VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
This paper discusses a community of tombkeepers, or individuals who offer paid contractual services of tomb cleaning and maintenance in a Chinese cemetery called Bukit Brown Cemetery (BBC) in central Singapore and contrasts this with ‘Friends of the Cemetery’, which are groups of unpaid volunteers who perform similar tasks of tomb cleaning and maintenance in cemeteries in the United Kingdom. The paper argues that tombkeepers of BBC are distinct from ‘Friends of the Cemetery’ in terms of their motivation, relationship to the cemetery, internal group membership, sense of purpose in their role, and role function. BBC tombkeepers are unique from other tombkeepers in other cemeteries found in Singapore because they originate from the evicted human settlements within BBC, are not employed by the Singapore government to perform tombkeeping duties and practice a culturally specific set of mortuary rituals to revere the dead in this cemetery. Therefore, this paper argues that they are the gatekeepers of Chinese graveside rituals since they continue to preserve the customary practices specific to this cemetery in terms of ancestor worship, memorialisation of the dead, and the performance of tombkeeping. Information would be welcome from conferees on unofficial tombkeepers in other countries.
See Mieng Tan is a recent PhD graduate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research examined contemporary civil society in Singapore using the empirical example of a community-led interest group that has been advocating for the preservation of Bukit Brown Cemetery. Prior to this, she obtained a Master of Science (Merit) degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh and a Master of Social Science degree in Sociology from the National University of Singapore. She is passionate about the broad research on death.