Sabine Zurschmitten is senior teaching and research assistant at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, where she gained her doctorate in 2013. Her dissertation ‘Staging Difference. Interreligious Dynamics among Kempo Manggarai Catholics and Muslims in post-Suharto Indonesia’ deals with the media circulation of religious violence and the reimagining of religious landscapes. It explores, moreover, the local adoption of global religious discourses like Charismatic Catholicism and Reformist Islam and the formation of religious experience through bodily practices such as speaking, viewing, listening, touching, eating and so forth. She is postdocteral researcher in the SNF-funded research project (2014-2017) ‘Churches as agents in sustainable development projects: the case of Indonesia’. Her current research focus is on the Catholic missionary congregation ‘Societas Verbi Divini’ and the Catholic Church on the island of Flores. She is interested in the global connections (the mobilized solidarities, the charitable efforts of various actors e.g.) governing Catholic development work in this part of Indonesia.
