The annual Community Service Activities initiated by Universitas Brawijaya (UB) through the faculties encourage lecturers to do real activities for the community. This year, the Community Service Activities of Dr. Hipolitus Kristoforus Kewuel, M.Hum., from the Faculty of Cultural Studies (FCS) involved an Anthropology student from the class of 2019, namely Aileen, as part of the independent implementation of the MBKM programme.
The H3 (Hurup, Hurip, Handar Beny) Cultural Community has many activities. One of them is a nature conservation activity where the members specifically walk by the river to ensure that the water sourced from their village is always guaranteed to be clean.
“We are interested in doing service in this community because they are focused on the cultural field even though their activities are diverse. In nature conservation activities, we see an interesting thing that they still place cultural elements in these activities,” said Dr. Hipo.
“By walking along the river, aside from keeping it clean, they also carried out a mission to explore cross-village history and culture to see the relationship between villages which tends to be forgotten in the division of government areas. It is culturally interesting to understand that a society that is separated by a government area is not necessarily separated by their cultural history,” he continued.
Meanwhile, the initiator and founder of the H3 community as well as a cultural activist in Mangliawan Village, Orin, described that the H3 cultural community was initially established based on concern for the situation of Mangliawan Village at that time which did not pay attention to local culture due to the large number of migrants living in this area.
“This nature conservation activity is a form of cultural activity. Maybe a lot of people don’t think about this. By doing river conservation, we also try to see the history and culture of the surrounding villages. We found many things including several sites that show the cultural relationship between Mangliawan Village and other villages,” Orin explained
“With these findings, we think that one day, we need to meet with the community of neighboring villages to do something as a form of our concern for the culture of our villages. If it is not us, who else?” he added.
Meanwhile, Aileen revealed that in meeting with members of the H3 community, she learned a lot about the life force of culture that exists in the community.
“The motivation already exists in the community, so the academics have tasks to approach and discuss with them, then do something together to strengthen the culture,” said Aileen. [dts]
