What can the history of Islamic Singapore teach us about one of the most important eras of Indian Ocean connectivity? And what do Islamic traditions in Southeast Asia reveal about everyday ethics for living responsibly on a damaged planet and navigating our relationship with the more-than-human world?

These are some of the questions Teren Sevea, the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School, explores in his research. Sevea recently completed his residency as a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia at APARC. A scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in South and Southeast Asia, he investigates the region’s distinctive Islamic practices and intellectual traditions, revealing both its centrality to the study of Islam and the reasons it has often been marginalized within the field, despite its vast Muslim populations.

We spoke with Sevea about his work and fellowship experience at APARC. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Could you describe your research briefly?

Very briefly, I’m close to finishing a monograph on Islamic Singapore and the Sufi networks that connected this port city to Muslim and non-Muslim communities across the Indian Ocean world, from its revival as a British port right up to the present. At the same time, I’m developing a second project on land, extraction, and natural resources, where I look at how multispecies religious worlds – which include animals, trees, waters, and spirits – offer different ways of thinking about ethics, vulnerability, and what it means to live through times of climate crisis.

What initially drew you to these topics, and how did you develop your methods?

I’m trained in history and anthropology, and these projects really emerged from a worry that the histories I was reading – and sometimes writing – were too narrow. By focusing on certain texts, elites, and official archives, these histories risked overlooking the working-class believers, community‑based scholars, and the graves, ruins, trees, animals, and waters that sustain devotional life. So my methods have become necessarily interdisciplinary and site‑centered. I read multilingual texts and study official documents and elites, but also sit at shrines, in cemeteries, on coastal edges, and in plantations, listening to oral traditions, dreams, and visions, and paying close attention to the research practices of community‑based scholars and caretakers of the landscapes I study.

In my project on multispecies religious worlds, I’ve tried to extend this approach to track how communities’ accounts of charismatic animals, trees, groves, rocks, and islands help us think about ecological responsibility in an age of rapid development, industrial expansion, climate catastrophe, and faith in technological “fixes.” This has pushed me to learn from interviews, environmental histories, flood narratives, and what I have called interspecies communities.

What challenges have you encountered in studying this topic?

One of the challenges is that the histories I study are often deliberately forgotten or actively erased. Graves are relocated or demolished, ruins are converted into “useful” secular spaces, interspecies communities are displaced by development, and the archives of working‑class believers and community‑based scholars are fragile and dispersed. In certain Southeast Asian settings, the practices and sites I study have also been treated as superstitious or as “not really Islam,” which shapes how they are documented – or not documented – both bureaucratically and academically.

Another challenge is a methodological one. Much of my work relies on community‑based scholarship, popular histories, oral traditions, dreams, visions, and other stories that are supposedly not easily translatable into standard scholarly categories. The question for me, though, has not been whether to “believe” them or not, but how to learn from them. How do we, for instance, write histories that take seriously trees that bleed and overturn bulldozers, or animal saints and ancestors who enforce ethical codes, without reducing them to fantastical allegory on the one hand or romanticizing them on the other?

Finally, there is the challenge of working across scales. I am always moving between very local sites across Southeast Asia – graveyards, mangrove forests, crocodile ponds, palm oil estates – and global processes: colonial hunting regimes, plantation capitalism, petrochemical infrastructures, climate departure, and technocratic fantasies of overcoming the climate crisis. Holding these together, while remaining grounded in the voices of community‑based scholars, caretakers of these sites, and devotional communities, is demanding but, I think, necessary.

How has your time at APARC supported your research?

My fellowship at APARC has really allowed me to place Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia much more firmly within broader conversations on Asia and the Pacific. It has given me the time and space to finish my monograph on Islamic Singapore, while also thinking seriously about how questions of land, extraction, and resource futures in Southeast Asia resonate with debates across the region. Practically, APARC has given me access to an extraordinary community of scholars working on politics, economics, demography, human rights, political and comparative sociology, social movements, globalization, and political economy, as well as climate, energy, migration, and religion.

Conversations here have sharpened my thinking about technofixes and “green developmentalism” – from Singapore’s petrochemical complexes and reclaimed islands to the shifting of Indonesia’s capital to East Kalimantan – and about how to foreground vulnerability and multispecies responsibility in these discussions. It has also pushed me to reframe my materials for different audiences: not only historians of Islam or Southeast Asia, but scholars of climate, religion, environment, and contemporary Asia more broadly, who are grappling with similar questions from very different sites and through very different approaches.

Discussions with APARC colleagues I have learned from have moved across so many themes: the ethics of representing vulnerable communities in climate research, the politics of palm oil and coal, how to think about interspecies responsibility alongside state-led sustainability agendas, but also migration and development, transnationalism and diaspora, labor and governance, care work and health, children and youth, legacies of the 1947 Partition of South Asia, Singapore’s governance, the state of higher education and its pressures, and the precarious lives of migrant and transient workers in Southeast Asia. We also talked a lot about the Bay Area itself as a site in its own right.

Many of these exchanges have unfolded in multilingual conversations that drift very naturally between scholarship and everyday life. That has reminded me how tightly intellectual and everyday life are braided together. It has been a real privilege to be in a community where so many people are thinking about overlapping questions of environment, religion, political economy, migration, and social change in Asia, and to learn from students who bring their own experiences – from Jakarta’s and Karachi’s floods to Singapore’s “garden city” – into the room. In many ways, being here has felt like a truly Asian experience, but one unfolding in the Bay Area.

Have you discovered anything surprising while you were here?

What has surprised me most is how deeply these seemingly “local” stories I work with – about environments in maritime Southeast Asia – have resonated with scholars here who focus on very different places and issues. Colleagues and students have generously responded by sharing their own “tree stories,” “animal stories,” flood memories, or accounts of sacred animals and groves from other parts of Asia and beyond.

I have also been struck by how quickly conversations here turn to technofixes: mechanical trees, negative‑emissions technologies, desalination plants, and “smart” eco‑cities. Encountering these discussions up close, within a community that is rigorously engaged with policy and practice, has sharpened my sense that there is a real need to tell other kinds of stories: stories that foreground vulnerability as situated and context-specific, that ask whose futures are being secured or sacrificed, and that insist on multispecies response‑ability rather than relying only on technological rescue. Those exchanges have been some of the most intellectually and personally rewarding moments of my time at APARC and Stanford.

Living in the Bay Area has also opened up new dimensions of my research. It has enriched my work on anti-colonial, revolutionary, left‑wing connections between Singapore, Java, Burma, and the Bay Area itself. I had not expected, before coming here, to be pursuing research at religious sites in the Bay Area as part of this project. 

What is your advice to young scholars in your field?

I doubt I am one to offer advice – I am mostly in the business of receiving it. But if pressed, I might say a few things.

Firstly, try to listen very carefully to the people and places you work with, including the non-human ones. Let scholars from the communities you study, their caretakers, storytellers, animals, trees, and waters unsettle your concepts and teach you more than you expected to learn. For those working on religion and ecology, it helps to be suspicious of ready‑made binaries – monotheism versus “animism” or “nature worship,” religion versus environment, indigenous versus cosmopolitan – that flatten lifeworlds grounded in multispecies relatedness and kinship.

Secondly, consider taking communities’ histories, oral traditions, dreams, and visions seriously as forms of knowledge and research practice, even when they do not sit easily within disciplinary expectations. At the same time, be reflexive about your own position, your archives, and your responsibilities to the communities you write about, and be rigorous about how you document, interpret, and present those materials.

Thirdly – and this I can say with a bit more certainty – do not be afraid of interdisciplinarity. To understand Islamic Singapore, charismatic animals, or climate vulnerability in Jakarta and Karachi, I have needed history, anthropology, religious studies, environmental humanities, and sometimes hydrology, forestry, and energy politics. Let the questions you ask guide you across disciplinary lines, and be willing to speak to area studies and to broader debates on politics, environment, and society in Asia and beyond.

Introduction and Contribution:

Gossip — sharing information, both positive and negative, about absent third parties — plays a major role in social life. Two friends spread a rumor about their neighbor’s infidelity, an employee’s hard work is praised at a manager's meeting, and so on. 

From an evolutionary standpoint, however, the origins and proliferation of gossip are somewhat puzzling. Not only is it costly — acquiring personal information, sharing it with others, perhaps risking ostracism for being a yenta — but the evolutionary benefits are not clear. Indeed, gossiping may be entertaining, but it seems like a stretch to think it could improve human adaptation, let alone survival.

In “Explaining the evolution of gossip,” Xinyue Pan, Vincent Hsiao, Dana S. Naub, and Michele J. Gelfand conduct a series of computer simulations to model the gossiping process and shed light on the benefits it generates for both society and gossipers. The authors posit two such benefits that help explain its evolution: First, gossip spreads information about others’ reputations, helping people identify those who will (not) cooperate with them. Second, gossip reduces selfishness, as those who otherwise would not cooperate will choose to do so with gossipers in order to manage their reputations. These are called the “reputation dissemination” and “selfishness deterrence” functions, respectively.

Readers come away with a sense of the power of agent-based modeling to solidify our intuitions about complex social processes. Indeed, gossip involves dynamics of communication, cooperation, geographical proximity, as well as both personal and collective gain. Models help simplify these dynamics. In addition, the authors illustrate how an ostensibly non-strategic activity has very important strategic dynamics and implications. 

The Simulation Setup:

Agents in the simulation develop a strategy based on two decisions: whether or not to gossip and how exactly to cooperate with other agents. The former is a binary choice, whereas the latter permits six choices. Of these six, three are especially important: The “exploitive” agent is one who only chooses to cooperate if they believe their partner cannot easily be taken advantage of in the game. In other words, exploiters condition their choice on the other agent’s reputation. Next, the “virtuous” agent cooperates if it believes the other agent will and otherwise defects. Finally, the “opportunist” agent will only cooperate with gossipers and never with non-gossipers.
 

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Figure 2b. Plot (B) illustrates an agent’s action as a function of their own strategy and their belief about the interaction partner’s strategy.

The other three cooperation strategies are as follows: “unconditional defectors” and “unconditional cooperators” are, as the names imply, insensitive to information about others’ reputations. Meanwhile, “reverse opportunists” only cooperate with non-gossipers and never with gossipers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors will show that agents tend to discard these three strategies over time. If gossip is, in fact, beneficial from an evolutionary standpoint, then both cooperative and gossiping strategies must increase over time.

To model the gossiping process requires that agents respond to new information and update their strategies accordingly. This will help them maximize their success and avoid being exploited by others. Information can thus be obtained in two ways: either agents observe each other’s behavior during the game and use it to infer their strategy, or information is disseminated to them via gossip.

The simulation proceeds in three steps. First, agents play a “cooperation game,” whereby each player simultaneously decides whether to cooperate or defect. (The rules are as follows for two agents, A and B: A incurs a cost of 1 for cooperating while B’s benefit is 3, and vice versa. A thus gains by cooperating, but is tempted to defect to gain 3 while B pays a cost of 1, and vice-versa.) The second step involves the dissemination of gossip. Finally, strategies are updated based on the first and second steps. 

Simulation Results:

The authors show that over time, the vast majority of agents (90%) choose to gossip and to cooperate (78%). The three most common cooperation strategies are “exploitive” (57%), “opportunistic” (18%), and “virtuous.” By contrast, none of the other three cooperation strategies is chosen more than 5% of the time.
 

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Figure 3. The evolutionary trajectories of different strategies and behaviors. The lines are average trajectories from 30 simulation runs with all the six cooperation strategies under the default parameter choice. The shadows show the SEs of the average trajectories. Plot (A) illustrates the evolution of gossipers. Plot (B) illustrates the evolution of different cooperation strategies. Plot (C) illustrates the evolution of cooperation. 

At first glance, the high prevalence of cooperation and exploitive/opportunistic strategies may appear puzzling. However, the growth of gossip helps guard against exploitation and opportunism. In other words, it remains strategically rational to exploit when feasible, but doing so simply becomes less feasible over time. 

One surprising finding is that gossipers and opportunists actually need each other. Opportunists cooperate with gossipers to protect their reputations, and in doing so give gossipers a real survival advantage over non-gossipers. As co-author Michele J. Gelfand said in a recent interview, “Opportunistic agents kind of get a bad rap. They’re seen as kind of sneaky…But in fact, they’re actually helping a lot in the population.”

The final aspect of the simulation involves showing that both functions of gossip, (1) disseminating reputations and (2) deterring selfishness, are jointly necessary to explain its evolution. To do this, the authors begin by analyzing solely function (1). Yet, this provides no direct benefit to gossipers: they spend time and energy disseminating information that helps others, but without deterring opportunists, who are not necessarily more likely to cooperate with them. In this situation, gossiping strategies will not proliferate. This is why function (2) must be part of the explanation. Gossipers directly benefit when opportunistic agents must manage their reputations by cooperating with them. In this way, they can deter the prospect of defection, which non-gossipers still face.
 

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Figure 4. Results of Steps 1 and 2. Each condition is the average of 30 simulation runs. The value is calculated as the average value from the 4,000th to the 5,000th iterations of each simulation run. The error bars show the SEs. On the Left side of each plot are the results from Step 1; on the Right are the results from Step 2. Plot (A) shows that gossipers evolve only when both reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions exist (i.e., with-gossip and with-rep-manage). Plots (B and C) show that the existence of gossipers (yellow) increases reputation accessibility and cooperation. Plot (D) shows that opportunists evolve only when both reputation dissemination and selfishness deterrence functions exist. Plots (E and F) show that the existence of gossipers increases the proportion of reputation-sensitive agents.

In all, “Explaining the evolution of gossip” is an insightful exercise in “abductive reasoning.” No historical account could ever hope to conclusively show how gossip actually developed. Instead, the simulation shows readers how gossip could possibly have developed in order to provide us with better information and encourage cooperation.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS), the flagship peer-reviewed publication in the field of Korean studies, returns to Stanford University’s Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) with the publication of Volume 31, Issue 1. JKS publishes a broad range of original scholarly articles related to Korean history, culture, politics, and society. The journal also publishes reviews of new Korea-related books, making it both a venue for original research and a guide to the field’s expanding literature. Its contributors and readership span disciplines and continents, bringing together historians, literary and cultural scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists representing the wide range of disciplinary approaches in Korean studies.

The journal’s institutional history traces the arc of Korean studies in the United States. The journal was originally established in 1969 at the University of Washington in Seattle, the early center of gravity for Korean studies in America. After the publication of two standalone volumes (1969, 1971), James Palais, an influential historian of premodern Korea, shaped the journal's intellectual character through serial publication (1979-1987). Michael Robinson, at Indiana University-Bloomington, carried the journal forward as editor (1988-1992) before a long publication hiatus. In 2004, JKS was revived at Stanford University by co-editors Gi-Wook Shin, the William J. Perry Professor of Contemporary Korea and director of the Korea Program at APARC, and John Duncan, professor of Korean history at UCLA and former director of its Center for Korean Studies. It was housed at Stanford until 2008. The journal has since been guided by editorial leadership at the University of Washington (Clark Sorensen), Columbia University (Theodore Hughes), and The George Washington University (Jisoo Kim). JKS returns to Stanford under the new editorial team of Paul Chang (Shorenstein APARC), Yumi Moon (Department of History), and Dafna Zur (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures).

JKS welcomes manuscripts from researchers at all career stages, working across the full range of topics, periods, and methodologies reflected in the field of Korean studies. Korean studies is undergoing genuine growth with new generations of scholars producing compelling work that is reshaping our understanding of Korea’s past and present. The Journal of Korean Studies exists to support and disseminate that work.

Kerstin Norris is a research associate at APARC’s Korea Program and managerial editor of The Journal of Korean Studies.