NIAS Studies in Asian Topics, no. 59. Copenhagen: NIAS Press; Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press [distributor], 2017. xv, 261 pp. (Graphs, maps, B&W photos.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 978-87-7694-209-0.
Under Portuguese rule, Timor-Leste (East Timor) hosted numerous anthropological researchers. Indonesian forces then invaded in 1975, halting the decolonization process until 1999. This brutal time also created an “ethnographic gap” when outside researchers had little access. Since the restoration of independence, anthropologists and others have returned, birthing a new field of Timor-Leste studies. The field has advanced far enough that a book can be published about fieldwork in Timor-Leste. Edited by two recent PhD graduates with impressive records, the book is a much-needed reflection and important contribution to the study of Asia’s newest country.
The editors’ introduction notes the essentialist nature of efforts to define Timor-Leste, highlighting “how the nation has been socially produced, contrasted, and understood” by both insiders and outsiders (2). Approaches to studying Timor-Leste have moved from viewing it within the Australasian culture area, through studies of resistance and occupation emphasizing Timorese-Indonesian difference, to more recent depictions of a post-conflict state seen as a near-blank slate for international action. Timorese nationalist assertion has, perhaps in reaction, revived tradition and harnessed history in the pursuit of nation building. Each of the contributors—from anthropology, geography, history, and public policy—presents a well-conceived case study and reflection on their own fieldwork. Together, their chapters should prove influential, informing future researchers about their own methods and ethics.
David Hicks, one of the major names in the anthropological study of pre-occupation Timor-Leste, revisits his fieldwork from the 1970s and compares it to more recent visits to independent Timor-Leste, bridging field work methods across the 1975–1999 ethnographic gap. Ricardo Roque makes a case for archives as sites of fieldwork where anthropologists and historians meet. He likens seeking evidence in the archives to a hunt, pointing out an “archival ethnographic gap, a scarcity of archive-grounded studies on Timor-Leste’s colonial history” (59).
Chapters by Andrew McWilliam and Angie Bexley discuss “fieldwork in a new nation.” For McWilliam, the field is Lautem, at the eastern end of Timor-Leste, whose dense forests offered “an ideal location for explorations into the nature-culture interactions that I was interested to pursue” (83). Curiosity led him to the Fataluku people. Their own movements into global labour markets subsequently broadened his research. Angie Bexley’s examination of the geração foun (“younger generation”) also shifts the field, including research both in Timor-Leste and Indonesia among young pro-independence activists. Indonesia was both foreign occupier and site of identity formation for these activists, many of them advocating Timorese freedom while studying at Indonesian universities. The distinction between generations formed in different colonial contexts remains relevant in Timorese politics today.
The editors call the next pair of essays “spatiality and temporality.” Both engage the local and draw from local research to interrogate national assumptions. Douglas Kammen challenges the “modernist vision” that assumes Timorese society is “overwhelmingly rural and agrarian.” Such “entrenched fantasies” about tradition have fossilized and thus excluded rural people from the growing wealth of the capital city, Dili (125–126). Portuguese and Indonesian methods of organizing governance spatially have shaped national government practices after independence. Like Kammen, Judith Bovensiepen looks to local colonial inheritances in a very different district. She interrogates the Timorese historical narrative of heroic resistance to argue that collaboration was also a form of anti-colonialism, heavily influenced by succession disputes in Portuguese-era principalities. “Doing fieldwork in East Timor,” she finds, “requires special attention to these neglected memories” (163). Micro-histories of small areas challenge national efforts to define an undifferentiated tradition.
Two more chapters tackle the paradigm of “post-conflict fieldwork.” From a pair of eastern villages to the national capital, conflicts endure in cross-cutting manners. Pyone Myat Thu’s study of land conflict between a village of traditional land owners and a community resettled from elsewhere by the former Indonesian authorities, sees her shift her original theoretical framework to one that thought about “forced displacement and land conflict in a way that better reflected local lived experiences” (188). Maj Nygaard-Christensen’s micro-study of the leak of a United Nations document depicts different understandings about the meaning of a text between UN and Timorese leadership. This leads her to reject the dichotomy between international and domestic realms and call for “increased methodological attention to the complex entanglements of external and local political projects” (191). In the end this was not a clash, but evidence that international and Timorese dynamics were “part of the same political terrain” and thus “co-constitutive” (204).
The final two essays consider “positionality.” Guteriano Neves is the only Timorese author in the book. While Neves has no academic affiliation, his academic training in the US informs rather than shapes his work as a “citizen anthropologist” (208) and insider who can gather information relatively easily while also taking part in local struggles. He was shaped by his work for La’o Hamutuk, a respected development monitoring NGO in Dili where research is “a tool of advocacy,” then as part of a team of innovative young advisors to the former president, where research was “directly deployed as a policy tool” (221–222). Amy Rothschild concedes her different positionality as an outsider who became known for having an argument with another outsider. In trying to observe the filming of what is described as the first Timorese feature film, she grappled with differing claims to ownership asserted by different actors. In a thoughtful reflection that should be read by every outside researcher, she also notes the way national claims to ownership of the past overwhelmed local claims. Where the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991 in Dili is sanctified as national tragedy, the 1983 Kraras massacres receive little attention. Power relations within Timor-Leste and between researchers attempting to position themselves on the insider-outsider spectrum, are perhaps the issue that lingers the most from this excellent final chapter of an excellent book.
David Webster
Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada