Douglas Kammen's book traces the long history of violence in the Maubara district of East Timor. One of Kammen's contentions is that most accounts concerning East Timor are framed at the national level and, consequently, the nuances that influence events at the local level are lost. In-depth local studies afford a better understanding of the impact of local rivalries, which are often overlooked in what Kammen calls ‘macro-level histories’. Kammen attributes his decision to study Maubara to a random event. His interest began with the discovery of a memorial stone dedicated to three brothers at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, which stated that they had been murdered at Maubara in 1975. Kammen then found a mass of interconnected stories from which he could recreate a three-century-long history of violence in Maubara.

Kammen mentions two other works that examine the impact of violence over time in individual localities in East Timor – Janet Gunter's study of five decades of violence in the Mount Matebian area, which culminates with the 1959 uprising and the Portuguese response (Gunter Reference Gunter2007), and Ernest Chamberlain's history of resistance activity in Iliomar during the 24 years of Indonesian occupation (Chamberlain Reference Chamberlain2003). Both studies cover a far shorter time period than Kammen's work, from which they are also differentiated by their focus ‘on explaining the causes and dynamics of violence, not the implications of its recurrence over time’ (p. 8). These implications are not clearly defined in Kammen's book, but are evidently related to ‘the question of how recurrent violence is experienced or shapes popular responses to subsequent violence’ (p. 11).

Kammen devotes several pages to a discussion of the problem of ‘recurrent mass violence’ and analysis of associated literature stating that there are two main approaches in the existing research in this topic: one gives primacy to the theory that the memory of violence is a cause of its recurrence, while the other focuses on the role of institutions as agents of violence. Kammen describes both approaches as ‘problematic’ and of limited use for understanding violence in a local context over the longue durée, something he himself pursues in regard to Maubara. His arguments directed at the latter model are convincing, but his reservations concerning the role of memory in understanding recurrent violence are less so. Kammen correctly observes that memories in the shape of oral traditions do not allow us to know the thoughts of people from the past but, nonetheless, his analysis relies heavily on such oral traditions. The main difference between Kammen's work and the first theory is Kammen's focus on the implications of recurrent violence over time rather than its causes. The main difference seems to be Kammen's focus on the implications of recurrent violence over time rather than its causes.

One publication that conforms to Kammen's approach is William Rowe's study of a single Chinese county over a period of seven centuries (Rowe Reference Rowe2007). Rowe, however, had the advantage of researching a place with a long history of literacy and a rich archival record, which aided him greatly in telling his tale, whereas the archival record for Maubara is quite thin. One method Kammen applied for addressing this limitation was to ‘read across’ the various sources available; that is, to compare and contrast various local oral traditions against the available archival record to come to some understanding of the area's history as perceived by the people of Maubara themselves, as well as how this perception has influenced their behaviour over time.

Maubara has some unique features that make it especially interesting. One is that it was once strongly allied with the Dutch, as evidenced by the old Dutch fort in the area. As the Portuguese strove to establish control of the eastern half of Timor, Maubara's alliance with a colonial rival meant that it became a site of recurring violence. Maubara was also one of the earliest and richest coffee-growing areas in Timor, a quality that made it a rich prize worth fighting over. It should be noted that it was not only the Portuguese who fought for control of Maubara, because several dynastic changes occurred in the area throughout the period of Kammen's study. These struggles may explain why the century-long allegiance to the Dutch no longer features in the oral tradition. Kammen postulates (p. 60) that the Dutch connection clashed with the imperialist narrative concerning the Portuguese, as well as the later nationalist one, which referenced 450 years of Portuguese colonial rule. Additionally, the ruling family from the Dutch era was removed from power by its rivals and was never able to enjoy such primacy again.

Such contested power, Kammen emphasises, was not uncommon, but is hidden from view in the macro-histories that tend to portray local polities as unitary actors rather than the faction-ridden entities they often were, and still remain. Kammen has a point here but, since the final decades of the twentieth century, historians and anthropologists have usually acknowledged the tendency of the Timorese princedoms of the early colonial period to join together and later break apart, largely due to local rivalries. Kammen's assertion is truer for the more generalist histories of Timor that have appeared since 1999. These are usually not written by professional historians and are often quite short, being part of some larger study on state building or post-conflict development. The writers can be accused of adopting a simplistic analysis and an uncritical acceptance of nationalist or anti-colonial rhetoric that portrays all Timorese as striving for independence since the earliest days of the Europeans’ arrival.

Kammen's account is vastly different and must be applauded for its attempt to see history through the eyes of the locals, using all available sources. Kammen makes plausible claims that certain events that happened in Maubara in the second half of the twentieth century can be traced to events that occurred in the same place centuries earlier. Through a study of one district in a rather small country, Kammen shows that there are many possible interpretations of events, and that it can be fruitful to try understanding them in terms of local dynamics rather than adopting the macro-level approach.