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
7 - Ritual Speech and Education in Kutete
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
Spending time in the highland village of Kutete I got to know the teachers at the primary school, Eskola Lalehan. Towards the end of the year, worried many of the children would fail their exams, the principal organised the purchase of a pig, and for a ritual speaker to beseech the ancestors to allow the children safe passage to the exam centre and success once there. This chapter juxtaposes the reluctance of Kutete's farmers to adopt new agricultural methods with their embrace of the village school. Through an exegesis of the ritual speech they use for this I explore how, for the people of Oecussi, kase education can draw on and validate meto notions of interventionist, geographically embedded spirits.
Keywords: education, development, ritual speech, agriculture
When anthropologist Michael Jackson arrived in the village of Firawa in Sierra Leone during the late 1960s, the outside world still seemed far away. He wrote of how the socio-spiritual realm of his subjects was contingent upon physical place – a way of being defined by indigenized Islam, oral historiography, and intimate knowledge of their fields and forests. As in any remote hamlet, life in Firawa could be difficult, but Jackson observed how, in their daily struggles, people were comforted by a feeling of socially mediated control and understanding. There, he wrote, ‘what you give in the course of your life will somehow be given back, and whatever you receive will be shared. You respect your elders, parents and rulers and in return they protect you and see to your welfare’ (Jackson, 2005, 69).
Returning 50 years later, Jackson was struck by how this system had broken down. The old modes of authority had been swept away by civil war and the growth of the state. Rather than focus on the transformation of the village he had known into a struggling town, he took as his subject the plight of its youth who once would have passed their lives in the fields, but now eked out a precarious living on the streets of the capital or in faraway England. For them, he writes, ‘the time-honoured roles of gender and of age together with hereditary chieftaincy, cult associations and labour collectives, are no longer binding or viable.
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- Information
- Indigenous Spirits and Global Aspirations in a Southeast Asian BorderlandTimor-Leste's Oecussi Enclave, pp. 191 - 222Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020