Development and Environmental Politics Unmasked: Authority, Participation and Equity in East Timor by Christopher J Shepherd

Author:Christopher J Shepherd [Shepherd, Christopher J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Developing & Emerging Countries, Social Science, Political Science, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781136023040
Google: LeYpAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18291325
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

‘First the house’: the primacy of ‘the local’

Far removed from the development ideologies of state and international organizations, a resurgence of East Timorese practices, institutions and power relations had been taking place ever since the upheaval of 1999. In the absence of Indonesian prohibitions on public gatherings and with Timorese free to return to ancestral lands (see Bovensiepen 2009), many rituals began to be held, often for the first time in two-and-a-half decades. These included rituals for ensuring the arrival of the rains, the flow of water to springs and the fertility of soils, all of which required the beneficence of ancestral spirits attained through offerings (see Palmer and Carvalho 2008; Palmer 2010, 2012; Traube 1986). As ritual practices were revived, communities also set to the task of rebuilding many hundreds of sacred houses. While not equally prominent in all places, sacred house-building has been interpreted as part of a broad movement to reaffirm ethnic identity, strengthen local authority and demonstrate clan membership (Fox 2012; Loch 2007, 2009). Corresponding to the revival of ritual and ritual infrastructure such as sacred houses, customary forms of land management, land tenures, water access, community law and dispute resolution processes were also reaffirmed. Engaging spiritual ancestors through sacred houses was and remains a simultaneous engagement with agroecological processes and their attendant local politics.

So what did this mean for the evolving regulatory apparatus of the fledgling nation-state and international actors? On the one hand, it meant little since the mass of technical discourse spawned in the years following 1999 granted little space to extant religious and social realities. The very idea of ‘development’ and its prominent neo-liberal underpinnings set the stage for a more or less generalized problematization of ‘tradition’ and an official disregard for non-market activities such as building sacred houses, ritual exchange and barter (JICA 2002). Constitutional law, moreover, defined critical resources such as water as the property of the state, highlighting the state’s intention to occupy the space of ultimate authority in these matters (Palmer 2010).

In the area of forestry policy, however, first UNTAET and then the state made allowances for the integration of ‘traditions’ with environmental protection in the pursuit of ‘co-management’. Given budgetary constraints and the scant presence of Forestry Directorate employees in the districts (equal to one per district in 2003), the state had no choice but to look to existing local authorities and customary land regulation (McWilliam 2003a). After 2002, state and non-governmental agents put in train various initiatives that linked ‘traditional’ practices to state agendas. Agents lent their support to local collectives to recreate certain rituals that invoked spiritual relationships to ancestors as much as they asserted local authority and community regulation. These initiatives were selective in both their construction and application. In their construction, ‘rituals’ of historically marginal import were ‘revived’ and given pride of place among the repertoire of autochthonous traditions. Their appeal lay in the fact that they would serve as instruments for environmental management. They were selective in their application because they overlooked

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