Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of images
- Map
- 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
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
2 - Body and Belief in Timor-Leste
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of images
- Map
- 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
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
Abstract
This chapter is based around the story of a young man from Oecussi called Jake Lasi. Born in a village where stones are sometimes sacred, his choice to later study geology raises a range of compelling ontological tensions. For he and his friends maintaining their connection to the land and the social networks embedded in it can be a matter of life or death. This chapter explores how meto spiritual and economic realities travel with highlanders who seek an urban life as somatic experiences of terror, sickness and death that question the nature of what it is we mean by the term ‘belief’.
Keywords: medical anthropology, education, urbanisation, geology
In Alive in the Writing, Kirin Narayan (2012) sets out to explain how ethnographers could stand to benefit from employing the stylistic tools of creative prose. The techniques of those who write novels and narrative non-fiction, she argues, offer ethnographers a way to give a sense of moments and things that may in their fullness elude capture in field notes or photographs – ‘A scene depicting a person's vulnerability stranded within a messily unfurling story’ she writes ‘can communicate more about that person than a summary that tidily wraps up how things turned out’ (65).
Geertz (1973) would likely have called this thick description, helpfully pointing out that through such methods one might distinguish even between a wink and a twitch. Towards the end of his life, he was happy to go on record and announce that, ‘I don't do systems’ (Micheelsen, 2002). From the 1970s he was noted for his distinctive way of writing – an anthropologist ‘who recoils at typologies, grand theories, and universal generalisations’ (Shweder and Good, 2005, 1). Rather, he argued for the selection and presentation of vivid fragments over the abstract description of societies in their totality (Pollock, 2015, 5). Reflecting on his four decades of practising the approach, he described anthropologists as working with ‘swirls, confluxions, and inconstant connections’, and their final product as ‘pieced-together patternings after the fact’ (Geertz, 1995, 2).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Indigenous Spirits and Global Aspirations in a Southeast Asian BorderlandTimor-Leste's Oecussi Enclave, pp. 65 - 90Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020