Nation Building: The Peranakan Collection and Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Abstract

This case-study investigates whether it is valid to argue that the museological practices of the Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM), as manifested in the exhibition The Peranakan Legacy (1999–2006) and in the subsequent Peranakan museum (2008 to present), are limited to projecting officially endorsed storylines, or whether the museum has been able to portray multiple stories about the Peranakan community and their material culture. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, the study considers the genesis and context of the ACM within the social structures in which it operates. This approach allows for consideration of the generative reproduction of Singapore’s colonial structures, such as the prevailing doxa on race, manifested in the organising principle of the ACM’s Empress Place Museum with its racially defined galleries addressing Chinese, Malay/Islamic and Indian ancestral cultures. Analysing the ACM as a field in which the curatorial team (informed by their habitus) in combination with various forms of capital are at play, exposes the relationships between macro structures (state policy and economic drivers) and the micro operations (day-to-day decisions of the curatorial team at work on Peranakan exhibitions). Through this analysis the study argues that the Peranakans’ refusal to support Singapore’s bid to join the Malay Federation resulted in their political and cultural marginalization. However, the Peranakan community’s legacy, consisting of unique, internationally prized material artefacts, presented ACM museum professionals with a compelling case to promote the community in this state-run museum. The study asserts that through these ACM exhibitions ACM museum professionals effectively repositioned the once disgraced Peranakan community in multiple ways: tentatively as an invaluable aspect of Singapore national cultural capital, as a galvanising symbol to encourage greater harmony between Singapore’s distinct racial groups and confidently as the source of a depoliticized collection of aesthetic artefacts within a newly defined canon of Southeast Asian art.