Social Cultural Engineering and the Singaporean State

This book, a collection of previously published articles, focuses on the role of the Singaporean State in social cultural engineering. It deals with the relationship between the Singaporean state and local agencies and how the latter negotiated with the state to establish an acceptable framework for social cultural engineering to proceed. The book also highlights the tensions and conflicts that occurred during this process. The various chapters examine how the Singaporean state used polices and regulatory control to conserve and maintain ethno-cultural and ethno-religious landscapes, develop a moral education system and how the treatment of women and its morality came into alignment with the values that the state espoused upon from the 1980s through the 1990s.

Kuah Khun Eng is currently visiting the Division of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Prior to this, she was Professor of Anthropology and Head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia and Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. She was also a visiting scholar and coordinate research scholar of Harvard-Yenching Institute at Havard University and a visiting professor at University of Paris Diderot. Her research focus is on Chinese Diaspora-Mainland Connections and Religion and Politics, focusing on Buddhism, politics and philanthropy, gender and social movements. She conducts her research primarily in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. She is the author of 2 books, editor/co-editor of 9 edited books, guest editor/co-editor of 4 journal issues and numerous journal articles and book chapters.