Ethnographic Notes on the State Funeral of Lee Kuan Yew: Introduction

In memorium: Bernard Bate:

Bernard Bate was an Associate Professor in Social Sciences in the Yale-NUS College at the National University of Singapore. He inspired and launched the team research on the commemoration of the death of Lee Kuan Yew that appears in this special section. Tragically and unexpectedly, he passed away on 6 March 2016 while on research leave at the Stanford Humanities Center in Palo Alto, California while the project was in its final stages. His research explored the theory, ethnography, and history of political oratory and rhetoric in the Tamil worlds of South Asia, and he authored Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic (Columbia, 2009/Oxford India, 2011).