HEAT ADAPTATION STRATEGIES AND THE FORMATION OF HAWKER HABITUS AMONGST SINGAPORE'S HAWLERS
VOON JUNG
VOON JUNG
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Abstract
Singapore is becoming increasingly hot. So are its hawker centres. Current scholarship on heat and hawker centres focuses on the technical and environmental realms, neglecting the social elements in their analyses. Sociopolitical literature about hawkers and hawker centres, on the other hand, centres mostly the hawker centre and hawker food as sites of inquiry, but rarely hawkers and their work conditions. This thesis seeks to reconcile both the above issues by asking how the type and nature of hawker labour impacts hawkers physically and mentally. I look into how hawkers embody and negotiate heat the strongest and most pervasive sensation in the hawker stall. Next, I address how the nature of hawker work changes the way hawkers view themselves and their vocation. In synthesising the two, I present the hawker habitus a conceptual synthesisation of the hawker s disposition and embodied identity in response to the field of hawker work they find themselves in. To answer these questions, I engage in qualitative research, combining participant observation and in-depth interviews whilst attending to a sensory approach. I combine fieldnotes, visual presentation, and interlocutors testimonies to more deeply and richly represent hawkers narrative identities, the heat-dominated sensory world that they inhabit, and the spatial sensory work that they undertake to cope with work. Doing this reveals that a thorough investigation of how hawkers embody and negotiate heat is crucial to understanding hawkers, in both their self narratives and their work.
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2024-04-25
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