Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: South-East Asian Connections: Art, History and Archipelagos
Teren Sevea and Faizah Zakaria, Love, Desire, and Death: Charms from Islamicate Southeast Asia
Thursday, November 13, 2025, 6:30pm
Pondering on themes of love, desire, birth, and death, Faizah Zakaria and Teren Sevea explore a selection of Islamicate materials from Southeast Asian settlements, themselves fertile sites of the intersections of 'globalized' and 'localized' Islam. Drawing on their research into everyday religious practices, Zakaria and Sevea discuss how these performances negotiate boundaries between multiple religious traditions and shape Islamicate identities in ordinary spaces related to production and reproduction. Their discussion extends to Malay manuscript traditions from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, introducing charms and manuals that systematized knowledge about how bodies were marked in nature, offering signs and resources for human socio-sexual welfare while highlighting communities devoted to bodily pleasures, engagement, and discipline. The presentations consider how such Islamicate materials provide insight into communities conscious of their esoteric practices, communal boundaries, complex religio-sexual rituals and seemingly rigid gendered identities.
Bios
Teren Sevea is a scholar of Islam and Islamic societies across the Indian Ocean world. Sevea is the author of Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya, which received the 2022 Harry J.Benda Prize, awarded by the Association of Asian Studies.
Faizah Zakaria is an assistant professor 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. Her first monograph The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia was published by University of Washington Press in 2023; it won the Harry J. Benda Prize in 2025 and was shortlisted for best book in social science by the European Society for Southeast Asian Studies in 2024. She is currently working on a research project on community responses to natural disasters and co-coordinates a digital humanities project on comparative Asian medicine. She received a PhD in history from Yale University in 2018.
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