Singapore has earned the reputation of being a clean and corrupt-free economic and technological forerunner in Southeast Asia. The country’s popularity grew shifting the nation’s position from a ‘Developing Third-World Nation’ to that of ‘Developed Nation’ under the strong one party authoritarian government, the People’s Action Party (PAP) in a span of four decades. This achievement was carefully planned since independence from the British in 1965. The PAP with its series of social re-engineering programs has been in the process of reconstructing a new identity for its people. This paper examines whether it has been successful or not. With this in mind, I examine the extent of cultural paradigm shifts that Singapore has gone through resulting in a hybrid cultural identities.

Looking particularly at the Malays in Singapore, this paper asks if this new hybrid status has differentiated the ethnic groups in Singapore from their counterparts in the neighbouring countries and examines if and how Malays are coming to terms with this hybrid identity. I ask if this cultural hybridity is a result of acculturation and if it has changed the social status of Malays in Singapore among the other ethnic groups. The paper will apply Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘Habitus’, Homi Bhabha’s ‘Ambivalence’ and Benedict Anderson’s ‘Imagined Communities’ using fieldwork over the span of two years with two prominent Singaporean Malay theatre groups.

Keywords

• Cultural Hybridity
• cultural diversity
• cultural identity
• ethnic identity
• national identity

(30 min. Conference Paper, English)