Paper short abstract:

What does an ethnography of a group of people living out, through and against the policy imports of an official system of racial classification in Singapore tell us about its longevity and potential for change? How can people be both complicit and resistant to how they are imagined and acted upon?

Paper long abstract:

All residents in Singapore, without exception, are ascribed a “racial identity” based on an official framework defined by four letters, CMIO, which stands for Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others. Such racial or ethnic classifications are not unique, but the ways and degree to which it permeates into and organizes social and public life in Singapore have been a source of political and scholarly debate (Chua 2003; Lai 2024). This paper considers the work of contemporary policies and institutions in continuing to give shape and salience to CMIO as a mode of classification, sustaining it as legitimate and necessary, and even a natural way of being-in and relating to the world. In policy terms, this offers the state an expedient basis to differentiate among the population, identify and coopt “community brokers,” and target its group-specific programmes accordingly while, at the same time, claim a space of neutrality towards all groups, having attended to each. A case in point may be seen in how a range of social problems, from drugs and gambling to domestic abuse and diabetes, is presented and managed through the prism of CMIO. This is ritually manifest in targeted public speeches, media representations and group-specific programmes. Long-term ethnographic fieldwork, particularly among those identified as Malays, reveals a contradictory interplay of complicity and resistance to how target groups are imagined, described and acted upon. They serve to mobilize the group into existence and action but also raise challenges to policy assumptions about “the Malays” and their problems.