Moussons (Nov 2012)
The Performance of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Performance in Malay Singapore
Abstract
From the 1960s the Malays of Singapore were mandated to relocate from kampung (village) locations to “modern” concrete housing blocks. Their former villages, consisting of wooden houses built on stilts, were razed for concrete social housing, accompanied by a policy enforcing a rigorous ethnic quota “representative” of the multi-ethnic composition of Singapore. The mandatory “relocation” of the populace was packaged by the local state/media in social evolutionary terms as “progress.” Nowadays, people descended from the villages periodically reconvene at Malay weddings held across the Island. The weddings occur under the giant concrete housing blocks, utilizing the same space where Chinese funerals lay their dead. Wedding silat, a Malay martial art danced at weddings, is a rite of aggregation to welcome new family members, and acknowledge the realignment of wider kinship structures. The performance of wedding silat illuminates performance in relation to traditional and modern power structures. Given the colossal rationalization of Singapore, the physical extinction of the kampung, the Islamization of the Malays, and the general malaise of nostalgic disenchantment with the present, the performance of silat empowers Malays to re-enchant their world. In the process, to secure, preserve, and manufacture Malay identity, ritual performances reunite the scattered minority community in a reconstituted space, a virtual kampung.
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