[TimorLesteStudies] New article: "Embedded in the Land: Customary Social Relations and Practices of Resilience"

[Victoria Stead]

Please find details below of a new anthropological publication on
Timor-Leste. I'd be grateful if you could please forward this to the East
Timor Studies list.

Best, Victoria Stead


Victoria Stead (2012). "Embedded in the Land: Customary Social Relations
and Practices of Resilience in an East Timorese Community", *The Australian
Journal of Anthropology* 23(2): 229-247.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1757-6547.2012.00183.x/abstract

Drawing on a case study of Cacavei, a rural subsistence community in
Lospalos, Timor-Leste, this article explores the mutually constitutive
relationship between people and land within customary forms of society.
Patterns of land use and connection to land are not simply *reflective* of
genealogical modes of social organisation, but are also *enabling* of them.
Particularly, the embedding of ancestors within the land offers a means of
accessing kinship relationships beyond the genealogical present.
Embeddedness provides a *quality* of embodiment that makes ancestors active
participants in social life. Constituted in the relational nexus of people
and land, forms of social organisation in Cacavei have a mutability which
goes some way to explaining the community’s resilience in spite of forced
displacement and cultural disruption during the period of Indonesian
occupation. This mutability might be considered more broadly as a source of
resilience for customary communities grappling with modernising processes
of change.
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 ___________________________________________

Member, Globalism Research Centre
PhD candidate, Global Cities Institute

E: victoria.stead at rmit.edu.au
T: +61 3 9925 0276
M: +61 402 259 370

 Building 96, level 2
RMIT City Campus
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