The Phenomenology of Ethnicity: A Singapore Case-Study

One possible approach towards understanding the topical relevance of the CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others) racial categories in Singaporean eveiyday life is to focus on a small group of individuals and describe how they make sense of ethnicity in particular situations. A three-generational family which is characterized by inter-racial marriages has been chosen to illustrate this approach. Choosing a family whose members find identification with one of the CMIO categories ambiguous, if not problematic, raises new insights and issues concerning two complex processes: first, how family members negotiate their ethnic identities, and second, how the institutional ization of ethnicity has affected this process over time.