Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 326 pp. US$144.00, cloth. ISBN 9789463724319.
While there have been major ruptures in East Timor’s recent and past history—with the Indonesian invasion and occupation of 1975 to 1999 proving the most disruptive—one continuity over time persists, namely the way in which the dead are remembered, or made to matter. Yet, as Elizabeth Traube points out in the preface to this volume, there is a difference: the notion of martyrs and heroes hardly figured in local mortuary ceremonies at the time she researched in East Timor, when the country was still under Portuguese rule. However, with the restoration of independence in May 2002 following a United Nations intervention, a new valourization of the fallen in resistance struggles has come to the fore, with the appearance of statues and memorial cemeteries, hence the importance of nation-state in this book. As an edited collection, the tone of the book is set forth in the introduction by Lia Kent and Rui Graça Feijó, who make the observation that the deceased, perceived as “ancestors,” are thought to be able to influence the living. Not only are the dead manipulated by the living for certain goals, but such manipulation can be carried through to the sphere of politics, as with pensions and payoffs to descendants. The dead are treated as social beings, hence the prevalence of mortuary rituals in line with tradition but outside of strict Catholic Church practice, such as has come to dominate in East Timor in recent decades.
The dead-as-ancestors theme touches complex strands of ethnographic research to which some, but not all, of the contributors relate. As such, the book is divided into three parts, albeit somewhat arbitrarily. Impressively, all the contributors have conducted fieldwork in East Timor and, amazingly, they represent all the continents, as was the case with the UN mission that guided Timor-Leste to statehood.
The book’s first part, “Ancestors, Martyrs and Heroes,” includes two contributions. Susana de Matos Viegas studies “ancestorship” in Timor-Leste, with a focus on lineage, recalling the work of Maurice Bloch, among other anthropological texts. As addressed in many of the contributions, in East Timor we cannot ignore a broader cosmological worldview that incorporates Catholic elements. Following his interests and expertise, Michael Leach creatively engages changing definitions of martyrdom reaching back to the Portuguese colonial era, suggesting a “memorial landscape.” With national martyrs prioritized over youth who also joined the struggle, he finds the debate on martyrdom to also be complicating the process of nation-building.
The second part of the book, “The Dead in Everyday Life,” includes six contributions. As Alessandro Boarccaech demonstrates through the study of one community on the offshore island of Ataúru, there is a continuity between the living world and the world inhabited by spirits and ancestors, even if they declare themselves Christians. Visiting a community in Viqueque, Bronwyn Winch exposes ceremonial ancestral practices and reciprocal exchanges between the living and the dead, bringing to the fore the notion of “ancestral omnipotence,” or the way the dead provide an important source of protection for the living. In a reflective essay, Damian Grenfell argues that the liberal assumption behind the UN intervention did not mean the attainment of peace per se but left the East Timorese to mediate their own meaningful peace, mostly outside Western assumptions. Victoria Kamala Sakti focuses on a memorial cemetery in the Oecussi enclave (in West Timor), dedicated to victims of a post-ballot massacre in 1999. Although a site of state remembrance, ritual ceremonies consistent with “bad death” or the unnatural way in which they died, are still adhered to by locals or related kin. Andrey Damaledo explores death rituals among East Timorese living in Indonesian West Timor, especially as many on both sides of the border opt to bury their dead in their respective homes. He claims that such death rituals may even help to expand kinship relations and improve transnational relations. Soren Blau engages the notion of “forensic truth” arising out of attempts to identify skeletal remains found in East Timor. This is a sobering chapter, just as the task must have been daunting for those concerned, whether outside scientists or locals.
A third part of the book, “The Dead and the Nation-State,” brings together five contributions. In a highly useful chapter, Amy Rothschild contrasts the East Timorese “truth commission” approach of highlighting victimhood with the state’s framing of the dead as heroes and martyrs and, in turn, family remembrance of the war dead through the lens of “ancestorship.” She rightly critiques the commission’s obsession with seeking to ascertain an objective truth (namely mortality statistics), when, as widely observed, the methodology and circumstances disallowed an objective count (leading to an under-estimation). But the domination of national narrative validating the resistance heroes, she declaims, also sets aside questions of recriminations (as with pursuing culpability issues with the Indonesian state) and so, panders to the leadership. Henri Myrttinen engages masculinities and the invisible gender surrounding the hero or victorious-men-of-action narrative that has dominated in Timor-Leste. On the part of the co-editors, Feijó writes on the theme of “contested memory” on the part of two resistance figures he encountered during fieldwork in Lautem, albeit folded into the national narrative. By contrast, Kent enters the conversation on the valourization of heroes by examining the proliferation of state commissions for the recovery of human remains, contrasted against the active collection of ossuaries by local communities, thus suggesting acts of “nonstate governability.” As Kate Roll demonstrates, the political leadership in Timor-Leste has gone out of its way to care for veteran resistance fighters who fought and died, especially in terms of pensions and other benefits. The branding of founding fathers thus becomes “an important element of state consolidation” (322).
It is hard to find flaws in this collection. Admirably meeting the attributes of “thick ethnography” as set down by Traube in her preface, not only does this work advance our understanding of Timor-Leste’s travails today, but deservedly takes its place in the broader anthropological literature around “ancestorship,” martyrdom, and “bad death.” Still, just how many dead we are talking about in East Timor remains conjectural and perhaps that puzzle could be addressed in cognate studies reading back from the global pandemic to the cholera epidemics and the little wars of colonial times.
Geoffrey C. Gunn
Nagasaki University, Nagasaki