Fieldwork in Timor-Leste: Understanding Social Change through Practice ed. by Maj Nygaard-Christensen and Angie Bexley (review)

Maj Nygaard-Christensen and Angie Bexley’s edited collection, Fieldwork in Timor-Leste: Understanding Social Change through Practice, draws together contributions from a number of researchers engaged with processes of social, cultural and political change in Timor-Leste. The contributors each reflect upon personal experiences of conducting anthropological, historical and archival fieldwork in Timor-Leste, and position these reflections within the context of ethnographic praxis more broadly. In doing so, the volume seeks to challenge essentialist notions of what constitutes East Timorese national identity and how it has been produced, as well as to unpack the critical processes of “sense-making” in which researchers are engaged (p. 15). By examining the intricacies of social and political change in Timor-Leste, the experiences of individuals and communities within these processes, and the relationship between internal and external imaginaries that reinforce and contest concepts of nationhood, this volume provides a sensitive, contemplative and valuable contribution to the field of Timor-Leste studies.

The editors position the volume within the context of previous approaches to research on Timor-Leste, and present a solid overview of this literature. Notably, they observe the dominant paradigms and representative modes within each approach, for example: the prevalence of analyses of social organization within the context of cultural studies; the narratives of resistance and national identity that dominate histories of the Indonesian occupation; and the impact of foreign intervention on the contemporary nation of Timor-Leste. There is a strong sense of how various disciplinary approaches, research methods, notions of the political, and temporality can shape the possibilities for “writing” Timor-Leste.

The volume is organized into several thematic sections: Portuguese Timor; Fieldwork in a New Nation; Spatiality and Temporality; Post-Conflict Fieldwork; and Positionality — although these distinctions are not strictly observed, and the chapters engage with these themes to various degrees throughout. The first section provides personal accounts of conducting research on colonial Timor-Leste. David Hicks reflects upon his experience of conducting fieldwork in Viqueque during the Portuguese colonial period and after independence, while Ricardo Roque frames his journey through Portuguese colonial archives as a search for “missing archival traces” (p. 65). These chapters make important observations about the research process, including issues associated with identity in the field, of serendipitous discovery, and the need for flexibility as a researcher.

In the remaining sections, the contributors draw upon experiences of and findings from fieldwork in independent Timor-Leste. They critically acknowledge the impact that the shift to independence has had upon access to the territory for foreign researchers, but also observe that Timor-Leste’s history of colonialism and occupation continues to shape the potential for writing about the country today. Some chapters are primarily concerned with communicating research findings that destabilize the historical and territorial categories that have shaped articulations of the East Timorese world: between the past and the present, between colonizer and colonized, and between violence and agency. Douglas Kammen, for example, examines the historical formation of the suco (village-level administrative unit) under Portuguese colonial rule to challenge conceptions of this unit as associated with bounded polities. Similarly, in exploring some of the complex entanglements of kinship ties and political affiliations within the subdistrict of Laclubar, Judith Bovensiepen problematizes the distinction between independence and integration that has featured within nationalist renderings of Timor-Leste’s history. Her approach demonstrates how attention to locally-grounded stories can provide more nuanced understandings of Timor-Leste’s past (and present).

The contributors, to varying degrees, intersperse their analyses with observations and reflections about fieldwork process, practice, experience and challenges. In reflecting upon his research on Fataluku cultural resilience and forest livelihoods, Andrew McWilliam highlights the importance of opportunity and spontaneity within the fieldwork process. In explaining her decision to focus on how young East Timorese have attempted to create a “cultural citizenship” to forge belonging and legitimacy in the new nation-state, Angie Bexley notes her experience...