Cultural Signification within Inter-Religious Encounter in the Post-Conflict Ambon: Negotiation and Contestation of Identities

This article obviously is an effort to comprehend processes of socioreligious identity formation through historical trajectory as well as identity contestation in the contemporary daily life of Muslim-Christian communities of Leihitu in Ambon, specifically Wakal and Hitumesing (Muslims) and Rumahtiga (Christian). Those villages acknowledge that they have a mythological narrative which based their gandong relationship. This research eventually would like to depict that development strategy of the local community, in a broader and fundamental sense, is able to be applied by understanding the local community’s worldview as a manifestation of historical and cultural consciousness, which is formed throughout a long and dynamic living experience. At that point, it offers a novel perspective about a cultural strategy for community development with orientation on discovering intrinsic values of local tradition as the foundation to absorb and adapt social changes in accordance with existing local wisdom that actually are their social and cultural capital. Certainly, the result of this research is only a model that offers to be tested continuously in changing sociopolitical and cultural contexts. This research ends right on the dot where other subsequent researches must move on to discover and reconstruct development models which take sides for the better future and life of the globalized-local ‘glocal’ communities in Indonesia.