ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for the efficacy of weddings as sites for understanding ethnicity-making amongst Chinese Singaporeans. Sociological studies of wedding rituals confirm the wedding to be a significant and worthwhile unit of analysis. At the same time however, many of these studies focus on Judeo-Christian ‘Western’-weddings that take place in the United States or the United Kingdom. The entanglement of different everyday lives is rooted in the consociative activities that construct weddings. Consociation is defined as social interactions between individuals that create shared experiences and a sense of groupness and ‘community’. Spontaneous changes to pre-planned events in weddings are exposed in the way some rituals are negotiated on the spot, making them fluid in their execution and application. Material practices, their intersections, and their outwards-facing performative attributes all contribute to exposing us to the social intimacies and distances that individuals make or maintain in their everyday lives, or in other words, their social trajectories.
