Spirit Ecologies and Customary Governance in Post-conflict Timor-Leste

Abstract

In post-conflict Timor-Leste, the concepts of spirit ecologies and intergenerational wellbeing direct our attention to the ways in which Timorese people derive strength from house-based family networks as well as protective and productive spiritual relations with living nature. These practices of exchange resonate with a comparative body of research that has described similar ‘spiritscapes’ elsewhere in Southeast Asia and their relevance for social and environmental governance. Exploring the diverse ontologies of particular Timorese ‘spirit ecologies’ and their embedding in a concept of more-than-human ‘intergenerational wellbeing’, in this article we investigate the renewed significance of these ‘house-based’ practices for social and environmental governance in Timor-Leste. We argue that despite the challenges, multiple engagements of mutually appropriated, transgenerational debt obligations and ritually regulated forms of resource governance are emerging as cultural, and increasingly state-sanctioned, strategies aimed at rebuilding the social and environmental commons.

A brief qualitative study of indigenous traditional medicine providers in Timor-Leste

“…b) A substantive meaning sorcery in English, and also prohibition... horok is used mainly to state a prohibition in an iconic framework, at the spatial and social scale of a family property (Casquilho & Martins, 2022, p. 252). c) Locally enacted customary practices of ritualized prohibitions (Palmer & McWilliam, 2019). d) A hanging object marking specific restrictions of access to spaces or crops that reminds the passer-by of the prohibition at stake in a given place."…”

The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste

“…While this regional literature has demonstrated ethnographically the embeddedness of human relations and exchanges with other material forms (such as inanimate objects, plants and animals; see, e.g., Traube, 1986), there has been a focus in the more recent independence period literature on the links between these kin‐based relations and broader spirit ecologies, including the circulation of more‐than‐human ‘bodies’ and things across time and space (Trindade, 2011; Bovensiepen, 2015; Palmer, 2015; Palmer & McWilliam 2019). Similarly, building on the literature from the so‐called ontological turn in anthropology, a wider regional literature has placed increasing ethnographic emphasis on the inseparability and interconnectedness of human and other life forms (see Tsintjilonis, 2004; Allerton, 2013; Arnhem, 2016; Sprenger, 2016).…”

Untangling Tales of Tropical Sardines: Local Knowledge From Fisheries in Timor-Leste

“…Local knowledge is increasingly conceptualized as a dynamic social process, which, like all knowledge including western scientific knowledge, evolves and changes over time, and can be contested (Lauer, 2017). We do not add the term 'ecological' , since 'nature' and 'human, ' and even 'spiritual/non-human' are often intertwined in Timorese (Palmer and McWilliam, 2019) and other non-Western knowledge systems (Berkes, 1993;Reid et al, 2020). However, in discussing sardine local knowledge and interpreting fishers' observations in the context of published scientific literature, we focus on components which can be considered 'ecological' and not mythical or other-worldly in the Western scientific sense.…”