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

Abstract

Coming to formal statehood in 2002, the independent nation of Timor-Leste has struggled to rebuild from the devastating consequences of a brutal Indonesian occupation and the incipient effects of 500 years of exploitative and neglectful Portuguese colonialism (Gunn, 1999). What has survived this human, infrastructural and ecological destruction is a culturally and economically resilient, largely rural, semi-subsistence population of just over one million people. Despite and because of their

Filmic encounters: Multispecies care and sacrifice on island Timor

“…The ceremony to which we were invited took place by a cave that led down to waters flowing deep underground. This place and its waters were intimately connected to Atinu's origin house and the custodians of this site were consubstantiated through the embodied relationship between the house's senior elders, apical ancestor spirits (now rendered as nature spirits, or dai in the local Makasae language) and the pythons that lived deep inside the cave (Palmer, 2015(Palmer, , 2020. The following day a similar ritual would take place at the origin house located inside the village.…”

“…What, I want to explore, can multisensory encounters through filming and then with my own video footage (its sounds, colours, surroundings, voices, bodies, gestures, rhythms, sensations, smells, tastes) reveal about the participation of people, animals, plants, water and celestial bodies in more-than-human lives and livelihoods on the island of Timor? The sensory attunement augmented for me via my own filmic encounters involves an increased openness and awareness of Timorese spirit ecologies, including people's diverse ways of being with the other-than-human spirits, plants, animals, land, sky and waterscapes (Palmer, 2015(Palmer, , 2020Palmer and McWilliam, 2019). My argument is that one important element in these filmic encounters is the camera's ability to capture sensorial aspects that might elude or repel the eye of the ethnographer.…”