Lisa Palmer begins this personal account of her decades-long engagements with the island of Timor and the Timorese by describing how “local people stared at me blankly” as she ventured through the empty streets of East Timor's capital, the town of Dili, on the occasion of her first visit to the country. This occurred in 1997; the armed forces of the Republic of Indonesia had been cruelly suppressing the population since their bloody invasion twenty-two years earlier. The intervening time had witnessed little joy among the people and few tourists.

A passenger on one of the ferries that ply their way through the islands of the eastern Indonesian archipelago, Palmer took advantage of a brief stop the vessel made to purchase pieces of the indigenous cloth for which the islanders are renowned.

For many years now, though, Palmer has no longer faced blank stares, for she has come to share in a most singular way the social practices and cultural values of a people now happily free of foreign domination. Today, she and her Timorese husband, Quintiliano (“Quin”) Mok, own a house in the municipality of Baucau, where they live with Madalena and Zeca, their two children. Building their home proved an enterprise that drew her passionately into such interconnected realms of Timorese culture as cosmology, ritual, kinship, social status, oral narrative, and the politics of land tenure.

Although the subtitle of the volume includes the term “outside,” the reader acquires a perspective decidedly more internal than this would suggest, since Palmer's assessments come from an observer who is thoroughly a participant in Timorese culture and society. No previous ethnographic study of the Timorese people conveys such a feeling of cultural intimacy and sympathetic understanding. In Palmer's evocative words, “It is the experiences of traveling to East Timor with Quin and spending longer periods of time with him and his extended family . . . that has most profoundly shaped my sense of Timor-Leste” (p. 5). This sense is an authoritative one, indeed, and from it, we learn about water spirits, family interconnections, marriage negotiations, friendships made, how quarrels are resolved, the regulatory authority that ancestors traditionally exercise over their living kin, the indispensability of extended families for the individual, and the myriad ways resourceful villagers cope with influences invading from outside Timor-Leste. Prominent among these agents of “modernity” are the NGOs and governmental agencies, both international and Timorese.

In a multitude of images crammed with ethnographic substance, Island Encounters radiates a “lived-in” feeling of how daily life in small Timorese communities is lived. With scrupulous and close attention to nuanced detail, Palmer describes how village folk take great care to follow the injunctions of their ancestors in such matters as affinal reciprocations and rebuilding origin houses (sacred edifices dedicated to these spirits), which are occasions when extended families celebrate their interdependent need for one another's services, indigenous healing practices, and the back-breaking tasks involved in cultivating rice. Another physically challenging labor, as Palmer discovered when she assisted the gatherers, is collecting honey or “courting bees,” an activity heavily charged with ritual meaning, which she also captured on video.

Foreigners continue to import new ideas and institutions into Timor-Leste, as they have been doing for centuries. However, the pace and reach of their assumptions concerning how villagers should conduct their lives have intensified since the Indonesian military forces finally left the country in 1999. Several chapters, accordingly, describe how the diffusion of new concepts is changing the dynamics of local traditions, but, at the same time, they attest to the lesson borne out by Timorese experience that the ancestors insist on having the last word. This becomes apparent in the way the author describes what prescriptions must be followed before the spirits will grant access to spring water and the penalties that accrue to those who disregard them and other customary procedures involving lulik.

This dialectic between Timorese values and foreign values has been recorded in a number of first-class books recently, notable among them Douglas Kammen and Jonathan Chen's Cina Timor and Michael Rose's Indigenous Spirits and Global Aspirations in a Southeast Asian Borderland.Footnote ¹ Island Encounters is an impressive addition to this literature. We see what profound insights into a culture become possible when a perceptive ethnographer, amply endowed with empathy, resides for many years among those whose lives she so affectionately portrays.