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Modern Singapore has been a focus of contact between the three cultural blocs of China, India, and Indonesia, and between Orient and Occident. Asian migrants came as laborers, artisans, and entrepreneurs; the much smaller European migrant group introduced western economic and administrative institutions. Subsequent modernization and development, necessitating improved coordination and development of all resources, has been hampered by substantial cultural divergences relating to economic and social practice and attitude. Contrasting cultural patterns are commonly identified with ethnic differences and can most readily be analyzed on this basis; the ethnic data utilized in this paper serve to highlight significant cultural differences which are only gradually breaking down despite sustained locational contiguity and the unifying force of political independence within, and subsequently outside the Federation of Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on religious organization and economic process in Indonesia. A major by-product of the analysis of the factors making for, or impeding, economic development in the so-called underdeveloped countries of the world is the discovery of religious or other ideological forms of human motivation that shape the cultural specifics of their concepts of welfare and betterment in the production process. In that part of the world where the advanced features of the modern Western market economy and its industrial and financial ancillaries are still relatively novel imports, types of religio-familistic organization still prevail which, with varying degrees of effectiveness, dominate economic life. This paper seeks to illustrate this contention by three examples from the Indonesian sphere: the village and its various territorial and genealogical affiliations; the Islamic sacred foundations; and the altar associations of the Indonesian Chinese. Although the data are limited to Indonesia, it is believed that they have relevance for a wider area.