Periods of transition following the cessation of conflict usually usher in relief for impacted communities. However, they simultaneously provide pause for profound reflection of suffering, and an accounting of traumatic experiences that brings renewed attention to them. For this reason, post-conflict truth and reconciliation commissions have become international best practice, aiming to facilitate healing and avoid retributions that may reignite conflict. Such concerns were central in the design and aims of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, CAVR (Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação de Timor Leste), undertaken in Timor-Leste following 25 years of repressive Indonesian occupation.
While not discounting the importance of memorialisation as expressed through CAVR, Judith Bovenseipen suggests that healing the post-conflict sociopolitical landscape is more complex and requires more than just disclosure. In Land of gold she argues that such outcomes are not uniform amongst impacted communities, and the period of restoration can instead produce a collective suppression of past horrors. She contends that this occurs when the emergent expressions of national identity are roughly hewn out of hierarchies of victimhood that privilege the experiences and sacrifices of certain groups while diminishing those of others. Bovenseipen examines this contention through a rich ethnography of an Idate village in the central Timorese highlands. Here she attempts to map how past violence and oppression manifest in (and are expressed through) a contemporary Timorese landscape. Such expressions facilitate social healing in a manner that is contrary to the explicit confessional processes of truth and reconciliation.
The book foregrounds post-conflict recovery and customary revival in the village of Funar, geographically located at Timor-Leste's centre but sociopolitically in its periphery. Like the rest of the nation, Funar endured from 1975 to 1999 institutionalised genocide, violence, and displacement during the Indonesian occupation. Throughout the country, local customary institutions of governance were often suppressed or dismantled and replaced with structures of Indonesian state control, with the aim of Timorese submission and coalescence into an imagined pan-Indonesian citizenry. However, such actions instead codified collective resistance to the Indonesian state into a cohesive Timorese identity that is now central to notions of citizenship. The customary practices and governance suppressed under Indonesian rule have been rejuvenated in the post-independence vacuum of local governance. Since 1999 there has been a large body of anthropological research on this phenomenon, in particular the reassertions of customary mechanisms for discussing, mediating, and navigating justice surrounding intercommunal conflict and trauma (e.g. Dionisio Babo-Soares, ‘Nahe Biti: The philosophy and process of grassroots reconciliation [and justice] in East Timor’, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 5, 1 [2004]: 15–33; Andrew McWilliam, ‘Houses of resistance in East Timor: Structuring sociality in the new nation’, Anthropological forum 15, 1 [2005]: 27–44; Simon Batterbury et al., ‘Land access and livelihoods in post-conflict Timor-Leste: No magic bullets’, International Journal of the Commons 9, 2 [2015]: 619–47; Tanja Hohe, ‘The clash of paradigms: International administration and local political legitimacy in East Timor’, Contemporary Southeast Asia 24, 3 [2002]: 569–89).
Funar demonstrates an interesting, divergent case by virtue of the villagers’ collective decision to suppress discussions of past violence. The author links this to the area's perceived lack of participation in the classic resistance narratives of the Timorese state. Funar's sacrifices lack the legitimacy of other areas and its villagers have thus been marginalised from Timor's political power and the attendant economic, institutional and infrastructural development promised to its citizens. Despite suffering immeasurably during the occupation, in the hierarchy of Timorese modern heroism, the people of Funar have been left out.
The book explores these themes by following an arc that loosely tracks the birth and emergence of power/self/identity from the land; the rituals of house construction and marriage; and the return to the land through death. These events provide a rich insight into the cultural fabric and difficulties inherent in contemporary Idate life. In the second chapter, Idate cultural knowledge and authority is conceptualised through metaphors of tip and trunk, illuminating the great power and responsibility of hidden trunk knowledge. Later, the recounting of the hazards of sacred and origin house reconstruction in post-independence Timor reveal nuanced insights into local marriage and clan structures. Specifically, Bovenseipen details the immense emotional and political complexity imbued in processes of persons changing origin clans which themselves are in a state of institutional flux due to frictions with contemporary state governance.
Subsequent discussions of kinship and separation lead to explorations of funeral rites, highlighting a shift in the prominence of death rituals over marriage rituals. The people of Funar place great importance on the efficacy of death rituals to address past conflict and settle debts, and thus the rituals are themselves accompanied by anxiety in case of failure. Chapter 6 turns its attention to the cosmological landscape and how it entwines with the material world. It argues that the period of absence from the land has reconstituted peoples’ relationship to it and their own notions of self.
This study shows how Funar residents have been reinvigorating and reanimating their ancestral landscape and associated cultural practices. The revival of ancestral practices has become a way of dealing with the traumas of the occupation, rather than openly speaking about and acting upon them. The outcome is that villagers are distancing themselves from the horrors of a recent past they are trying to come to terms with. Concurrently, this has enabled a valorisation of nostalgia for a long-lost era of ancestral prosperity. Yet in doing so they are inadvertently changing the very cultural logic and foundation they are seeking to revive and thus potentially engendering new conflicts. In negating historical change through revival, a reproduction of unequal customary relations is fostered that denies emergent contestations of social position and states of difference amongst villagers.
Overall, Land of gold explores several important themes, the first of which is how human subjectivity is interwoven with the environment in Timor-Leste, and thus how emotional and spiritual relationships to the land are affecting post-conflict recovery. Ancestral land is a crucial conduit to the past and this is troubled in Funar by the relocation of its population during the occupation. Non-narrative engagement with history mediated through the ancestral landscape reflects the self; it also absorbs the violence and trauma of the occupation. Second, the text highlights the significance of ritual and custom in recognising and re-negotiating (informal and formal) political status. One idea raised but perhaps not given enough attention in this study is how post-independence subjectivity articulated through a compassionate approach to trauma (rather than celebratory heroics) may work as a means of making Timor politically possible. Third, the text interrogates Funar's collective amnesia about Indonesian oppression as understood through their exclusion from current nation-building processes. The village is situated in the margins of a nation in which emergent identity is constructed utilising narratives of suffering; this also affects the way villagers regard each other.
The title Land of gold refers to villagers’ frequent invocation of Funar's hidden riches: gold is a living metaphor for the cultural power, fertility, spiritual potency and prosperity of the land that enabled a fabled ancestral age. But with this prosperity comes fears of its loss or potential theft by outsiders. That prosperity is further troubled by the paradox of ancestral land as a source of wealth as well as a threat due to the violence it has absorbed and the villagers’ neglect of it during their time of displacement.
Readers will find this book refreshingly readable while providing an excellent comparative companion to recent anthropological explorations of the negotiation of customary land systems by displaced communities. Throughout, it becomes apparent that conflict and displacement can make visible the inherent contradictions in ideological perspectives while concurrently working to transform them. The Funar villagers are seen to be negating their recent history of suffering as well as their marginalisation in current nation-building by seeking to reconnect with a mythic ancestral past; a past that is reshaped and reimagined by such actions. In this manner Bovensiepen is cautioning that while producing stability in some areas, cultural revival may give rise to tensions in others, bringing unresolved conflicts to the fore and engendering new ones.
