The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Methodological Musings, Analytical Signposts
Chapter 1. Retelling Railway Histories: Centring Labour
Chapter 2. Constructing Colonial Railway Networks in Malaya
Chapter 3. Work and Living Spaces of Railway Labour
Chapter 4. Mapping ‘Railwaymen Temples’ in Singapore and Malaysia
Chapter 5. Sojourneying with Muṉīsvaraṉ the ‘Railway God’
Chapter 6. Railways and Religion: Negotiating Colonial and Post-colonial Modernities
Conclusion: Sedimented, Intertwined Histories
Appendices
Glossary
Index
About the author
Vineeta Sinha is Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her publications include A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore (2005) and Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon (with S.F. Alatas, 2017).
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