著者

土屋 喜生

出版者

京都大学東南アジア地域研究研究所

雑誌

東南アジア研究 (ISSN:05638682)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.55, no.2, pp.139-168, 2018 (Released:2018-02-09)

参考文献数

40

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Observers of Timorese culture have long maintained a preoccupation with the term Lulik. Its meanings have fluctuated in the past one-and-a-half centuries—with prominent associations including “idolatry,” “the sacred” or “prohibited,” “black magic,” “Timorese animist expression,” or “the core of Timorese culture.” But Timorese have also commonly used the word as an adjective. This paper attempts to trace the origin of the bifurcated usages of the word Lulik through a reading of early missionary efforts to translate Portuguese religious texts into Tetun since the 1870s. In the early European missionaries’ ethnographic reports, Lulik was identified as the Other of Catholicism, the opponent to be suppressed. It was adopted as the translation of “idolatry” in missionary Tetun texts. However, it was impossible to maintain the singular pejorative meaning of Lulik, as the Timorese preferred to call Catholic priests nai-lulik (Lord Lulik). A Timorese collaborator on Bible translation further took advantage of the missionaries’ ignorance of Timorese culture and language: Jesus was called Maromak Oan (the ritual ruler in Wehali) and liurai (the indigenous executive authority), while Caiaphas became the head sacerdote (the Portuguese word for “priest”) and Pontius Pilate was called Em-Boot (the title for a Portuguese governor). The upshot was that an attempt to present Catholicism as a European religion failed in Tetun, and the Passion became a story of an innocent native who was executed by the colonial and religious authorities. The missionaries’ Europe-centric mistranslation of Lulik and the Timorese cosmology, however, strongly influenced the way the academic discourse on Lulik has developed in the following generations.