Over the past 40 years, life in Timor-Leste has changed radically. Before 1975 most of the population lived in highland villages, spoke local languages, and rarely used money. Today many have moved to peri-urban lowland settlements, and even those whose lives remain dominated by customary ways understand that those of their children will not. For the Atoni Pah Meto of the island's west, the world was neatly divided into two distinct categories: the meto (indigenous), and the kase (foreign). Now things are less clear; the good things of the outside world are pursued not through rejecting the meto ways of the village, or collapsing them into the kase, but through continual crossing between them. In this way, the people of Oecussi are able to identify in the struggles of lowland life, the comforting and often decisive presence of familiar highland spirits.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- A note on language
- Acknowledgements
- 1. Frontiers imagined, frontiers observed
- A short of history of a small country
- Life between lines: an outline of Oecussi
- The kase, the meto, and the threefold division of indigenous life in Oecussi
- Urban highlanders: movement and authority in Oecussi
- Encounter. Change. Experience
- Theories of encounter
- Theories of change
- Theories of experience
- Encountering Oecussi: serendipity and the social imperative
- Strolling in a Southeast Asian borderland: local frameworks, international aspirations
- 2. Body and belief in Timor-Leste
- His name was Octobian Oki
- The dual utility of ritual in urban Timor
- Spirits, somatic experience, and the limits of belief
- Jake’s story: Atauro
- Jake’s story: Oecussi
- Land as life in Timor-Leste – the embodiment of knowing
- 3. The ruin and return of Markus Sulu
- Precedence and the modern pegawai
- The Sulu, their supplicants, and the shame of Markus
- ‘All Timor knew about the Sulu’
- Rain and money: meto tales as a way of controlling kase fortunes
- Conclusion
- 4. Angry spirits in the special economic zone
- ZEESM – Timor’s special economic zone
- High modernism
- Oecussi’s indigenous political/spiritual system
- Growing food and relationships: Meto land practices
- Affect, angry spirits, and resistance in Oecussi
- Illness, anxiety, and affect in an inspirited land
- Conclusion
- 5. Stones, saints and the ‘Sacred Family’
- Religion in Oecussi: the concept of le’u, the coming of the Catholic and the influence of the Indonesian state
- ‘Heat’, healing, and the meto in Oecussi
- ‘Strangeness’, Mr. Bean and meto healing in 2015
- The book of Dan. The door in the tree
- Stones that look like saints
- Healing and the Sacred Family
- Conclusion
- 6. Meto kingship and environmental governance
- Forests, failed states, and the local as a way of getting by
- Jose and forest: personal ecologies of governance in the 21st century
- Cloaking kingship – the Koa and the consolations of a failing state
- The constraining – and enabling – effect of meto perspectives on kase law
- Conclusion
- 7. Ritual speech and education in Kutete
- Eskola Lalehan
- Ritual speech in Oecussi
- Children of the charcoal, children of the pencil
- Conclusion
- Concluding thoughts: encounter, change, experience
- An animating interior: the meto and economic development
- Seeming like a state
- Lives in motion: the meto as movement in a global age
- Selected Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
- List of images
- Image 1 Map of Timor-Leste
- Image 2 Map of Oecussi
- Image 3 Map of Pante Makassar and Kutete
- Image 4 Persuading a cow to board the ferry to Dili
- Image 5 Stars over a village by the swamp
- Image 6 Portuguese era statue of Madonna and child in Pante Makassar
- Image 7 A traditional house (uem meto) with a ritual altar (male pole: ni mone) in the foreground
- Image 8 The deer hunters and their quarry
- Image 9 Before the burning
- Image 10 Walking home in the hills
- Image 11 Photo by Rui Pinto
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