Jill Jie’en Tan

JILL JIE’EN TAN, then a graduate student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, was approved funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Corpses Incorporated: The Funeral Profession and the Geopolitics of Death in Singapore,” supervised by Dr. Erik Harms. Retitled “Corpses Incorporated: The Contemporary Management of Death in Singapore,” this project explores the public’s, funeral professionals’, and state planners’ logistical and emotional management of death in multi-ethnic, multi-religious Singapore. Due to land scarcity, there is insufficient room to maintain distance between residences and stigmatized spaces associated with corpses, burial, and deathcare. There is also increasingly no room — in spatiality or consciousness — to grieve the dead with permanence, given the constant exhumation, reinterment, and relocation of graves and remains since the 1970s, and parallel displacement of funeral parlors for public housing development. Growing attempts to shape discourse around death through public art and outreach, however, highlight transformations. Notably, Singaporean funeral companies have sought to participate in moral and infrastructural conversations around death, moving beyond purveyance of funeral and burial-related goods and services towards claims to effecting social good through projects such as a Virtual Reality heritage conservation game featuring a funeral parlor shuttered for land redevelopment. This dissertation explores contestations over how the matter, taboo, and stigma of death are managed, with ethnographic focus between 2015 and 2025 when discursive conditions of death have been radically shifting. It centers multimodal and arts-based methods to explore death and grief on personal and national historical scales.