Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia

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'.

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).