The invited speaker who graced the weekly Wednesday Forum held for students, professors, academicians and other interested individuals on November 25, 2009 was Ms. Kelli A Swazey, a Ph.D candidate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.

During the forum, Ms. Swazey explained the ethnicity of being a Christian Minahasan. Like in other areas in Indonesia that were reached by Christian missionaries during the early colonial period, the region of North Sulawesi known as Minahasa is strongly associated with Christian heritage. The perceived link between Minahasa and Christianity is not only defined by population but through a sense that Minahasan culture and Christianity are so intertwined that to be a Minahasan, one must be a Christian by birth. As a result, non-Christian inhabitants in the region have been historically marked as ethnically different.

CRCS & ICRS WEDNESDAY FORUM THROUGH A VIDEO CONFERENCE WITH MONASH UNIVERSITY.

Dear CRCS & ICRS students, faculty and guests, We kindly invite you to participate in the CRCS & ICRS Wednesday Forum of this week. Wednesday forum this week will be a forum through video conference with Monash University, and we will have Dr. Melanie Landau (Lecturer, Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University) as the speaker who will talk about “Sanctification of Subordination? Traditional Jewish Marriage and Alternatives within Rabbinic Literature.” Some information about this forum can be read as follows.

Dear CRCS & ICRS students, faculty and guests, We kindly invite you to participate in the CRCS & ICRS Wednesday Forum of this week. Wednesday forum will have KELLI A. SWAZEY as the speaker who will talk about “The Differences that Make Us the Same: Ethnicity as a Framework for a Multi-religious Minahasan Cultural Identity”. Some information about this forum can be read as follows.

Date: Wednesday, 25 November 2009
Time: 12.30 pm – 2.30 pm (free lunch)
Venue: Room 306, UGM Graduate School Teknika Utara, Pogung
Speaker: Kelli A. Swazey

The interesting topic delivered during the Wednesday Forum on March 3, 2010 was given by Maesur Zaky from the PKBI (Indonesian Family Planning Center) in Yogyakarta. During the forum, Maria Ingrid Nabubhoga, the foreign-students host, acted as moderator.

In the forum, Zaky built an argument that religion is often placed in a dichotomous system. As a result, almost all approaches in life are divided into two categories: true and false, black and white, right and left, and other ambiguous categorizations. Among other life, sexuality and gender is a phenomenon that often explicitly categorized in binary opposition.

Endy Saputro MA, a staff from CRCS, presented a discussion about tayub in Wednesday Forum in Nov 11, 2009. Endy discussed his small research on a traditional art performance in the Eastern part of Madura, with the title of discussion “Tayub in Madura: From Rites Economy to Symbolic Power”?. It is very interesting topic since the topic of religion and local culture is less paid attention from CRCS students to study it. So, it is a part of Endy’s appreciation to present a topic that strongly related with the issue of religion and local culture.

Dear CRCS & ICRS students, faculty and guests, We kindly invite you to participate in the CRCS & ICRS Wednesday Forum of this week. Wednesday forum will have Dr. Nelly van Doorn-Harder (Religion Dept., Wake Forest University, North Carolina) as the speaker who will talk about “Protest through Pictures: Gendered Forms of Coptic Christian Visual Culture.” Some information about this forum can be read as follows.

Date: Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Time: 12.30 pm – 2.30 pm (free lunch)
Venue: Room 306, UGM Graduate School Teknika Utara, Pogung
Speaker: Dr. Nelly van Doorn-Harder