Organizer: Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium
Type/Location: Virtual
Description:
Join the Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium for a community book read with Dr. Faizah Zakaria, Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, author of The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia, and winner of the 2025 Benda Prize. Dr. Juno Salazar Parreñas, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, will moderate the discussion.
About the Book:
What is the role of religion in shaping interactions and relations between the human and nonhuman in nature? Why are Muslim and Christian organizations generally not a potent force in Southeast Asian environmental movements? The Camphor Tree and the Elephant brings these questions into the history of ecological change in the region, centering the roles of religion and colonialism in shaping the Anthropocene—“the human epoch.”
Historian Faizah Zakaria traces the conversion of the Batak people in upland Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula to Islam and Christianity during the long nineteenth century. She finds that the process helped shape social structures that voided the natural world of enchantment, ushered in a cash economy, and placed the power to remake local landscapes into the hands of a distant elite. Using a wide array of sources such as family histories, prayer manuscripts, and folktales in tandem with colonial and ethnographic archives, Zakaria brings everyday religion and its far-flung implications into our understanding of the environmental history of the modern world.
About the Author:
Dr. Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor holding a joint appointment in the Departments of Southeast Asian Studies and Malay Studies at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests center on religion and ecology, environmental justice and indigenous movements in island Southeast Asia. She is the author of The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia(University of Washington Press, 2023), which was awarded the Harry J. Benda Prize(2025) and was also been shortlisted for Euroseas Social Science Book Prize (2024). Her work has been published in various journals including Indonesia and the Malay World, Journal of Social History and Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society and she has contributed to several field-defining edited volumes including the upcoming New Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (ed. Barbara Andaya, Miriam Stark, Leonard Andaya and Robert Cribb).
Registration:
To attend the event virtually, please register here.