1 This is the originally submitted English-language text of an article published in Czech translation as: Benjamin, Geoffrey. 1996. ‘Sociologie Singapurská.’ In: H. Maříková, M. Petrušek & A. Vodáková (eds), Velký Sociologický Slovník, Charles University, Prague: Karolinum, vol. 2: 1140–1142. [A download of the Czech version is appended.] Singapore sociology Geoffrey BENJAMIN (2 April 1991) Origins of sociology in Singapore Sociology had little prominence in Singapore before the mid-1960’s. A few foreign researchers had carried out empirical work on the Chinese and Malay communities in the 1950’s; among these was Maurice Freedman, later to become Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University. “Social studies” was included in the courses offered at both Nanyang University (NU) and the University of Singapore (SU), the direct ancestors of the present National University of Singapore (NUS). An internationally well-regarded Dutch-trained sociologist, Syed Hussein Alatas, had introduced a sociological bias to teaching and research in the Department of Malay Studies that he headed for many years at SU and NUS. However, these various activities did not in themselves establish a local sociological tradition or a body of indigenous sociologists. Sociology emerged as an autonomous field only in 1965, with the setting up of a full Department at SU. (Except where otherwise stated, the rest of this article refers solely to the activities of this department and to its lineal successor at NUS.) The foundation professor was Murray Groves, an Australian social anthropologist who instilled a concern for methodological rigour that still marks much of Singaporean sociology. Several of the first batch of students and two of Groves’s faculty appointees were, by the late 1980s, among the senior teachers of sociology in Singapore. Groves was succeeded in 1971 by Hans-Dieter Evers, a German sociologist who had studied in the USA and done much field research in Southeast Asia. Before he returned to Germany in 1974, Evers oversaw a considerable expansion in the range of interests covered by the Department of Sociology, and did much to stimulate empirical research. The Working Papers series, founded by him in 1972 to further these aims (see below), still serves as an important repository of the Department’s research findings and, more recently, of its sociological thinking. A German connection has continued over the years through the appointment of relatively senior scholars as visiting professors: this helped to leaven the NUS Department’s heavily empirical orientation with a concern for wider theoretical issues. At Nanyang University, Sociology became available as part of a mixed degree program from 1976, but no full department was ever founded there before the university itself was merged with the University of Singapore. Sociological orientations Sociology in Singapore emerged as an exogenous, mainly American, creature. Local and regional influences had little to do with its theoretical shaping during the early years, despite the wholly regional and local orientation of the empirical work that was done. Between 1965