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Chapter 1 Some Occasional Rites Performed by the Singapore Cantonese (1951)* This paper deals with some of the rites performed by the Cantonese in Singapore with the object of overcoming illness and misfortune. The rites selected for description are in all cases specific to the sufferer, and are enacted only when help is required. The term occasional is used here in this sense, to distinguish them from festival rites and the type of performances of a spirit medium which take place regularly and are attended by many people. They also differ from other rites in that they can be performed alone by the person who hopes to benefit from them, or who wishes to benefit some other person in whose welfare they are interested. Even when the rites to be described are performed by a priest, the person paying for the rite is an active participant. In most cases, the association of ideas in the objects used in the rites is straight forward, and the body of esoteric knowledge needed is limited. The cost of the material apparatus is low, and can easily be met by a fairly poor person: no article costs more than 50 cents, and the majority as little as 5 cents. This kind of ritual is as one woman told this writer, “Old women’s business.” “Men,” she said, “and younger women, are usually sceptical, or they haven’t the time and patience to do such things. Since the paper things necessary are very cheap, the younger members of a family don’t usually mind their old grandmother and aunts practising the rites.” Younger women may, however be persuaded to take part in them, usually by their mother or mother-in-law, especially when the health of a grand-child is at stake. In Kwangtung [Guangdong] Province, these performances are carried out in people’s homes, at the village altar or at a road junction. In Singapore, where Chinese villages have a somewhat different lay-out, they are more often associated with temple worship, usually temple * Published in Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS), 24(3)(1951): 120–44. Reprinted by permission of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. 28 Chapter 1 worship with a Taoist bias,1 but occasionally road junctions and the space in front of a house are used here. In Singapore a temple is a more suitable place for a ceremony than a house. In China, the house occupied by a family or group of related families consists usually of several courtyards and apartments and it therefore affords ample space for ritual. Here however, many people live in a single small room in a house containing many unrelated families. More often than not the room is in fact a cubicle, that is, a part of a room which has been divided by wooden partitions, and so does not afford much space for religious activities. A temple has the added convenience of containing a store of the articles necessary for all kinds of rites. It also has authorities on ritual to whom a woman may apply for information on how a rite is to be performed. Food offerings may be borrowed for the occasion, and the keeper will send out for the temple’s regular attending priest if so desired. He and his assistants will then assemble and arrange everything needed for the ceremony while the worshipper waits for the priests to arrive. When a rite is performed in front of a house or at a road junction, a more limited form is usually carried out, and it is performed in the early part of the night in the semi-privacy of the dark. The material for this paper was drawn from conversations with women from both the “big ‘pore” (from “Singapore”) Օࡕ that is, the area adjoining New Bridge Road, and from the “small ‘pore” ՛ࡕ, between Beach Road and Selegie Road. Questions were asked at several Chinese temples and at shops selling joss and paper images. Some of the rites were witnessed by the present writer, and additional information on them was supplied by the Cantonese Taoist priest who performed them, and by the temple keeper. In all cases, in reply to the question “Which dialect groups perform these rites?”, the answer was that it was mostly the Cantonese. A few Hakka women do so, but nobody questioned had heard of any other group performing them. It is possible, of course, that some Hokkiens and Teochews...

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