New Books In Buddhist Studies

Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore (University of Washington Press, 2025), an ethnography of Chinese funeral parlors and cemeteries, anthropologist and trained mortician Dr. Ruth E. Toulson demonstrates this as part of a larger shift to transform a Daoist-infused obsession with ancestors into a sterile, more easily controlled "Protestant" Buddhism. Further, in a context where the dead remain central to family life, forced exhumation tears the social fabric, turning ancestors into ghosts. Using death ritual and grieving as interrogative lenses, Dr. Toulson explores the scope of and resistance to state power over the dead, laying bare the legacies