ABSTRACT
Introduction: The social distance project To understand the relationship between individual piety and social distancing, we formulated the ‘Social Distance Project’. The literature suggested that the greater the piety of the individual, the more likely he or she would prefer to keep a safe distance from the religiously impure for fear of contamination. Given that contemporary Singapore is modern, secular and multicultural, there would be some aspects of public life which would be deemed to be religiously impure by the pious. These would include public dining establishments, public schools and even interpersonal relations with, for lack of a better term, non-believers. Public dining establishments might contain elements which would be perfectly acceptable to some religions but at the same time prohibited by other religions. Public schools, as they are completely secular, might not provide a proper religious environment for the student. And finally, interpersonal relations, which might include dating and marriage, with non-believers or people of other religions might again conflict with the teachings of the religion and be viewed as being impure. If public dining, attending public schools and interacting with non-believers might threaten religious purity for pious individuals, then it might follow that these individuals would choose to avoid such situations altogether. Thus, piety could possibly lead to social distancing, where the individual intentionally seeks to be apart from the impure. As we have suggested in the opening chapter of this book, if individuals choose to remain apart from the rest of society that is multicultural and secular, then a situation of enclavement might take place, where groups of people do not socially interact with other groups. This in turn would create Furnivall’s archetypal ‘plural society’ (1956), where groups only have economic ties within the marketplace but no social relations with each other. Worse still would be a situation when groups have no contact with each other, not even economic, resulting in a situation of separate ghettoes. Ultimately, plural societies are more likely to be threatened by social instability and inter-group conflict, because the distance between the groups would be more likely to lead to competition and suspicion rather than trust and understanding.
