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Myth, resistance, and identity in Timor-Leste's Nino Conis Santana National Park

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2014

Nick McClean
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Abstract

Since the end of the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste in 1999, a significant revival of local cultures and identities in public life has been occurring. In this article I discuss aspects of identity and culture among Fataluku-speaking people in relation to the recent establishment of the Nino Conis Santana National Park over much of their homeland. Today Fataluku cultural and historical stories provide a basis for their status as an autonomous and sovereign cultural group, as well as a legacy of intercultural negotiation and alliance that arguably reflects regional patterns of migration and social change over thousands of years. With the park's 15,000 residents continuing to rely on its forests and reefs for subsistence, recent restrictions on hunting have highlighted the need for increased local community support if the park is to achieve its conservation aims. I argue that long-standing traditions surrounding the negotiation of social and political change within Fataluku society provide a potential basis for cooperation with the new nation–state and for developing community-oriented park management policies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 153 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 2014 

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References

1 See Leach, Michael, ‘Valorising the resistance: National identity and collective memory in East Timor's constitution’, Social Alternatives 21, 3 (2002): 43–47Google Scholar.

2 See Deborah Cummins and Michael Leach, ‘Democracy old and new: The interaction of modern and traditional authority in East Timorese local government’, in ‘Timor-Leste: Challenges of postcolonial state construction and nation building’, special issue, Asian Politics and Policy 4, 1 (2012): 89–104Google Scholar; McWilliam, Andrew, ‘Exchange and resilience in Timor-Leste’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 4 (2011): 745–63Google Scholar; McWilliam, Andrew and Traube, Elizabeth, ed., Land and life in Timor-Leste (Canberra: ANU ePress, 2011)Google Scholar; Palmer, Lisa and de Carvalho, Miguel, ‘Nation building and resource management: The politics of nature in Timor-Leste’, Geoforum 39, 2 (2008): 1321–32Google Scholar; Traube, Elizabeth, ‘Unpaid wages: Local narratives and the imagination of the nation’, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 8, 1 (2007): 9–25Google Scholar; Pannell, Sandra, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala: Fataluku stories of going places in an immobile world’, Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 7, 3 (2006): 203–19Google Scholar; Babo-Soares, Dionisio, ‘Nahe Biti: The philosophy and process of grassroots reconciliation (and justice) in East Timor’, Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 5, 1 (2004): 15–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 These enquiries span four months in Timor-Leste during two separate trips in 2011 and 2012. Material directly quoted here can be found in Nick McClean, To the head of the crocodile (Feature-length radio documentary, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Ultimo, 2011) unless otherwise attributed. All interview excerpts from this source were translated from Fataluku into English.

4 Land and life in Timor-Leste, ed. McWilliam and Traube; Palmer and de Carvalho, ‘Nation building and resource management’; Traube, ‘Unpaid wages’.

5 Sahlins, Marshall, Islands of history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 168Google Scholar.

6 McWilliam, Andrew, ‘Customary claims and the public interest: On Fataluku resource entitlements in Lautem’, in East Timor: Beyond independence, ed. Kingsbury, Damien and Leach, Michael (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2007), pp. 165–78Google Scholar.

7 Santana was born near the hamlet of Tutuala inside the park boundary and was commander-in-chief of the Timorese resistance forces during the mid-1990s.

8 Leach, ‘Valorising the resistance’.

9 See Sandra Pannell, ‘Struggling geographies: Rethinking livelihood and locality in Timor-Leste’, in Land and life in Timor-Leste, pp. 217–40; O'Connor, Sue, Pannell, Sandra, and Brockwell, Sally, ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom? The limits of national public good protected area models in Timor Leste’, in Rethinking cultural resource management in Southeast Asia, ed. Miksic, John N., Goh, Geok Yian, and O'Connor, Sue (London: Anthem, 2011), pp. 39–65Google Scholar.

10 Traube, ‘Unpaid wages’, p. 18.

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12 Ibid.: 405.

13 Ibid.: 387.

14 See The Nature Conservancy, ‘Delineating the Coral Triangle, its ecoregions and functional seascapes’, report on an expert workshop held at the Southeast Asia Center for Marine Protected Areas, Bali, 30 April to 2 May 2003, http://community.middlebury.edu/~scs/docs/Nature%20Conservancy,%20Coral%20Triangle.pdf (last accessed 6 Dec. 2013).

15 See Pannell, ‘Struggling geographies’, for a detailed exploration of Fataluku subsistence strategies.

16 O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’

17 See C. Trainor, F. Santana, F. Xavier and A. da Silva, ‘Status of globally threatened birds and internationally significant sites in Timor-Leste (East Timor) based on rapid participatory biodiversity assessments’ (Report to Birdlife International, Asia Programme, 2003).

18 Recent community consultations undertaken by the CTSP, for example, were jointly funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as the US-based environmental NGOs, The Nature Conservancy and Conservation International. See CTSP, ‘Com: Results captured during community consultations 2010’ (n.p., 2011); and Andrews, Neil, Pheng, Kam Suan and Phillips, Michael, Mapping fisheries dependence and aquaculture development in Timor-Leste: A scoping study (Jakarta: CTSP, 2011)Google Scholar.

19 O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’, p. 11.

20 International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Guidelines for protected area management categories (Gland: IUCN, 1994), p. 22Google Scholar. This is of course in addition to those which identify biodiversity conservation strategies and goals.

21 Palmer and de Carvalho, ‘Nation building and resource management’, p. 1328.

22 See McWilliam, ‘Customary claims and the public interest’.

23 On the restrictions on hunting see Pannell, ‘Struggling geographies’, pp. 233–5. For recent community consultations surrounding resource use and customary ownership, see Raimundo Mau, ‘Ecosystem and community based model for zonation in Nino Konis Santana National Park’, M.Sc. thesis (Bogor Agricultural University, 2010); CTSP, ‘Com: Results captured during community consultations 2010’; Andrews et al., Mapping fisheries dependence. Information on the employment of Fataluku rangers is based on a personal communication (Sue O'Connor, Aug. 2011), while I have personally visited the tourism cooperative and interviewed a number of its members.

24 Pannell, ‘Struggling geographies’, p. 233.

25 McWilliam, Andrew, ‘Austronesians in linguistic disguise: Fataluku cultural fusion in East Timor’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, 2 (2007): 355–75Google Scholar.

26 Bellwood, for example, citing Wurm, notes three separate phases of expansion of Papuan languages westwards into the Eastern Indonesian archipelago approximately 15,000, 10,000, and 3,000 years ago. Timor in this context is considered significant as it may provide linguistic evidence for languages arriving from Papua both prior and subsequent to the establishment of Austronesian languages. Bellwood, Peter, Archaeology of the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago (Canberra: rev. ed., ANU ePress, 2010), p. 126Google Scholar.

27 On archaeological evidence for migration see O'Connor, Sue, ‘New evidence from East Timor contributes to our understanding of earliest modern human colonisation east of the Sunda Shelf’, Antiquity 81 (2007): 523–35Google Scholar.

28 See, for e.g., Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, vols. 1 and 2 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1995)Google Scholar.

29 Fox, James J., ‘The articulation of tradition in Timor-Leste’, in Land and life in Timor-Leste, ed. McWilliam and Traube, pp. 241–57Google Scholar; ‘Contending for ritual control of land and polity: Comparisons from the Timor area of Eastern Indinesia’, in Sharing the earth, dividing the land: Land and territory in the Austronesian world, ed. Reuter, Thomas (Canberrra: ANU ePress, 2006), pp. 237–51Google Scholar; and ‘Models and metaphors: Comparative research in Eastern Indonesia’, The flow of life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia, ed. Fox, James J. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 327–34Google Scholar.

30 McWilliam (‘Austronesians in linguistic disguise’) for example tracks nine of Fox's ‘metaphorical continuities’ in his analysis of Fataluku culture. Here I have selected those I consider most immediately relevant to a discussion of shifts in contemporary land relations among Fataluku, while acknowledging the potential for a more detailed approach to shed further light on current social transformations.

31 Fox, ‘The articulation of tradition in Timor-Leste’, p. 242.

32 O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’, p. 42; Sue O'Connor and Sandra Pannell, ‘Cultural heritage in the Nino Conis Santana National Park Timor Leste: A preliminary survey’ (n.p., report to the New South Wales Department of Environment and Conservation, Hurstville, 2006), pp. 35–6; Andrew McWilliam, ‘Fataluku forest tenures and the Conis Santana National Park (East Timor)’, in Sharing the earth, dividing the land, ed. Reuter, pp. 257–8.

33 See McWilliam, Andrew, ‘Harbouring traditions in East Timor: Marginality in a lowland entrepôt’, Modern Asian Studies 41, 6 (2007): 1113–43Google Scholar.

34 See also O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’; Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’.

35 Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’.

36 McWilliam, ‘Fataluku forest tenures and the Conis Santana National Park’, p. 257.

37 Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’, pp. 207–8.

38 McWilliam, ‘Fataluku forest tenures and the Conis Santana National Park’.

39 O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’, p. 4.

40 See O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’, pp. 42, 47; O'Connor and Pannell, ‘Cultural heritage in the Nino Conis Santana National Park’, pp. 35–6; McWilliam, ‘Fataluku forest tenures and the Conis Santana National Park’.

41 McWilliam, ‘Exchange and resilience in Timor-Leste’, p. 70.

42 McWilliam, ‘Austronesians in linguistic disguise’, p. 362.

43 McWilliam, ‘Customary claims and the public interest’, p. 365.

44 Quoted in Traube, ‘Planting the flag’, p. 117.

45 Sharing the earth, ed. Reuter, p. 15.

46 Traube, ‘Planting the flag’, p. 117.

47 Babo-Soares, ‘Nahe Biti’: 22.

48 Traube, ‘Unpaid wages’, p. 117.

49 Fox, as quoted in Traube, ‘Planting the flag’, p. 117.

50 As far as wider Timorese examples in the literature are concerned, Traube's discussions of Mambai thought are joined by Fox's explorations of this specific mythic pattern at Amunaban and Wehali in Indonesian West Timor. See Elizabeth Traube, ‘Mambai rituals of black and white’, in The flow of life, ed. Fox, pp. 290–316; Traube, Elizabeth, Cosmology and social life: Ritual exchange among the Mambai of East Timor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar, ‘Unpaid wages’, and ‘Planting the flag’, in Land and life in Timor-Leste, pp. 117–40; Fox, ‘Contending for ritual control of land and polity’, pp. 240–44. A number of other authors have also considered the relevance of this general attitude for contemporary social issues in Timor-Leste, e.g., Dale, Pamela and Butterworth, David, Articulations of local governance in Timor-Leste: Lessons for local development under decentralization (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2010)Google Scholar; Babo-Soares, ‘Nahe Biti’. Sahlins' exploration of the ‘stranger-king’ ideology is the classic work on this mythic pattern. Marshall Sahlins, ‘The stranger-king; or Dumézil among the Fijians’, in Islands of history, pp. 73–103.

51 McWilliam, ‘Exchange and resilience in Timor-Leste’, p. 67.

52 O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’, p. 5.

53 O'Connor, ‘New evidence from East Timor’. The Sunda Shelf is the southeastern extension of the continental shelf of Southeast Asia, extending eastward to the Sulawesi Sea between Borneo and Sulawesi and the Lombok Strait between Java and Lombok. Its eastern edge charts the southern extent of Wallace's Line.

54 For recent reports on Fataluku culture and history as articulated by the traditional owners of these caves, see O'Connor et al., ‘Whose culture and heritage for whom?’; O'Connor and Pannell, ‘Cultural heritage in the Nino Conis Santana National Park Timor Leste’; Palmer and de Carvalho, ‘Nation building and resource management’, also provide a significant exploration of the annual harvest of mechi (sea worms) on the shores of Valu Beach, on the mainland looking out towards Jaco Island. They discuss contemporary aspects of Fataluku engagement with ideas of nature conservation, highlighting the role of the Tutuala xefe de suco (‘head of village’) as the local political functionary, working in tandem with the many ritual leaders who converge on Valu Beach to perform the harvest ceremonies. No other ratu has had such detailed attention from researchers in the post-independence period.

55 See McClean, To the head of the crocodile.

56 Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’, p. 206.

57 See McWilliam, ‘Harbouring traditions in East Timor’: 371–5.

58 Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’, p. 211.

59 Informants I worked with from other ratu expressed support for Rafael's story, but I was also told that it was not accepted by all Fataluku. Likewise Mau (‘Ecosystem and community based model for zonation’, p. 29) notes dissent to Tutuhala Ratu's claim of sole ownership over Jaco Island from some of his informants, while McWilliam's sustained explorations of the variety of origin myths among Fataluku demonstrate clearly that the stories of any one ratu cannot be taken to hold for all. See McWilliam, ‘Exchange and resilience in Timor-Leste’; ‘Customary claims and the public interest’; ‘Austronesians in linguistic disguise’; ‘Fataluku forest tenures and the Conis Santana National Park’; and ‘Harbouring traditions in East Timor’.

60 See, for e.g., McWilliam, ‘Fataluku forest tenures’ and ‘Harbouring traditions in East Timor’.

61 Leach, Michael, ‘Difficult memories: The independence struggle as cultural heritage in East Timor’, in Places of pain and shame: Dealing with ‘difficult heritage’, ed. Logan, William and Reeves, Keir (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 144–61Google Scholar.

62 See Traube, ‘Unpaid wages’, and ‘Planting the flag’.

63 Such practices are frequently undertaken with the liver across the Indonesian archipelago, however as this organ is considered to be the emotional and spiritual centre of a being, it is commonly translated as ‘heart’.

64 Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’, p. 211.

65 Los Palos is the principal town of Lautem, while Baucau and Viqueque districts border Lautem to the west.

66 Traube, ‘Planting the flag’, p. 127.

67 O'Connor and Pannell, ‘Cultural heritage in the Nino Conis Santana National Park Timor Leste’, p. 5.

68 Ibid.

69 Pannell, ‘Welcome to the Hotel Tutuala’, p. 211.

70 Pannell, ‘Struggling geographies’.

71 Ibid., p. 234.

72 The cus-cous (Phalanger orientalis) is a species of possum considered to have originated in Papua, having spread to the Moluccas, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands and Timor. T. Leary et al., Phalanger orientalis, in IUCN, IUCN Red list of threatened species (Gland: IUCN, 2008)Google Scholar.

73 See Setty, R. Siddappa, Bawa, Kamal, Ticktin, Tamara and Gowda, C.M., ‘Evaluation of a participatory resource monitoring system for nontimber forest products: The case of Amla (Phyllanthus spp.) fruit harvest by Soligas in South India’, Ecology and Society 13, 2 (2008): 19Google Scholar; Campbell, Lisa, Haalboom, Bethany and Trow, Jennie, ‘Sustainability of community-based conservation: Sea turtle egg harvesting in Ostional (Costa Rica) ten years later’, Environmental Conservation 34, 2 (2007): 122–31Google Scholar; Lele, Sharachchandra, Srinivasan, Veena, and Bawa, Kamalajit, ‘Returns to investment in conservation: Disaggregated benefit–cost analysis of the creation of a wildlife sanctuary’, in Tropical ecosystems: Structure, diversity and human welfare: Proceedings of the international conference on tropical ecosystems, ed. Ganeshaiah, K.N., Shaanker, R. Uma and Bawa, K.S. (New Delhi: Oxford-IBH, 2001), pp. 31–3Google Scholar.

74 See CTSP, ‘Com: Results captured during community consultations 2010’; Andrews et al., Mapping fisheries dependence.