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Paper short abstract

In Singapore, few laws govern death rituals, yet tiny details within funeral rites and forms of grief come to reflect state policies on identity, language, and love. This paper explores how grief comes to align with state narratives, revealing the mechanisms for ordinary necropolitics.

Paper long abstract

What connects expressions of grief, elements of ritual, and forms of governance, particularly in contexts where the state, seemingly, has little to say about the treatment of the dead? In contemporary Singapore—where I worked as anthropologist and mortician—surprisingly few laws regulate the treatment of corpses. The regulations that do exist fall within the remit of public health. There are few laws to determine how funeral rituals should be performed and, of course, no government could successfully dictate how its citizen-subjects should grieve. However, I suggest, in the choices bereaved families make—decisions as seemingly insignificant as the degree of curve of a casket lid, the number of days in a wake, or the color of a silk funeral drape—there is a politicized narrative that can be read. Multiple decades of policies aimed at shaping the kinds of person it is possible and desirable to be are both realized and contested in the actions that surround death. There is a pattern that emerges, an alignment between state policy—on language, identity, and love, areas of the intimate life the Singaporean state has attempted to legislate—and worlds of death that it has not, such as the form of ritual and the nature of grief. In this paper I ask: how does this happen? How do even forms of grieving come to mimic the state, which makes no attempt to mandate tears? What are the mechanisms for this necropolitics of the ordinary?