The concern with problematizing this category continues to engage
Singapore-based social scientists, as seen in the work of Geoffrey Benjamin
(Benjamin 1987) and more recently Syed Farid Alatas (unpublished) and the
Malaysian social thinker Syed Naquib Al-Attas (Al-Attas 1992). Scholars
based at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have also explored the
complex and multifaceted relations between religion and the nation-state (Kong
1993; Sinha 1999; Tong 1992, Wee 1989). Studies of popular religion also
abound here as seen in the works of Pattana Kitiarsa for Thai Buddhism
(Kitiarsa 2005) and Vineeta Sinha for Hinduism in Singapore (Sinha 2005).
Working in varied religious traditions, these works attend to the following
themes: the location of religion in a secular, urban context, the attendant
tensions between proponents of ‘official religion’ and ‘popular religion’ and
the impact of modernizing and rationalizing forces on religious conscious-
ness. It is striking that even within the highly urbanized context of cities in
Southeast Asia, such as Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, religious
communities are able to secure spaces that facilitate the persistence of particular
religious styles, including the popular and folk variety. Sociologists and
geographers of religion have highlighted how pockets of urban space have been
colonized by religious groups with a fair degree of success. The fact of an
educated, literate population in places like Singapore has also meant shifts in
religious consciousness, seen in the attraction to imported forms of Christianity
and a movement away from religions such as Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism,
which are defined as ‘traditional’, judged negatively, and thus rejected as being
out of touch with a modern context. In universities across Southeast Asia,
religion is a popular field of research and study both amongst faculty and
graduate students. Most recently, religion has a core presence in the form of
the ‘religion and globalization’ cluster at the Asia Research Institute newly
established at the NUS. This research initiative is led by sociologist Bryan
Turner, prioritizing the global dimension of religious phenomena and drawing
scholars working on a variety of Asian religious traditions in a comparative,
historical perspective. Interest in globalization and religiosity is certainly not
new to the region. It was conspicuous already in the work of Malaysian
sociologist, Raymond Lee, who has been writing about this since the early
1990s (Lee 1993) in his study of Hinduism in West Malaysia.
Studies of specific religious traditions have also found favour in the different
Southeast Asian countries. For instance, in the Philippines the historical
relationship of Christianity to the experience of Spanish colonialism has
attracted scholars over the decades (Rafael 1988, Sitoy Jr. 1985). In Malaysia,
studies of Islam, in particular its location in a multi-ethnic, religiously plural
context of the nation-state, inspire much scholarly commentary (Noor 2002,
2004; Shamsul 1997). Despite being a minority religion in the region,
Hinduism—both of the traditional orthodox variety and ‘new religious
movements’ (Lee 1982; Sinha 1985)—has attracted a good deal of sociological146
ROWENA ROBINSON AND VINEETA SINHA