Abstract:
The paper examines religious shrines as symbols and the cluster of local knowledge of Christian-Muslims relationships in Maluku. In the social-cultural context of Maluku, religious sanctuaries — mosque and church- have become interreligious spheres. Although the shrine stands for a specific religious ritual, in the cultural sense the building is the responsibility of interreligious community who intertwined in shared cultural identity (pela).
This research explores church and mosque as symbols of interreligious hyphenation. It is a hyphenated reality because, in the cultural sense, church-mosque belongs to Christian and Muslim. In the local dynamic of Christian-Muslim engagement, the shrine conveys the collective memory of kinship (rasa orang basudara) among Malukan Muslims and Christians. Using an interdisciplinary approach: Christian-Muslim engagement in the sociology of religion and collective memory in folklore studies, this paper explores Malukan church-mosque as the representation of the total system of indigenous culture in five islands in Maluku.