One Face, Many Masks: The Singularity and Plurality of Chinese Identity
- One Face, Many Masks:The Singularity and Plurality of Chinese Identity
Tong Chee-kiong teaches in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore, where he has also served as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Director of the Graduate School. He is the co-author (with Eddie C.Y. Kuo) of Religion in Singapore (1995), the co-author (with K.F. Lian) of The Making of Singapore Sociology (1993), and (with K.B. Chan) of Alternate Identities: The Chinese in Contemporary Thailand (2001) and Past Times: A Social History of Singapore (Singapore Times Editions, 2002), as well as of numerous articles on migration, cultural geography, ethnicity, religion, and Chinese business networks in Southeast Asia.
Chan Kwok-bun is Professor of Sociology, Head of Department, and Director of the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of over forty articles and book chapters and of Smoke and Fire: The Chinese in Montreal (in English, Hong Kong Chinese UP, 1991; in Chinese, Beijing UP, 2001) and the co-author (with C. Chiang) of Stepping Out: The Making of Chinese Entrepreneurs (in English, Prentice Hall-Singapore / National University of Singapore's Centre for Advanced Studies, 1994; in Chinese, China Social Sciences Publishing, 1996). He has edited or co-edited ten books, including Chinese Business Networks (Prentice Hall / Copenhagen Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2000).
Notes
1. See Bock (1976) for a discussion of these concepts.
2. See Daedalus (Spring 1967), special issue on the salience of color in social relations, which includes essays by Edward Shils, Harold R. Isaacs, Kenneth J. Gergen, and E.R. Braithwaite.
3. See Isaacs (1975) and Levi-Strauss (1966) for an incisive treatment of names and naming.
4. The major religions of the Chinese are Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, as well as other popular religious beliefs such as worshipping ancestors and praying to spirits. However, most religious beliefs and practices of the Chinese do not fall neatly into these known categories. For many Chinese, the "formal" religious labels simply do not matter and their practices represent a mixture of several religious traditions. Many Chinese cannot and do not distinguish these religious categories, often mixing Buddhism and Taoism. As Topley noted, "the popular religion of the Chinese people is characterized by its syncretic and catholic nature. It is an amorphous mass of beliefs and practices from various sources including the greater systems of religion and philosophy" (76)
5. The term disembedding was used by Anthony Giddens (16-20) to refer to the fact that modern institutions are in various key respects discontinuous with pre-modern culture and ways of life. He suggests that modernity is characterized by the separation of time and space and the disembedding of social institutions, that is, the lifting out of social relations from local contexts and their re-articulation across indefinite tracts of time and space. Although we draw from his insights, we use the word disembedding in the context of lifting out and separation.
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