著者

Yoshinari Morita 森田 良成

出版者

国立民族学博物館

雑誌

国立民族学博物館研究報告 = Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology (ISSN:0385180X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.43, no.3, pp.367-390, 2019-01-25

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Recent research in cultural anthropology has shown that smuggling is notnecessarily an act of negation of the rule of the state or an attempt toundermine this rule. In fact, smugglers quite often require the rule of thestate for their actions to be justified as ‘exceptions’.In 1999, the Province of East Timor became gained independence fromthe Republic of Indonesia, and in 2002 the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste was born. As a result, an international border was created on theisland separating the two countries. Since that time, the border surroundingOecusse District, a detached territory of Timor-Leste, has become a stagefor routine smuggling – an ‘open secret’ in the neighbouring villages.This chapter is structured around a series of events that occurred inNapan, a village on the Indonesian side of the international border surroundingOecusse District. The events involved villagers and soldiers of theIndonesian army assigned to border guard duty. This chapter gives anaccount of these events and then analyses them. The events threatened thedelicate balance between the villagers and the soldiers, at the same timelaying bare the contradictions and failures inherent in the rule of the stateover its people and the way in which the border is administered. We shallexamine the complex relationship between the power and violence inherentin state rule that clearly manifested itself in the process, at the same timediscussing more universal issues such as the relationship between the powerof the state and its people or citizens’ sense of belonging to the state.