A Welcome from Singapore

Welcome to “Social Change in Contemporary Southeast Asia”! I’m glad to be your Teaching Fellow for Fall 2020, albeit from afar in Singapore. I’m Jill Tan, a second-year in the Sociocultural Anthropology PhD program. Like Erik, I would ordinarily have hoped to have some updates on my primary research on death and funeral corporations in Singapore, but in the course of the summer have mostly been figuring out how to live through this pandemic like many of us.

In Singapore, some of the people whose lives are most drastically affected by Covid-19 are migrant laborers who live in dormitories, and two of my Yale colleagues and I wrote about the Singaporean state and community care in the time of Covid-19 here. In mid-July, Singapore also had its General Elections for 2020, which was considered a political milestone by many, and prompted much conversation on social change, such as this. 

In lockdown, I’ve spent time reflecting on isolation and connection through collaborative projects, one with an acquaintance coincidentally assigned to the same government-mandated quarantine facility, and one with my mother who I was traveling and quaranting with. Since participating in a dance lab spanning Singapore, India, Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Australia, in which we pondered “How To Dance When We are All Ill,” I’ve also been thinking a lot about building translocal networks of support and collectivity in these times.

Finally, as we embark on a semester of this course online, I wanted to share some thoughts I had this week as I was observing some young dancers in Singapore and Sydney choreograph over Zoom for a piece of performance research I’ve been doing. Under normal circumstances, we would have encountered each other in the studio. Instead, everyone was in their own living spaces; some were not able to participate fully synchronously. When the dancers sometimes moved out of sync, we could not tell if it was an improvised deviation from choreography or a glitch, but soon this became incorporated into our understanding of what we were doing together. My hope with this class is that we will likewise figure out how to learn when we are out of sync, and that we will be understanding and supportive of challenges of access across our various environments. I am looking forward to being in class with you and aiding your learning in this time, and hope to get to know you all and your work in time.