Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

What would it take to create a climate for supporting empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore? This is a question that has surfaced over the last five years, including generating substantive discussions in media, public sphere, and political discourse. Analysts often point to the lack of empirically-grounded socially impactful social science scholarship in Singapore. The problem is often positioned as one related to rankings, suggesting implicitly that the drive toward rankings in Singapore-based institutions has a key role to play in the lack of social relevance of social science scholarship. The solution to this lack of socially impactful social science scholarship is often framed as the need for hiring a core of Singaporean academics that would be committed to the local context. In this blog post, I will argue that while the drive toward rankings is indeed an impediment toward generating socially impactful scholarship in Singapore (with the em...

For anyone that has been to a Durga Puja in Singapore, the account I offer here is both familiar and often accepted as normative.  Durga Puja is a celebration of Bengalis, a five-day festival that celebrates the victory of the Goddess Durga over Mahishashura (the asuras are synonimized with evil) in upper caste Hindu narrative (inverting the narrative of violence carried out by upper caste Hindus over the indigenous peoples, as voiced in Santali narratives of the festival). In Bengal, Durga Puja is celebrated over a period of five days although the preparations for the festivities take place often over two months. The celebrations of the Durga Puja in Singapore take place in two distinct registers, narrativizing the trajectories through which caste and class in the Bengali context travel through Singapore.  The puja of the expatriate, upper caste, upper class Hindu Bengalis, mostly from West Bengal (henceforth referred to as expat), and the puja of the working class Bengali mi...

When voices from the margins speak out/up, the dominant structures will respond by attempting to silence these voices. Whether you are co-creating a culture-centered intervention within a form of government that presents itself as a democracy or in a form of government that is more strictly authoritarian or a form of government that is somewhere in between, power is invested in protecting itself. To protect their interests, those in power will create as normative/cultural specific forms and strategies of silencing voices from the margins.  Because culture-centered interventions, when they actually work, co-create infrastructures for the voices of the "margins of the margins" (see Dutta, 2020), the interventions themselves as well as the accompanying structures are often the targets of attacks. The attacks can take a wide range, from actual violence, to labeling the infrastructures as anti-national (against the national interest) to raising accusations of foreign interference ...