 1991: 197-200). Bataille suggests that economics is driven by a Dionysian frenzy of non-productive consumption rather than by just an Apollonian rationality. He suggests all successful societies need to find the sovereign moment. I suggest one sees this sovereign moment in tang-ki shrines in Singapore, in their yearly shrine celebrations [carnival] and in the carnival of the market and, contrary to Bataille, in their productive economic activity.

It was difficult at first to come to terms with the large emphasis on money and wealth in the shrines – as if I thought wealth and money should not be connected in so explicit a way with religion. iv McVeigh (1997) reminds us, however, in his study of new religions in Japan that in these religions there is often a concern with an increase in wealth and tangible results, but that this does not detract from there being present a genuinely religious phenomenon. DeBernardi points out that the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane, often used to look at religious material, does not necessarily apply to the Chinese, where both elements can be present; an interest, for example, in enlightenment and also in worldly success and prosperity (1992: 252-253). Parry and Bloch’s work on monetary transactions shows that money, while equated with individualism and capitalism in the West, might not be like that in all places (1989: 238). It may be used to make personal relationships and relationships with deities. I first thought I would be researching what I thought was a ‘religious’ belief system and had little idea that this would involve researching the belief system of modern capitalism, which can be seen to be as esoteric as any ‘purely’ religious belief systems.

Anna said to me on one occasion, ‘Singapore is sick sick, sick, I tell you’. On another occasion, a member of the Redhill shrine who has his own small investment company started talking to me about the economics of Singapore. He said, ‘I suppose I am the only one that has talked any sense to you and that all the temple things that you hear must sound like madness to you’. While Anna was referring to the economy as not functioning well and the other person was making a distinction between the rationality of economics and the seeming irrationality of the tang-ki shrines, the statements of the two individuals do raise the question of the relationship of madness and the market and the place of tang-ki-worship within this relationship.

Lacan credits Marx with discovering the concept of the symptom in his idea of surplus value (Lacan 1969/70: I.11, IV.7). He sees Freud as also having a similar idea in his thought that to enter into society a person must give something up, something of instinctual pleasure, which Freud saw in religious societies as being then offered to the deity as a sacrifice (Freud 1907: 127). Lacan calls this instinctual renunciation a surplus jouissance [plus-de-jouir] and sees this jouissance as part of an economy of jouissance where jouissance is at the base of various symptoms and the way we do find some enjoyment in the world (Lacan 1969/70: I.10-I.11, IV.9). In psychosis, for example, he would see that jouissance has hardly been tamed at all and so at times completely overwhelms a person. In neurosis, he would see the person gaining some jouissance from his symptoms. One clearly sees this being overwhelmed by jouissance in the case of anorexia, where a person can reach a near state of ecstasy as they become more bound up with their extreme appearance of thinness.

Lacan’s idea that there is a different ordering of jouissance in early capitalism and in late capitalism (1969/70 I.14; VI.15) suggests that symptoms and diagnosis may also be related to particular economic structures. Capitalism has often been related to obsessionality and to prohibition (Sullivan 1995). While Warner (1985), in his book on the political economy of schizophrenic, does not directly link schizophrenia to capitalism, he does link how schizophrenia is shaped to associated factors such as industrialization, social class, wage labour, unemployment, booms in the economy and restricted social networks. He suggests that to look at schizophrenia as a whole, one needs studies by people such as anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists (1985: 1). v

Sass sees a certain way of being of the schizophrenic, such as an exaggerated cerebralism [hyper-rationalism, hyper-reflexivity and hyper consciousness], indifference, apathy, a sense of unreality as well as a sense of fragmentation of the world as characterizing modernity [including post-modernity] (Sass 1992). He quotes Charles Taylor that this condition induces one to, ‘…stop simply living in the body or within our traditions and habits, and by making them objects for us, subject them to radical scrutiny and remaking’ (Taylor 1988 quoted in Sass 1992: 369).

Jameson (1991) uses Lacanian ideas on psychosis to show that post-modernity is logically linked to consumer capitalism and that both are linked to the logic of schizophrenia. He speaks of a death of the subject within post-modernity, where a person is not able to situate himself or herself fully into the cultural/symbolic order and therefore remains with a fragmented self (Jameson 1991: 15, 26-27). Such a person is also deterritorialized [a term taken from Deleuze and Guattari] both in terms of locality [they can live anywhere] and temporality [they have no connection with history] (Jameson 1991: 21, 44). Kojeve’s idea (1980), taken up more recently by Fukuyama (1992), of the end of history, can be seen here as applying to the schizophrenic individual.

Deleuze and Guattari (2004) have a different concept of schizophrenia and its relationship to schizophrenia than do Sass and Jameson. They see schizophrenia as a scrambling and decoding of the various norms of society, a de-territorializing, but they see this as a useful exercise against the various power structures that want to, in their opinion, re-territorialize people (2004: 342-354). It is this ability to decode and scramble that Deleuze and Guattari also associate with capitalism, seeing capitalism as being able to reside anywhere [an aspect of globalization] and also as a decoding and scrambling of the various codes of society in which it is developed (2004: 352, 409). However, they see capitalism as limited and not going as far as the schizophrenic consciousness in that it creates a limit and then re-territorializes itself by using the bureaucratic state agencies in which it is placed (2004: 354, 368-371, 416-417).

In discussing both Jameson’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas on schizophrenia and capitalism, Peretti suggest that what we see in late capitalism is a subject which is able to take on ego identifications in quick succession but only for as long as it takes to buy the commodities suited to any one identification (1996: 13).

It is easy to see signs of post-modernism in Singapore. Signs of intense planning are everywhere. Arriving at Changi international airport is like entering a space capsule with a world of its own rather like many shopping centres in Singapore. The sociologist Featherstone suggests that indeed the heart of Singapore itself is like walking through a large shopping centre (1998). In his book LIFE IS NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT SHOPPING: CONSUMPTION CULTURE IN SINGAPORE , Chua (2003) implies that shopping is a favourite pastime of Singaporeans. The drive from the airport is along a planned tree-lined double lane highway with views of high-rise condominiums and blocks of flats on both sides; Housing Development Board flats [HDB] hardly distinguishable from Le Corbusier styled flats. The buildings everywhere remind one of Bentham’s panopticon from which one can survey the surrounding area as far as one can see. One also views in the middle of the city but also elsewhere, huge glass high-rise office buildings. Parts of the old China town area have been kept and ‘upgraded’, pastiche-like with hundreds of stores selling tourist products.

In various areas of Singapore, a vast de-territorialization took place, where older local neighbourhoods were destroyed and people moved to HDB flats. Christopher’s mother described how, in the late fifties and sixties, on nearly every weekend, relatives, who mostly lived in the area, as well as neighbours used to go to her grandmother’s house where they would play mahjong and cards. Hawkers on bicycles and motorcycles with their mobile ovens would line up outside selling food. Occasionally police would raid the place and there would be a scramble to hide any money used for gambling. However, when people were dispersed to high-rise flats around different areas of Singapore, these meetings became less frequent and eventually stopped. As we have seen in Redhill, which still retains a sense of community, cemeteries were covered over and even the hill, after which the place was named, was razed to the ground, leaving only the name. Along with this de-territorialization of place went a similar dislocation from history. The English language was valued over Chinese dialects, and modernity became more valued than traditionalism.

The Government became exceedingly concerned in the 1990s about Singaporeans leaving Singapore because of the hardship of the Singaporean way of life (Trocki 2006: 159). The Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, in a speech at a National Day Rally, in 2002, called those who left Singapore because of various negative aspects of the country ‘quitters’ and the other ‘stayers’ (Fernandez 2004: 92, 123-127). Some of the men at the Redhill shrine indicated a wish to migrate to Australia. A Singaporean film, PERTH (Djinn 2004), that came out when I was in Singapore tells the story of a rather alienated taxi driver who decides to go to settle in Perth in Australia.

Another sign of post-modernism, the lack of identification and need to make fleeting identifications, is seen in Singapore in the commonly heard refrain about needing to reinvent oneself. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, when talking about the economy and the need for flexibility, said, ‘...we must continue to reinvent ourselves and build new competencies…’ (The Straits Times 2005). Christopher’s cousin once said to me that we have constantly to remake ourselves. He was then considering leaving a position as a scientist [a position he loved but not the actual job] for one in commerce.

While it has been shown in the above and elsewhere that there are plenty of indicators of modernity and post-modernity in Singapore, and that they do go alongside a capitalist economic system, it is much more difficult to get any sense of a completely ‘schizophrenic’ consciousness or logic about the place. It is difficult also to come upon any statistics as to actual numbers of people with schizophrenia in Singapore. However, there is some evidence that those with schizophrenia in Singapore [and Hong Kong] have a better outcome than those in western countries (Lo and Lo 1977; Lee, Lieh-Mak, Wong, Fung, Mak and Lam 1998; Jilek 2001; Kua, Wong, Kua and Tsoi 2003). vi

It would seem, though, that people in Singapore are more integrated than they would be if living in a capitalist society described by Sass, Jameson and Deleuze and Guattari. For one, people in Singapore seem particularly family orientated. vii Two people mentioned earlier with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were well embedded in family relationships, and one is also involved in shrine activities and the other in church activities. Tony, who seems to have some type of mental health problem, is less embedded but has some contact with shrine activities. I did notice two people who used to wander around the market area of Redhill, who I was told had a mental illness. It was interesting to notice that when one of these people came up to the table, where I was sitting with some of the shrine members, wanting to sell a watch, the others were careful not to say anything that would offend the person. They mentioned afterwards the importance of the need for her not to lose face [tiu lian], a factor that could be of some help in protecting people from negative aspects of having a mental illness.

From a superficial appearance, it might be said that tang-ki worship is ‘mad’ in some ways. Some Chinese people said to me that tang-kis are mad. Anna herself said that at times she wonders if she is mad and that she often does not tell people that she is a tang-ki in case people think she is mad. On a more speculative level following the logic of Sass, Jameson, Deleuze and Guattari, one could say that because tang-ki worship has certain capitalist themes about it, it too could be based on a logic of schizophrenia, perhaps in the Deleuzian sense of being schizo, as suggested by Nickerson (2001) [see page 202 ]. Yet I argue that involvement in shrine activities works against a schizophrenic logic. For a start, such involvement is not highly cerebral and has none of the hyper-rationality and hyper-reflectivity that Sass characterizes as schizophrenic thinking. Nor does it de-territorialize people. On the contrary, it can be seen as reterritorializing people.

The bonds of the men at the Redhill shrine are strong and based on the Redhill locality. In the shrine procession, the men go around the neighbourhood almost marking out their territory. In the Ang Mio Kio shrine, we see that the members, who live in different parts of Singapore, do get a sense of location from coming to the shrine. In both shrines, a community is formed. Those who do not work can often be seen helping others who have small businesses. The shrines, then, can be seen as locations that help people position themselves against the destabilizing effects of globalization and capitalist forces. Lee Kuan Yew and the Government seem to have recognized the destabilizing aspect of globalization in their espousal in the late 1980’s of ‘Asian Values’. In the case of some people who do not have strong family contacts, the shrine can be seen to offer them a community, based on the notion of ‘brotherhood and sisterhood’. People are also embedded in a historical context when they come to the shrines. Symbols of Chinese history and the depictions of various gods, nearly all historical personages, are part of shrine worship.

Singapore is a highly structured society with a strong discourse of the master operating. There is also strong family support for people as well as support from various religious groups. In Lacanian theory, it is the Name-of-the-Father played out mainly by real fathers and authority figures that shore up a person against the fragmentation of psychosis, and this support seems to be very present in Singapore. It would not be expected then that schizophrenia would play a large part in Singaporean society. As Peretti notes, schizophrenics make bad shoppers (Perreti 1996: 12) and one of Singaporeans favourite past time can be seen to be shopping. It may very well be then that Chinese capitalism does not necessary have the logic that Sass and Jameson see capitalism as having in Western countries.

However, while schizophrenia may not be a mental illness that has any relation to the economic and political structure of Singapore, it may very well be that other disorders such as anorexia do have such a relationship. A growing increase in the number of women with this illness in Singapore and other Asian countries has been noted (Ung 2003; Wang, Ho, Anderson and Sabry 1999; Lee, Pathy and Chan 2005).

Littlewood associates eating disorders with being not only a pathology of the West but also as being associated with industrialization and modernity (Littlewood 2002: xiv, 78-86). Late capitalism could be added. Ruelle, writing on anorexia in Japan, specifically links the rate of anorexia in Japan, the highest rate in Asia, to consumer capitalism [Japan has the most developed capitalist economy in Asia], in which she sees a co-modification of the female body taking place with a consequent loss of subjectivity (Ruelle 2004: 3-4).

Interestingly, in one study in Singapore, dissatisfaction with body weight amongst a group of young Singaporeans was associated with speaking English at home [a sign of modernity] (Wang, Ho, Anderson and Sabry 1999). I interviewed one 16-year-old Singaporean Chinese girl with anorexia. There were no differences in terms of the illness between her and many young women with anorexia that I have worked with in the U.K. She was English speaking. Unfortunately, I did not get to meet the girl with anorexia that Anna said she had cured but from what Anna told me, Guanyin had told her to start eating, and she did. If anorexia is about the issues of being a woman, as some people have said (Orbach 1986; Bordo 1993), then perhaps an encounter with Guanyin through Anna could have been quite helpful for this girl in coming to terms with the issue of sexual identity and the wider area of subjectivity.

One sees, then, in the people that come to the shrines that their illnesses are not just a product of their bodies but are illnesses arising within a specific socio-cultural context, which includes living in the economic structure of late capitalism and people are given a healing appropriate, in some ways, to that context. It is argued in the Conclusion that the healing is by way of a process of transcendence.