Patterns of Social Alignment : A Case Study of Hakka Association in Singapore
These quotations pinpoint one of the main factors contributing to the successful settlement of Chinese communities in different parts of the world: their capacity to form various types of associations for mutual help. Chinese associations have long been cemmon wherever their formation and continued existence are not restricted.i) From the founding of modern Singapore in 1819, many associations were established and have continued to survive until today, while an unknown number have disappeared. Several general theories have been offered fo explain this proliferation. Freedman [1960] suggested that the increased scale and complexity of
Immigrants and Associations: Chinese in nineteenth-century Singapore
The society built up by Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia has always been remarkable for its wealth of voluntary associations. In the various historical and sociological studies of Southeast Asian Chinese which have appeared the importance of associations has been duly stressed, although in respect of only two settlements have we been given full treatment of their structure and significance. In this paper I shall consider the associations which Singapore Chinese created and modified in the course of the nineteenth century. Studying this earlier period of Singapore history we can see how the Chinese members of the colonial society adapted their social organization to the conditions of a trading settlement in which, while they often amassed great riches, they were not their own political masters. At the end of the paper I shall consider the Singapore evidence within the wider setting of Southeast Asia and put forward certain general conclusions which may be taken up in other papers on the same theme.
Chinese family and marriage in Singapore
than decrease; thus the elective position of the Regional Head, incorporated in the 1957 law, has recently been set aside in favor of presidential appointees. With the demise of the Indonesian parliament, we may expect that the complex issues of decentralization and regionalism have now been removed from the purview of independently acting social, ethnic, economic or partypolitical forces to the calmer conference rooms of administrators, once again acting under the aegis of an all-powerful, authoritarian government. Is it undue pessimism to believe that the story may have come full cycle, and that henceforth we may at best expect a series of bang wetjes, of timid little laws, to emanate from Djakarta? Whatever the ultimate fate of the Indonesian polity, we have ample reason to be grateful for these two painstaking inquiries into the often labyrinthine issues of decentralization and regionalism during the first decade of Indonesian independence. It would be most rewarding to find in the promised definitive works of both writers an expanded treatment, in which the intricate interconnections between regional, ethnic, economic, ideological, and party-political factors are more fully explored.