Join us for a virtual discussion with Faizah Zakaria, author of The Camphor Tree and the Elephant and winner of the 2025 Benda Prize. This virtual conversation is open to the broader public, and is hosted by GETSEA.

All participants should read the Introduction and Chapter 1.

The Camphor Tree and the Elephant offers a striking rethinking of the Anthropocene in Southeast Asia, tracing how religious transformation, from animism to Islam and Christianity, reshaped human relationships to the environment in the nineteenth-century Sumatran highlands and Malay world. Drawing on ethnography, oral traditions, and colonial archives, Zakaria shows how cosmological change, colonial governance, and plantation economies together produced new ways of imagining and exploiting nature.

The Community Book Read is structured as a live, discussion-based conversation with the author, with Juno Salazar Parreñas as discussant, bringing together faculty and graduate students from across institutions. Coming in with at least some familiarity with the text makes a real difference. Even reading the introduction and first chapter will give you enough to engage meaningfully.

Register here: https://get-sea.org/events/