 Everyone in this audience can probably imagine what the silence was like on the other end of the phone. When I called my mother a few years ago to tell her that I had fallen in love with this guy from a place called Tana Toraja in South Sulawesi, and that I wanted to marry him. These people, the Torajans, are famous for their death rituals. And that if we did get married, we would have to spend a good portion of our yearly salary buying sacrificial buffalo called Tedong that we would use for a family funeral or for the construction of effigies of the dead called Tao Tao, and that these funerals could go on from anywhere from a few days up to weeks at a time. I also explained to my mother that part of these traditions included keeping the bodies of deceased family members in the home sometimes for years, treating them as still active, alive members of the family, feeding them and caring for them until enough resources could be gathered to hold a funeral ceremony. So the people of Tana Toraja, in addition to being Protestant Christians, also maintain a cultural system in which family identity, social status, and even politics are played out in grandiose and elaborate funeral ceremonies and where intimacy with the ancestors is literally expressed by relationships with dead bodies. This is someone who has passed away. This is a ritual where the people who have been interred are disinterred and the family cares for them, cleans them and redresses them, spends some time with them to reconnect with their ancestors and then re-interrs them in cave burials. Needless to say, this was a lot of information for my mother to process. And after a long pause and a deep sigh, she said, well, you know, I guess it's not that different than what we do in America. Look at all the money Americans spend on caskets and flowers for their funerals. Mom, if you're out there, I love you very much. So dealing with difference and trying to integrate difference into our own worldview is something that all humans do. And as an anthropologist, I spend a good portion of my time trying to make sense of difference, writing it down, recording it, observing it and theorizing about it. But theorizing about it in a sort of social scientific sense is very different than actually coming face to face with difference. I mean, literally face to face with a different way of life. Incoming face to face with this difference and marrying into a family whose greatest life rituals are actually about death. I've completely changed the way that I want to approach the end of my life. And perhaps more importantly, I have experienced death as a social process, not just a medical or biological one. One that celebrates the value of human life in a like a communal experience of death. My husband's grandfather, Nenek Katja, has recently passed away at the age of 101. And his body has just been moved into the traditional house called the Tankonan to await the family to gather to decide on the details of the funeral. And I'm so grateful and thankful to be a part of this ritual that treats his life as a transition from one world to the next. But more importantly, a ritual that places death at the center of the story of who we are as people. So I don't just talk about difference. I'm really experiencing and living difference and it's changed the person that I am and the story about who I am that I tell to the world. But given all of this intimacy that I have with difference as an anthropologist, most of what I do is reduced to a publication in a journal that few of the people I work with or live with will ever have the opportunity to read. So I'm in this process of reassessing my own engagement with difference. What does it mean if it's only my voice that gets heard? And that's a voice that's disconnected from the story of the personal transformation that I've experienced. Living my life with people whose lives seem so incommensurable with my own American background. So my goal and my challenge is to find ways to embrace the uncertainty that comes with dealing with difference. I'm looking to find collaborative platforms that I feel really have the potential to give us projects that promote equality and innovation by pushing us past just looking at difference, pushing us past just acknowledging difference and just tolerating it and asking us to open ourselves to the risks of interaction that come with really, truly welcoming difference. Even if those differences challenge what we believe and who we think we are. I've learned a lot traveling around my adopted country of Indonesia and some of the things I've learned the most are from people who are considered too different to be good modern citizens. So the Sama people who live in an area called Wakatobi in the settlement, which is called Saam Pella and Wakatobi is in Southeast Sulawesi are people who are part of a larger group known as the Bajo. So these are seafarers who traditionally live their entire lives on boats. They almost never stepped on land. They lived in family groups on boats in part of a larger network that spanned from Thailand down to Australia through Indonesia and Malaysia. And people in Saam Pella experience the ocean as a familiar home, almost as familiar to them as our geographies of our own hometowns are to us. And they can read the waves and the wind and the water. Essentially, the ocean becomes a place full of landmarks that represent key portions of their history or are the homes of the pantheon of spirits and ancestors that control the ocean realm. And they continue to worship these spirits in ritual practices that also recognize their Islamic identity. So intimate is the Sama knowledge with the sea. It was reported in 2005 that Sama people around the southern coast of Thailand predicted the 2005 Asian tsunami before it actually happened. But these ways of life are increasingly threatened not only by wider processes of ecological degradation, but also by a government that insists that the Sama should give up their mobile lifestyles. They should send their children to state schools and they should stop educating the next generation of Sama people to be people of the sea. Living in Sama homes with the Sama people, homes that are still more ocean than land. I've had to radically reassess my own notions about education and poverty and the narratives of progress and development. What kind of progress do we really make when we say only certain kinds of knowledge have value? That only certain ways of life are worth aspiring to and that people only have value when they aspire to fit in to those notions of progress. As a teacher, I ask my students not just to observe different kinds of lives, but to actually experience them and instead of talking about what they learn from someone, I ask them to share those experiences of transformation with others. I'm working on collaborative platforms for students, scholars, artists and marginalized groups in Indonesia for programs where we utilize social media to create new forms of knowledge, multi-valent, multi-voice forms of knowledge that challenge common stereotypes and turn up the volume on the voices that we don't often get to hear. I passionately believe that as global citizens, we can no longer afford to devalue alternative types of knowledge and I really truly believe that the greatest potential that we have for imagination and innovation lies at the threshold between the way that we see the world and ways of seeing the world that seem too different for us to understand. I want us to stop tolerating difference and I want us to start welcoming it, not to face difference with fear and judgment, but in wonder for what it will transform us all to become tomorrow. Kure sumanga.