Indigenous Spirits and Global Aspirations in a Southeast Asian Borderland : : Timor-Leste's Oecussi Enclave / / Michael Rose.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Amsterdam University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Rose, Michael,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Amsterdam University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

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 into urbanized lowlands 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. Now 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- A note on language -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Frontiers imagined, frontiers observed -- 2 Body and belief in Timor-Leste -- 3 The ruin and return of Markus Sulu -- 4 Angry spirits in the special economic zone -- 5 Stones, saints and the ‘Sacred Family’ -- 6 Meto kingship and environmental governance -- 7 Ritual speech and education in Kutete -- Concluding thoughts: encounter, change, experience -- Selected Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index