A reflection by Kelli Swazey from the Seren Taun event in West Java, on how for indigenous communities religion and culture are in an intertwined relation.

Mengenang Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche yang meninggal karena membela dua perempuan muslimah di kereta komuter di Portland, Oregon, Amerika Serikat, dan merefleksikannya untuk Indonesia dan Amerika.

In memoriam for Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche, a graduate of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who was attacked on a commuter train in Portland on May 26th, 2017.

Anthon Jason | CRCS | Wednesday Forum Report

In Indonesia, people can be called by their homeland’s name, such as orang Batak, orang Sunda, orang Manado and so on. The Indonesian concepts that are tied tightly to ideas of land, community, and cosmology referred to as adat have a dynamic and complex relationship to people’s religious identification and how they understand their identities. People can be emplaced or displaced in regard to how their religious identity relates to their cultural identification with particular places. While emplacement is the process by which people identify themselves with a place, displacement is a dislocation, removal, expropriation, takeover, or ideological process to refute claims of rights over land, the use of cultural symbols, or the ability of people and groups to self-identify.

Abstract
In post-conflict Maluku, there has been renewed interest in redeveloping the Banda Islands as a major tourist attraction for the region, and as a world heritage site. As practices of tourism represent culture for diverse audiences, they also inform how local inhabitants conceptualize their identities, as well as influence the processes of collective memory. The Indonesian concepts of culture draw on relationships to land, community and cosmology referred to as adat that have a dynamic and complex relationship to people’s religious identifications. In this talk, I’ll explore how Christians displaced from the Banda islands during the conflict are being “re-membered” as outsiders in the process of reconstructing culture for the consumption of tourists, and consider how representations of culture for the tourism industry can potentially strengthen exclusive versions of local identity.
Speaker
Kelli Alicia Swazey is a faculty member at the Center for Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of Universitas Gadjah Mada. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Hawai’i Manoa. Her research focuses on identity in the public sphere, representation and the media, minority religions in Indonesia, and religion and tourism. She has designed several programs on diversity in Southeast Asia, and has been a featured TED speaker and a fellow of the INK (Innovation and Knowledge) program. 
Look at the full poster of the event here.