著者

Andrew McWilliam アンドリュー マクウィリアム

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.301-315, 2019-01-25

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Historically, the diverse ethno-linguistic communities of Timor-Leste havedefined themselves through local ancestral resource jurisdictions and mythichistories of exchange, alliance, and settlement. Central to this conception ofplace and belonging is the idea of the rai na’in, a Tetun language term withlocal language variants that refers to ‘custodians of the land’. However, thebrutal, generation-long struggle for independence promoted new forms ofimaginative connection and belonging encapsulated in the concept of RaiTimor, or ‘homeland’. The notion of Rai Timor is not merely a moreencompassing ‘homeland’ than the landed inheritance of locally embeddedcommunities; it is imagined as a territory shaped from below and collectivelyby the ordeals of ‘the people’, who become the active originators ofthe nation. If the constitutive act of a subject in the traditional ideology ofrule is to recognise and defer to authority vested in ritual and political leaders(the rai na’in), the constitutive act of belonging to the nation is to sufferand sacrifice for it (the Rai Timor) (McWilliam and Traube 2011). This presentationconsiders the contemporary force of this expansive sense of theimagined community in Timor-Leste, a notion that Anderson described as‘aggregated nativeness’ (2003), in the light of the well-documented resurgenceof custom and traditional authority. How do these different scales ofallegiance and belonging contribute to the shaping of contemporary societyin post-independence Timor-Leste? In this chapter, I discuss these and otherquestions with reference to the Fataluku ethnography.