Faizah Zakaria

FAIZAH ZAKARIA is a historian of Southeast Asia, interested in the intersections of religion and ecology. A post-doctoral fellow at the time of this interview, she is currently an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University.

In this conversation, we discussed:

Faizah's journey from Math teacher to historian
Southeast Asia's transition from animism to monotheism, and its impact on "more-than-human" relationships
what environmental history can teach us about climate change

This conversation was conducted in 2018 and has been lightly edited for clarity.

JY 00:08

Hi everyone, I'm the co-host of Lecture Theatre, a new podcast that aims to bridge the humanities in Singapore with wider public life. With us today we have Faizah Zakaria, a historian at the Nanynag Technological University who focuses on the connection between environmental and religious history. Welcome, Faizah and thank you for being with us.

Faizah 00:32

It's good to be here.

JY 00:33

So please tell us more about your life story. How did you become a historian and get to where you are today?

Faizah 00:38

I am a very normal Singaporean. I grew up in a normal lower middle class household. And I think being a historian never really entered into into my worldview—only very much later in my life. So I was first a teacher, and I taught mathematics in a junior college. Teaching and introducing students to the broader region through co-curricular activities—I got interested in the history of religion in particular. I remember a moment where we were standing in a genocide museum in Cambodia, and I'm sort of really unable to explain anything of what was going or how we actually got to a mountain of skulls in a rice field. So that sort of feeling of ignorance about the region for me led me to read more about it, and to learn more about it and move towards thinking about how we got here, as a country. So that was where history came into the picture. I was very lucky, sort of to be able to go on after my teaching career to pursue a Master's and then a PhD.

JY 02:01

So you were a math teacher before? What was it like transitioning from teaching to academia, and from mathematics to history?

Faizah 02:12

I think it's it's a process in which you sort of become less attuned to differences between disciplines. So I think of mathematics as a problem-solving method, in a way, and this carries over to how I think about the humanities. You start with a particular question. And you think of approaches on how you are meant to answer these questions historical sources. Sothe the way in which you move from one field to another, it's not as intimidating, if you think of it in terms of research and what you want to learn rather than the conventions of particular disciplines and the boundaries.

JY 03:11

So what sort of questions have you been interested in as a historian?

Faizah 03:15

I think my research, because of my interdisciplinary background, has been rather eclectic. So I would say that two main themes that bring together my research would be idea of rites and ideas of kinship. So what I'm interested in is thinking about who and what has been given rights in societies—for humans, as well as non-humans And another thing is related to who we perceive as our kin. And who do we perceive as being related to us— who is inside and on the outside? So these different configurations, which is bound up in ideas of political power, as well as social structures—I think these became part of what ties together a lot of things I am researching. And it started with thinking about a particular moments of violence in Southeast Asian history in that Cambodian ricefield—genocide. And then moving on to a similar episode in Indonesia, which was my master's project.

JY 04:29

So you're currently doing a postdoc, and you're working on revising a dissertation into a book. So tell us more about your forthcoming book and what your project is about.

Faizah 04:39

It's a very different project from what I started with in my master's. So when I first came to Yale, I was thinking about writing about a history of the Indonesian political left, and it became clear I think once you delve into the sources that a lot of that history is related to the idea of how you shape land rights. And so I started thinking about the cultural and social histories of how land came to be allocated or resources came to be extracted. And that led me to environmental history. So the question which I'm thinking about is to recover the history of how the transition occurred from animism to monotheism in the region. So what I'm examining is the case of North Sumatra in the 19th century, where there were mass conversions from animism to Christianity and Islam. And I look at that as a window in which we can examine the idea of different ideas of nature, and how the ways in which the different religious values impacted the interactions with the environment, and contextualize that with the landscape changes that would happen.

JY 06:16

So one of the things that struck me when reading about your project is the term "more- than-human relationships" as a subject of your study. So how do you go about finding sources to investigate those relationships?

Faizah 06:32

I think, firstly, to think about defining more-than-human and looking at connections in which humans become embedded in an ecological system where we're not the primary or even the only agents. And there are two dimensions. So this one is sort of the materialist aspect in which we are impacted by our environment. And the second is the sort of affective aspect in which we think about how you represent various elements of the natural world and how we think about them. So when we talk about sources to analyze these phenomena, then what we would be concerned with would be looking at, firstly, scientific sources for the sort of materialist changes that's happening. So what is happening to the soil? What is happening to population of elephants, for example? A lot of that intersects with the interests of biologists as well as environmental scientists. And as historians, we are not environmental studies. We don't take a similar approach. What we're doing is we're looking at the research that they have done and putting together those those pieces into a set of broader social political contexts that historians are familiar with, and are working to recover as well. So in that sense, we can understand these changes, not just in terms of just what is happening to one specific discrete population, but to the system as they are connected. A second set of sources would relate to representation. So here, art, literature, oral histories, stories become very important, because they emit the kind of ideas. For me, for this project, in particular, I think the prayer manuscripts, or spells that were chanted by shamans, for example, become a useful source. Not just as a way of kind of looking at, oh, this is a peculiar thing that we used to do in the past, but also seeing how appeals to spirits are related to the ways in which you choose what to cut down or what to extract or how you deal with particular animals. That provides us a different perspective into what we already know about history.

JY 09:22

And so did you travel to archives in Sumatra to locate your sauces? What was the research process like?

Faizah 09:32

My research is carried out in four main sites, starting with the collections in Britain and Holland, where many of the manuscripts of the past had been brought over. And there are copies of them. And transliterating some of the more pertinent ones. And I think when I was looking into this, to give it a sense of focus, I focussed on particular families. So families that were known to have shamans of particular charisma, and looking into the private collections that's available in Malaysia and Indonesia. That enabled me to pull out the family stories as a context. There were some really peculiar sources. For example, I got this particular shaman's divination of dreams. When you get that sort of source, and then you pull it out, you think about not only what is written there, as in, "oh, this is what this means, and so on." But, "why would anyone want to use this?" You just go back from there. So it really depends. It's kind of a chase down a rabbit hole.

JY 11:21

This is really a global project, and just incredibly ambitious. And I think the title of your book is going to be Spiritual Anthropocene. So in a sentence or two, can you sum up your big conclusion? Your big finding?

Faizah 11:40

So the title of the book is Spiritual Anthropocene: An Ecology of Conversions in a Maritime Southeast Asian Uplands. The key finding of the book is the the minds of the shaman class is about disenchantment of particularly trees and megafauna. And the the idea of environmentalism in Southeast Asia cannot really be separated from the religion of the indigenous people. And it's something that is important to understand as we're moving into a period in which we think about how religion may play a part in helping to sort of bolster the values of protecting the environment.

JY 12:42

So how do you see that play out today? And in the future? How does this history inform current debates about climate change?

Faizah 12:53

I think for climate change, specifically, it's important to see that the impacts are visible in a very visceral way in the region, in terms of the different weather patterns, in terms of crops, and in terms of the loss of biodiversity. So what we are at now, or where we're at now is that we are in a place where we are thinking about what can we do about it? And a lot of that intersects with, how can we? How can we as individuals play a role in this? So where I see sort of my project of contributing to this conversation is in thinking about what kind of values are we holding on to, that lead us to have particular ways of life?

So the 20th century is marked by progressive moves towards modernization and modern societies and, and thinking about history in this particular way. But if we think about the ways in which animism and this "backward" religion has moved to something else—not to think of it asmorphing into something that's a more modern religion—but to think about what kind of losses that came with that transition, then we should reevaluate the lifestyle that we're living. And I'm not saying that there's a lot of ways in which you could turn off the clock, and let's go back to the 19th century, but we need to understand that if we move away from this narrative of progress, what kind of life could we lead in a different way? And I'm sort of hoping that in a more of immediate sense, we could rethink policies about the marginalization of indigenous peoples in the region, because I think a lot of that is related to the idea that they are somehow more backward because they still cling on to a particular forest space.

JY 15:30

So I can't wait to read your book. Bo pressure! What has it been like rewriting the dissertation?

Faizah 15:44

I'm struggling to shape everything into pithy sentences. The biggest challenge is pulling together a very unwieldy set of sources and, and a lot of moving parts— the political and social context, the personal family stories, and then the story of the environment itself and what's happening. And pulling them to a very tight narrative. That's something that I'm still trying to work on it in a coherent way. The challenge is also to not see this as a 19th century story. That's true for any historian—to bring out the relevance of this period of history to what we're facing today, without letting our current situation color the interpretation of sources. And that's something I'm still working on as well.

JY 16:53

So I guess that's always the tough balance in being a historian. This could be a good moment for us to just segue into talking about academic life in general and being a historian. You have now spent a lot of time in three institutions. So you were a PhD student at Yale, and before, a Masters students at NUS, and you're now a postdoc. You've spent time, too, on a fellowship in Cornell. So all of these have been major centers of Southeast Asian Studies, historically. So what has that experience been like, and how is the study of Southeast Asian history different in each of these institutions?

Faizah 17:43

I think that it's important to realize that each institution is formed for particular reasons for particular audiences. So I started in NUS, and I think with NUS, being located in the region, you can sense a sort of immediacy to the way research is approached here. There's always a very pragmatic slant to what is supported, and I think it's a strength as well as a challenge, because what NUS needs to do is to be able to generate research that is fruitful for the region. And that's why scholars from around the region get together in NUS. So there is no need to sort of justify why we are here in reverse.

And I think that's a very important sort of starting point, and it's different when you move overseas. And then come to a different context where Southeast Asia is sort of, at the periphery of the discipline or in a particular department. And at Yale, I think there's so many resources and so much expertise there. But the interest in Southeast Asia in particular is is not as part of a region, but as piece to think about bigger themes, for example, democratization, or environmental change, and so on. So there is a sense I think when you move to move to a different audience that it's not enough just to say that you are interested in Southeast Asia. You have to be interested in Southeast Asia for something that is important for the rest of the world. And it's also a good way in which the field is pushed forward to interact with global as well as international history. And I think that's what I find more striking. And that's what's different about Yale in particular, and that's different from NUS. I think Cornell strikes that balance between the two. They have taken scholars from within the region and trained them in the techniques of reading sources or doing research in the region. And then scholars from Cornell and Yale move back to the region—and there is a great deal interaction. And I think there's more consciousness in the Cornell community about that. That sort of exchange as opposed to Yale. Because Yale is a rich institution, I think that is something that that they can move towards.

JY 20:55

And what has it been being Muslim woman academic, in both Singapore and the US?

Faizah 21:01

As a Muslim woman, you sort of expect things to happen to you. But most of the time, it doesn't really work out that way, which is great. And I think as a Muslim woman from Singapore, and then coming to the US to study, there's actually not that much difference between being a minority in Singapore and being a minority in the US. And I think I came at a particular time where the political discourse in in the US was particularly polarizing, along identity lines. But in the university itself, at both Yale and Cornell, I don't feel that this has impacted interpersonal relationships on an individual level. It's just something that you become aware of, when it's translated in terms of particular assumptions about what you're doing. So I think the hardest thing that I had to deal with is sort of debunking this view that I am only interested in what's happening in the Muslim world, which is just not the case at all. So there's this implicit assumption that you're studying the Middle East, if you wear a hijab. But I think with with greater conversation and communication, I think in both Singapore as well as the US, people are open to changing their minds.

JY 22:47

And of course, one thing that struck me is how profoundly transnational your interests are. And even though your project is situaed in Southeast Asia, it just has global reach.

Faizah 22:59

Thank you. That comes across eventually in the book. And that can transcend my presentation as a Muslim woman. So yeah, I think it's important, for anyone who is a Muslim woman, and who's contemplating studying overseas, to expect questions, and not to be afraid to engage. And I think with greater engagement, even though the questions may be comfortable, we can move forward more productively.

JY 23:46

So you're going to be starting an assistant professorship at NTU in the fall of 2019. So what are you looking forward to?

Faizah 23:57

I think it's exciting to go back to teaching after a very long break. The research process, while exciting in its way, is also rather isolating. And I look forward to the interactions on an everyday level with students and faculty that can bring you out of your own research shell, and maybe be generative in its own way. I mean, there's a lot of opportunities—I think NTU is developing various programs and institutions that is going to bring the study of humanities in different directions in Singapore. Particularly, I think, there is an institute for the the study of humanities and the sciences. So I think those sorts of intiatives will be something I'm looking forward to contributing to. And hopefully promote conversations that will make history relevant to Singapore, not just in terms of thinking about just Singapore history, but Singapore as part of this world.

JY 25:18

So one last question, what do you think your next project would be? What would you think you'd be studying in 10 years time?

Faizah 25:27

I am a lot more excited about my next project than my current one! If you are interested in doing your PhD, you really have to be prepared to stick with it for the next 10 years or so. And while you're doing it, you'll get lots of exciting new ideas. So what I would like to move on into the past—it gets further back in the past— I would like to write of history of power from the from earliest times. Power being looking at the ways in which energy is transmitted and looking at renewable energy, ending up with renewable energy Not just electircal power. So in terms of what I'm focusing on, it would be actually volcanoes and the ideas of powers associated with volcanoes. And that sort of generative power kind of morphing into electricity, and then now to geothermal renewable energy. And what does that history tell us about different ideas of power? And how can we power our future? That would be something I'm thinking about. That would also bring in, I think, ideas of power from culture and religion into a materialist energy cycle, that would allow us to think about what what kind of energy can can be productive for the Southeast Asia region and can bring us together.

JY 27:14

That's going to be fascinating. And we will have to do another episode when we get to that . But thank you so much for being with us today. To our listeners out there, that's Faizah Zakaria, a scholar of Southeast Asian, environmental and religious history. Stay tuned for the next episode of Lecture Theatre.

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