Holding Tightly: Co-Mingling, Life-Flourishing and Filmic Ecologies

ABSTRACT

Firmly emplaced within a soundscape incorporating movement, prayer, music, human-made and environmental sounds, the film Holding Tightly (2021) closely observes the performance and practice of a series of healing encounters in the Baucau Municipality of Timor-Leste. The lakadou (tubed zither) played in consort with dance in the opening and closing scenes is used by ritual specialists to communicate with the dai (ancestral nature spirit), which will eventually enable good health and more-than-human flourishing. Integral to conveying a sense of such flourishing are the sounds of everyday Timorese life which are pronounced in the film. The combination of rich and lively co-mingled soundscapes with the variety of healing modalities and exchanges depicted allows the audience to be drawn into the complexities and textures of Timorese pathways and aspirations for life-flourishing. Such flourishing emerges from forms of belief and care that are grounded in deep connections and exchanges between people and their environments. In this paper we explore the ways in which the relational sonic and visual richness of experience recorded in film opens new and productive ways of working with Indigenous knowledge and thinking about ecology.

KEYWORDS:

• Healing
• Timor-Leste
• film
• sound
• ecology
• more-than-human

Introduction

Like the wind, breath is always alive and moving. In Timor-Leste, as in many other Indigenous contexts, breath can generate what has been termed ‘vibrant relationality’ (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2022: 1), a quality related to the livingness and flourishing of ancestral textures and phenomena in both people and their environs. In this context, to receive ‘good care’ in Timor-Leste is a more-than-human undertaking. Attending and attuning to these life movements is to attend to, attune to and co-produce deep relationships of care concerning people and the more-than-human (cf. Tsai et al. 2016). Such more-than-human relationships involve people, lands, waters, animals, plants, and other elements of the natural and ancestral world.

In the opening ten-second scene of the film Holding Tightly: Custom and Healing in Timor-Leste, a lakadou (tubed zither) is played to ‘call in’ the healing spirit. A healer inhales breath over the smoking red embers at the tip of a piece of wood to light his cigarette; his exhaled breath then wafts towards his patient who lies on the ground, her eyes flickering and twinkling in unison with the nearby candlelight. Through the interactions of light, sound, breath, fire, and movement, we witness processes aimed at life flourishing via the recalibration of specific relations involving more-than-human textures and phenomena (Palmer 2020). Restoring equilibrium between these more-than-human relations enables healing and the restoration of well-being for all concerned. The sounds of the strident lakadou and the quiet breath of the healer combine with other phenomena to enable the movement and flow of healing.

Concerned with how people sense the world, Tim Ingold (2007: 13; cf. Pink 2015) writes, ‘[i]nhalation is wind becoming breath, exhalation is breath becoming wind … Sound, like breath, is experienced as a movement of coming and going, inspiration and expiration.’ What Ingold is foregrounding is the notion of sound not as something fixed and external to ourselves (cf. Schafer 1994/1977), but as an outcome of perception and mutual engagement. Sound, of course, is also spatial, and it is a material consequence of spatial and environmental relations. Ingold writes that sound is the ‘medium of our perception’, something we ‘hear in’ (Ingold 2007: 12). More provocatively still, he argues that as we hear in sound through its movement, ‘[a]ttentive listening, as opposed to passive hearing, surely entails the very opposite of emplacement’ (Ingold 2007: 13; cf. Duffy 2020). At the same time attentive listening is always situated and is, as the geographer Kanngieser (2020) asserts, ‘encultured and geographically specific’. In this paper we highlight this ‘play of movement’ (Curkpatrick and Wilfred 2022: 9) in Timorese healing practices and the co-mingling of audio-visual elements and relationships with and through place. The subject of our analysis is the filmic ecologies of the film Holding Tightly (Palmer and Barnes 2021).¹

Holding Tightly observes seven approaches to healing in remote, rural and urban parts of the Baucau municipality in the east of Timor-Leste, spanning contexts and experiences from the armed resistance era to Timor-Leste’s independence period. Timorese people acknowledge and embrace multiple pathways to healing through a complex interplay of spiritual care, comfort, and interpersonal connection. Through many lifetimes of observation and learning entwined with ancestral tradition, healers trial a variety of practices and pass down their knowledge to the next generation. According to circumstances and access to resources, people within families share treatments for everyday ailments, while specialist healers hone their diagnostic and therapeutic skills for more complicated medical and/or spiritual conditions. Medicinal botanical and divinatory knowledge is continually developed and refined in response to need and opportunity. Within this diversity are common threads of shared belief, respect, vitality, commitment, and resilience. Whilst collective life-flourishing is a shared aspiration, as the film makes clear, serious sudden or on-going experiences of ill-health in an individual or family require the ritual clearing of blockages to restore the flow of life (Palmer 2020).

The sounds of everyday Timorese life are pronounced in the film. In varied ways and to varying extents, these recordings enable the filmmakers and the audience to attune to the broader ethnographic and listening context. For the receptive listener, what emerges from the combination of this rich and lively soundscape and the variety of modalities depicted is a sense that life’s vitality and flourishing is grounded in deep connections and exchanges between people and their environments. Below, we engage briefly with relevant literature on film, sound, and embodiment before exploring the ways in which the audio-visual and relational richness of experience recorded in this film opens new and productive ways of working with Indigenous knowledges and ecological thinking.

Film, Affect, Embodiment, Sound

From the very opening scenes of Holding Tightly, the multisensory flows, rhythms, energies, and materials depicted in the ‘social space’ of healing caused issues in the film’s post-production. The dynamism and excess of these sounds were difficult to record, especially for the filmmakers as inexperienced sound recordists. The external audio recorder (Zoom H2) used to record the lakadou and the healing ceremony for the first scene had quietly run out of memory soon after it was placed in the centre of the ceremony. All that remained of the scene’s rich diegetic sound was audio recorded by the camcorder: wind, dogs barking, people’s voice, vehicles passing, chickens crowing, and the sought-after play of the lakadou. The visuals in this scene include the prone patient and the healer deep in ritual, breathing into his ceremonial betel leaf and waving it in the air. In the rear were seated the two lakadou players, working in consort to beat and stroke the zither and eventually entrance the healer into dance. Amidst this sensorial overload, it was the sound of wind on the camcorder microphone that dominated the recording. To reduce the wind interfering with the sounds of the lakadou in post-production, we decided to cut away from the healing scene to a montage which foregrounded the wind itself: a shot of a sacred origin house, with the wind blowing through its thatched roof and the leaves of its surrounding trees [2:00]. Throughout these transitions, breath and sound co-mingled visually with wind and movement. Montage and the arrangement of sound recordings were used in other contexts, such as the interview scene which alludes to the movement of people in the Indonesian occupation from their mountain refuges to containment in town. Here, birdsong recorded in the Matebian mountains was layered over a montage of the mountain-scape – permeating through the vehicle traffic that dominated the recorded interview [8:04].

Sonic geographer Michael Gallagher (2015: 170) writes, regarding his decision to produce a video work of the social space of schools, that, ‘written words would be inadequate to the multi-sensory, non-discursive, non-linguistic, affective aspects of what I had experienced’. Within this multi-sensory space, Gallagher (2015: 182) highlights the importance of the audio recordings he made to accompany his video work. These audio recordings, he writes, ‘in their very materiality, already contain interpretation … in ethnographic terms we might consider them to be thick descriptions (Geertz 1975)’. Gallagher (2015) responds to Ingold’s (2007) provocation in the essay ‘Against Soundscape’ by concerning himself with the co-mingling and integration in film of the visual, light and sound. He argues that the varied soundings found in film – everything from incidental noise to curated soundtracks – draw our attention to the essential audiovisuality of the moving image in ethnographic filmmaking. In this regard, he argues that the visuality of video can in some ways be understood as supplementing audio, like ‘sounds that have colonized light’ (Cubitt 2002: 360 cited in Gallagher 2015: 166). The ‘transsensoriality’ in the relationship between audio and image is the core of film’s multisensory power: it is audio that evokes the vibrant multisensory flows, rhythms, energies and materials of a visually depicted ‘social space’ (Gallagher 2015: 167, 169; cf. Feld 1996; Boudreault-Fournier 2021).

In the tradition of ethnographic film making, and firmly emplaced within a layered soundscape incorporating voice, spoken prayer, music, and environmental sounds, Holding Tightly closely observes the performance and practice of a series of healing encounters. Ethnomusicologist Ros Dunlop (2020) observes that music, including song, dance, and traditional instruments, is integral to all aspects of Timorese life. Music plays a central role in ritual practices associated with agricultural and other livelihood practices, in the reconstruction of origin houses and, in some contexts, in healing practices. In addition to the lakadou played in consort with dance to enable healing, heard in the opening and closing scenes of the film, the soundscape of Holding Tightly includes the pre-recordings of the lakadou, other instruments such as buffalo horn and drums, and traditional song. These soundtracks feature in the driving and transition scenes between healing locations. While these musical sounds create an intimate social space of movement for the viewer, the film’s immersion in the sounds of everyday Timorese life is also pronounced. The sounds of vehicle movements over pot-holed roads, flowing water, wind, birdsong, chickens, mobile-phone music and ringtones, pen on paper, medicinal preparations, rice harvesting, children playing, laughter, coughing, sniffing, voices, and footsteps make for a rich and energetic soundscape. This multisensorial space creates a filmic ecology of vital excess – an excess which, given the poor quality of many of the diegetic sound recordings, created post-production difficulties: background sounds of wind, chickens, vehicle traffic, exuberant music, unexpected mobile phone ringtones, and microphone interference. All needed to be treated and balanced to aid the clarity and coherence of dialogue and the sonic environment.

It is through engagement with these sensorial excesses that Holding Tightly is able to convey the vitality of life in Timor-Leste and the ways in which health and wellbeing are inseparable to people’s relationships to land, place, nature, and the substances around them. A deep sense of relationality emerges through the film’s audiovisual framing of affective exchanges between healers and the more-than-human world. In contrast to the sterility and silence of many Western medical settings, it becomes clear in the film that sound and movement contribute to both healing and life-flourishing. Likewise, the visual intimacy of these healing practices involves a range of bodily engagements: the body of the healer and the body of the person being healed; hands touching skin and plants, rubbing, wrapping, unwrapping, making medicines; saliva co-mingling with other potencies; voice invoking names that touch and activate the power of plants. Taken as a whole, the combined audiovisual intimacy of these scenes enables audiences to enter a world beyond the human, one that seamlessly brings into exchange human bodies and substances, sounds, animals, medicines, plants, water, and faith. The audiovisual is itself embodied in the depicted space, while also existing with the viewer in the filmic space (Ernwein 2022).

Building on the sonic methodologies developed by Steven Feld (1996), Boudreault-Fournier (2021: 51) argues that sound recording relies on ‘an ontological model that is fundamentally relational … based on fieldwork and multisensorial encounters’. To elaborate more on these encounters, and on the ‘capacity of transpersonal affects to circulate and generate atmospheres’ of healing and possibility (Ernwein 2022: 6), we below elaborate on the ways in which Holding Tightly was conceived, negotiated and animated through a co-mingling of concerns and relationships. The negotiation and cultivation of relationships centred on attuning to the flow of life among a common world of heterogenous more-than-human collectivities (Palmer 2020).

Background to the Making of Holding Tightly

Filmed over a three-year period, Holding Tightly is a contribution to a larger research collaboration between the directors and a diverse set of healing practitioners in the young nation-state of Timor-Leste. The filmmakers Susanna Barnes and Lisa Palmer have each carried out extended ethnographic research in locations across the country. Between 2013 and 2015, Barnes, Palmer, and global mental health expert Ritsuko Kakuma initiated an interdisciplinary scoping study together with the Ministry of Health and the National University of Timor-Leste (UNTL). This study aimed to improve understanding of Timor-Leste’s customary and religious health and healing practices, and to explore the potential of integrating these practices with modern psychological and clinical approaches (Barnes et al. 2019).

The involvement of a diverse range of Timorese collaborators was central to the filmmaking. This was a process grounded in Palmer’s ongoing research collaborations with Tetun, Waima’a and Makasae language speakers in the Baucau region, and more recent partnerships with Barnes, along with former mental health nurse and East Timorese resistance fighter Fransisco Almeida, and local customary specialist and veterinary officer, Celestinu Freitas. In collaboration with Almeida and Ministry of Health mental health nurse Luis da Cunha Rego, Barnes and Palmer first interviewed the healers who ultimately featured in the opening and closing sequences of the film in 2015. In collaboration with Almeida and Freitas, Palmer then established relationships with other healers in the Baucau municipality (Mau Solda, Palmira and Januario amongst others) and commenced filming in early 2017. Contributing to this collaborative process was the pre-existing long term research relationships Palmer had with Baucau-based healer and spring water custodian Jose da Costa. Felizarda da Costa (Noyti in the film) and her children are related to Palmer through marriage. Filming visits, usually two or more, were made to each of the healers annually, between 2017 and 2019. In mid-2019, Barnes flew from Canada to join Palmer, Almeida and Freitas in the field for one week to film additional footage and consolidate the narrative sequences of the film. On this final occasion, several healers invited their own patients and neighbours to be a part of the filming process.

Throughout the filming process our aim was to produce a deliberately inductive and open-ended inquisitory approach to each of the seven healing modalities documented. The different healing approaches are presented in a non-hierarchical way with no judgements made about their efficacy or otherwise. As Zhang has written, the viewer is left with the sense that each modality has something to offer in the wider therapeutic landscape, ‘whether or not that potential might be recognized in the idiom of Western medicine’ (Zhang 2022: 25).

Situating Timor-Leste

The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste is a small half-island nation located in south-east Asia, on the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago and approximately 650 kilometres north-west of Darwin, Australia (Figure 1). The current population is estimated at around 1.3 million, 70 per cent of whom live in rural and remote areas.

Figure 1. Map of Timor-Leste and its municipalities (Chandra Jayasuriya, adapted by Susanna Barnes).

Timor-Leste was a Portuguese colony for over 450 years. In December 1975, after a brief period of independence, Indonesia brutally annexed and occupied the country. Approximately 180,000 people are estimated to have died as a direct or indirect result of the occupation (CAVR 2005). Following the Indonesian invasion, many Timorese fled to the mountains of the country to take shelter with and support the East Timorese resistance force FALINTIL. Medicines and medical specialists were in short supply. As recounted in the film by Manuel Pinto (who later became known as Mau Solda, the barefoot doctor), members of the resistance took on the responsibility of educating themselves in primary health care. They drew on the knowledge of a small number of formally trained health professionals who had also fled to the jungle, as well as knowledge of forest medicines and healing practices from within the broader Timorese community. Some, including Mau Solda and Fransisco Almeida, formed primary health care units to care for the armed and civilian populations, and developed their own specialist knowledge of medicinal plants and healing, continuing to practice in formal or informal roles when they were captured or returned to the Indonesian-occupied towns and villages [7.12 and 8.49].

On 30 August 1999, East Timorese overwhelmingly voted to reject ongoing integration with Indonesia in favour of independence. Indonesian military and militia responded by running rampage. An estimated 1,500 East Timorese were killed before, during and after the UN-sponsored ballot and more than 250,000 were forcibly displaced into Indonesia. About 80 per cent of the country’s infrastructure was destroyed (CAVR 2005). After a period of United Nations transitional oversight from 1999 to 2002, the country officially regained its independence on 20 May 2002. Over the subsequent two decades, Timor-Leste made considerable strides toward social and economic recovery. It laid the foundations for key state institutions, enabled an environment for freedom of expression, secured peace and stability, and developed a roadmap for sustainable national development. However, basic services such as access to clean water and sanitation, quality and accessible health services and education, and sufficient nutritional support for children and pregnant mothers remain poor, especially in rural areas. The continuing effects of violence and the fragility of national reconstruction are subtly related in the film. The family being attended to by healer Jose da Costa, in the second scene of the film, are marginalised and vulnerable. In taking us to visit this family, Jose’s intention was also to draw attention to their needs and bring us into a relationship with one another. The young mother (visibly aged) has to care for both a sick husband and child with few resources. The audio captures the young boy asking Jose if he can eat the carcass of the small chick, while his mother, embarrassed, tells him to feed it to the dog. Bodily sounds, coughing and sniffing are so pervasive within everyday life and various scenes of the film that one hardly notices. Upper respiratory tract infections are the most common disease in the community and, if not treated, can develop into lower respiratory tract diseases contributing to a high incidence of disease, especially among children (Deen et al. 2013), and are a leading cause of death overall.

Despite, and perhaps because of, their nation’s turbulent history and basic needs challenges, East Timorese people’s sense of social solidarity and their diverse linguistic and cultural traditions remain vibrant. In rural areas in particular, people’s daily life remains entangled in shared concerns for a sociality that embraces deep, multi-temporal connections with each other and their environments. It is within this context that customary understandings of health and wellbeing across Timor-Leste are embedded in the interrelationships between people, the ancestors, and the more-than-human world. Knowledge of medicinal plants and healing techniques rely on relations within and beyond human worlds. Across the country, families of particular lineages are organised around clan groups linked to ancestral origin houses (Tetun: uma lulik/uma lisan) which embed these families in intimate, intergenerational social, political and economic relationships with their extended kin from other origin houses. These houses are both material structures and units of social organisation and alliance.

Links between these house lineages and alliances are rooted in local spiritual ecologies, life-worlds of obligation and reciprocity between people and a network of place-based ancestral and nature spirits. Symbolic and material exchanges between these houses form the basis of local customary economies. These exchanges among houses, and by extension with the more-than-human world, are central to customary healing practices and the achievement of familial wellbeing. For example, the healer Palmira talks about how she and her husband learnt skills from a grandfather at her husband’s Makasae-speaking Diri Falu origin house [16:21]; off-camera she also speaks of learning from members of her own Kairui-speaking origin house. Throughout his narration of the film, Celestinu Freitas talks about communicating with dai (ancestral nature spirits) associated with particular houses [14:21] and how the healing approach depends on ‘our house, our ancestors and nature’ [19:51]. At the same time, these customary economies and practices continue to be shaped by processes of colonisation, missionisation, post-conflict state building, international development, and transnational capitalism.

Pathways to Healing

Anthropologists have noted the capacity of East Timorese people to navigate multiple ways of being and knowing (see for example Barnes and Trindade 2018; Hicks 2003; McWilliam 2008; Palmer 2020). East Timorese draw on a plurality of sources of health-related knowledge and practices, including customary forms of healing, clinical or biomedical models, popular knowledge, and Christian faith-based healing. As Mau Solda comments on the development of his healing practices after his capture in the mountains, ‘Our Lady is my Doctor. It was her who taught me how to heal’ [9:58] (see Figure 2). There is a rich tradition of Chinese folk-medicine among the Chinese-Timorese and healers also operate within the Islamic community in Dili. Most individuals and families choose a combination of treatments or may switch between treatments if one is deemed ineffective. Celestinu Freitas explains how people might be transferred to a different healer or the formal health system if a treatment is unsuccessful [2.22]. Mau Solda attests that following his capture, he began practising from his new residence in Baucau town where people, including Indonesian health professionals, would come to him with illnesses ‘the hospital couldn’t treat’ [9.06].

Figure 2. Mau Solda and Our Lady. Still from Holding Tightly.

A feature of the healing approaches depicted in the film is the healers’ radical and embodied openness to their practice and, where relevant, the recounting of their own histories. There is little sense that the healers have a pre-conceived message to convey; rather, what emerges from each vignette is a disposition of quiet strength, inner joy and faith in their practice. Tensions between the various approaches (if they exist) are muted, with the healers choosing to foreground their own openness and connection to a range of more-than-human actors, as well as the complementarity of their practices with one another. Also present is the sense of humility that comes with the knowledge that, to have therapeutic force, ‘the world of ancestors and of lulik needs to be carefully negotiated’ (Dunlop 2020: 158)

In the second scene of the film, we join Jose da Costa and a young mother on the veranda of her one room home. Inside the house, laying together on a makeshift bed (not depicted in the scene), lies her badly disabled youngest son and his father who is also disabled. A consultation takes place involving the augury of a tiny chick to try to find a cure for the boy’s ailment. At different times throughout the scene, we hear the mingled sounds of voices calling from inside the house, chickens chirping, a small plane flying low, classical music from the ringtone of the father’s mobile phone, spitting, the plucking of feathers, footsteps on gravel, wind, birdsong, the scratch of writing, camera clicking, tutting, and laughter. The camera is drawn in close by the healer to witness the mixing of various substances: his spit with stone, the chick’s blood with water, the organs of the chick with metal blades, paper with ink, and, when her clearly malnourished older son pleads to be allowed to eat the scrawny chick, the mixing of the mother’s clear embarrassment with a broad smile to the camera. Throughout, the healer Jose Da Costa describes his healing practice, the great certainty he has in treating the young boy with medicinal plants, and how ‘having this [medicine] and medicine from the hospital will cure him and the sickness inside’. Jose Da Costa’s diagnostic and divination powers – considered akin to radiography – are enabled by the ritual sacrifice of the young chicken and a reading of the marks on its body and internal organs (Figure 3). He also interviews the sick person’s family members, taking notes prior to recommending a treatment to address the patient’s symptoms.

As described above, the treatment and possibly the eventual recovery of a patient may be enabled by either clinical or traditional means, or both. However, as is clear in the consultation between Jose and the sick boy’s mother, the perceived causes and consequences of illness are greatly shaped by cultural attitudes and expectations, and healing often requires not only physical but also spiritual attention. For many East Timorese, understandings of health and wellbeing are bound up in assumptions about social collectivities rather than individuals per se. Consequently, diseases, disorders or accidents affecting the ‘body-self’, be they natural or ‘supernatural’ in origin, are related to transgressions against the ‘body-social’. Hence customary healers often concern themselves with determining and resolving the social origins of illness and misfortune as much as addressing its physical symptoms.

Figure 3. Reading the markings on the chicken liver (photo credit: Kiku Moniz).

If a social or spiritual cause of affliction is determined, a healer will often recommend repairing relations by repaying any debts or making offerings to ancestors and/or house-based alliances. In nearby Sumba, where anthropologist Janet Hoskins has documented similar healing practices, she argues that customary healing de-centres the modern medical focus on the patient and their symptoms; instead, attention is given to the importance of social factors – such as restoring social relations and healing the group – before the ‘cure’ of the patient can be enabled or addressed by whatever means (Hoskins 1996).

Illnesses may also be attributed to the intervention of non-human entities that enliven the natural world (Tetun: rai na’in), ancestral nature spirits (Waima’a: dai, Tetun: malae) or ghosts (Tetun: matebian), and these are usually associated with social and environmental transgressions. Such transgressions can include entering a sacred site without performing the appropriate rituals, eating taboo foods, contravening marriage rules between lineage groups and houses, or cases of ‘bad death’ (murder, accident) and outstanding burial rites. In all such cases, for illness to be treated successfully, it is believed that reciprocal relationships across the social, spiritual, and ancestral realms must be properly addressed.

In reflecting on our research, we drew on the concept of ‘entanglement’ to understand how individuals and groups engage with, and often transform or make their own, multiple sources or repertoires of healing in the pursuit of health and wellbeing. This is particularly pertinent to the audio-visual elements of the film itself: as we can see in every scene, people wanted to tell their stories and show the camera their practices, and they gathered in groups to perform and witness such healing. While sound and attentive listening are integral to the healing practices and thus the documentation of those practices, listening and sound are also prerequisites for sharing those practices themselves. The social space of healing in Timor-Leste was being rendered visible for the world to see. In one untranslated exchange, Fransisco Almeida explains with pride to the gathered crowd: ‘This film will show the skills of doctors in Timor to the world’ [20.30].

Thickening Healing Modalities

Healing in Timor-Leste takes place across what cross-cultural psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman describes as the popular, folk, and professional sectors (Kleinman 1977). Familiar and familial knowledge of medicinal plants, massage techniques, and other remedies for everyday ailments are shared, learnt and transmitted from one generation to the next, as demonstrated in Holding Tightly by Noyti and the children. Additionally, non-specialist healers recognise the need for, and expertise of, ‘specialist’ customary healers, as well as professional health care workers. In the scene titled ‘Everyday Medicines’, we are introduced to Noyti and her children through a variety of audio-visual montages: a buffalo horn soundtrack frames the vehicles’ entrance into the social space, where children gather to explain and demonstrate their knowledge of medicinal plants and how to prepare medicinal compounds; we hear the sounds of wind, laughter, running, picking leaves, rubbing leaves, spitting, giggling; we see bodies touching, their shadows and smiles, the footsteps through crunchy post-harvested rice fields, and the picking of lolly medicines as they ham up their stroll through the fields and turn gleeful somersaults in the piles of rice stalk discards. Their mother talks to the camera in consort with the wind and tractor noises in the rocky shadowlands of the golden rice fields, to which she returns to harvest with her metal scythe, beside her fellow harvesters. As the scene closes, we see the children playing and a pre-recorded traditional song accompanies the lakadou in equally evocative play. These audiovisual elements combine to thicken the ethnographic description and enhance our understanding of how healing modalities and knowledge circulate in everyday life (Henley 2007).

Figure 4. Betel leaf, areca nut and turmeric. Still from Holding Tightly.

Specialist healers may or may not have kin relations to a patient. These healers draw their powers from a variety of sources including their own ancestral house, nature, or the divine. The healing gifts of these specialists may be received as a hereditary gift, through dreams, or as acquired through life experience and practice. For example, the bone-setter Januario da Silva first learnt to heal the bones of fighting cocks and small animals before trying out his skills on friends and family. These ‘animal intimacies’ (Govindrajan 2018) are especially pronounced in the scenes filmed in Januario’s clinic, drawing the viewers’ attention to the inter-species relationality at the heart of his healing powers. Others have recounted how Januario’s knowledge has been augmented by an interaction with an ancestral python who he intervened to save. Knowledge of the botanical components that Januario mixes in his water treatments was later passed on to him by the python in a dream. By contrast, Palmira acquired her knowledge of medicinal plants and healing techniques through a combination of learning from elders of her husband’s ancestral house, through her own natal family traditions, and by harvesting and testing remedies on herself (Figure 4).

Figure 5. Palmira massages a patient with a candlenut paste. Still from Holding Tightly.

En route to the film’s encounter with Palmira, we are driven at pace through dusty rural roads resplendent in flashes of green and tropical floral colour, augmented by the colourful hues of people’s houses and roadside stalls. We join Palmira in the forest where her voice competes with wind, footsteps, leaf crunch, birdsong, laughter and smiles. Back at her home, she swirls around baskets of rice which she is cleaning, throwing the odd handful to the scurry of chirping chickens underfoot, before placing it with collected plants in a wooden rice threshing receptacle and pounding it into a medicinal paste. The rhythmic sounds of swirling and pounding, the bodily movements and hand gestures involved, form part of a bodily praxis (muscle memory) that once again speaks to the everyday nature and sociality of healing. An older woman and children lie on the veranda behind her, commentating from the sidelines. Palmira’s pounding echoes through the social space. Later, Palmira massages an older woman with candlenut paste mixed with her spit (Figure 5). A little girl in a pink lacy dress and dogs join them on the massage platform. Inside we meet the gathered family members who have all been cured by Palmira. A baby coos and cries, people cough and others clear their throats; there is intentional listening, laughing, and the sound of the wind.

Healers often consider themselves to be vessels of healing: their power lies in their intermediary role between the patient and the spirit or natural world, either through the medium of an ancestral presence or animal, or through intercession. In the opening and closing sequences of Holding Tightly, the ancestral spirit has been called in by the sound of the lakadou and has entered the body of the healer. In the case of Jose da Costa, whose medicinal practices draw on an expansive suite of plants, the use of some botanical species has created onerous debts to be repaid to the spirit of these trees. For example, the medicines harvested from nunu wala (a type of ficus tree) used for muscular-skeletal healing of the young boy mentioned earlier must be repaid with an offering of one chicken or goat (bibi Timor). When harvesting medicinal plants, some healers (including Palmira and her husband) will speak to the plant, invoking the patient’s name and asking the spirit of the plant to activate its healing power in favour of the patient. In return, the patient will make a small offering to the healer which is taken as a return gift to the plant. While the specific return gift to the plant will often be prescribed (as Jose da Costa remarks in the film [2.31–2.49]), any additional gift made to the healer is decided upon by the patient.

More-than-human relationality is also present in the domesticated garden space of Mau Solda, the barefoot doctor. His home, as we can hear, sits at the edge of a busy city road. Mau Solda’s knowledge of herbal medication, built up over decades, means that some medicinal plants are cultivated in his own garden, while others are accessed from forested areas. Mau Solda maintains an extensive home garden of medicinal plants that he has collected over the years, building on the ethno-medicinal knowledge he developed and documented during the resistance period. As noted above, knowledge of medicinal plants was critical during the early years of the Indonesian occupation and throughout the period of armed resistance. In FRETILIN (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente) – held areas, health teams were formed as part of a popular health campaign, with a view to improving hygiene and sanitation and to highlight the importance of local medicines.

In the film, we arrive in Mau Solda’s garden to the soundtrack of a tebedai (drum and circular dance), the most potent musical affirmation of Timorese solidarity and resistance. In Mau Solda’s home and garden we hear children’s voices, his wife running water in the kitchen, wind, laughter, footsteps in the garden, birdsong, camera clicks, and finally the gasp of the filmmaker (Palmer) as the camera is led into the room containing the hand-carved shrine of Mau Solda’s teacher, Our Lady Mary. As well as Our Lady, Mau Solda points out to the camera his plants, his notebooks, and his medicinal powders which cure malaria. He caresses the bulbous root of a plant and, off camera, tells Palmer how he knew that the plant could cure malaria: the tiny green hairs on its stems stand-up like the hairs on the skin of a person in a malaria-induced fever (Figure 6).

Healers are not necessarily averse to including readily accessible over-the-counter pharmaceuticals in their repertoires of healing. Bone-setting may also involve the use of antibiotics to fight infection. Although some healers require patients to refrain from using formal health services while under their care, other healers may actively encourage patients to consult the local clinic after performance of the necessary rituals which act to enable or ‘open the path’ for a cure. At the clinic of Januario, the bone-setter, we arrive via a rough rural road, the camera shaking with the vehicle’s movement, the stark terrain visible simultaneously in the car’s windscreen and its rear-view mirror. The clinic – really a few rooms in both Januario’s and his neighbour’s house – is full of people awaiting our arrival. Voices mingle with the sound of chickens either running around or being caressed by the healer or others. Patients blare music on their phones, and again we hear the gasp of the filmmaker (Palmer) when confronted with a young man’s bloody leg, bound in leaves, bark, and bamboo casing. The young man with the damaged leg lies with his father beside him among a tangle of multi-coloured bedding on a simple bamboo bed. At one point the father beams at the camera – Januario, he says, treats his patients ‘with water, only water’ [21.27].

Towards the end of the film, we meet Jose da Costa again, who, as well as being a well-known local healer and ritual specialist, is also a kabu bee (irrigation water controller and custodian). Perched among a coconut and breadfruit-filled grove, Jose’s house-garden is brimming with tethered fighting cocks. He explains over their crowing how the Baucau karst (limestone) springs comprise a network of above and below ground waterflows connecting people and their origin houses with each other and with their respective environments. As the film cuts to a shot of water flowing down an irrigation channel through a lush spring grove, Jose tells of the water’s capacity for healing, stating that ‘water cures people … The power of water comes from its coolness. Because all medicine gets its life from water’ [25:48, 26:21]. These comments, and the subsequent healing ceremony involving water, which closes the film (see below), illustrate the intertwined nature of bodily and spiritual health, as well as the deep place-based connections between people, their environment and wellbeing in Timor-Leste.

Formal Healing Environments

At one point in the film, the clinic director of the Venilale Health Centre, Senhor Domingos Guterres, refers to customary healers and healing practices as ‘first aid’ and ‘emergency treatments’ [24.20]. His comments can be interpreted in a number of ways. Guterres seems to be suggesting that there is nothing wrong with resorting first to these practices and then accessing formal health care at a later stage. His comments also indicate that issues of accessibility and the location of health services are factors in people’s decisions to attend clinics or not. Yet through the audio-visual aspects of the film, we glean another way of making sense of the interview. While we travel to the clinic down leafy tree-lined roads, accompanied by a lively musical soundtrack, we arrive at a rather sterile, white, and orderly clinic, adorned with anti-malaria and ante-natal education banners. Above the relatively hushed tones of patient-clinician conversations in the hallway outside, we notice the distant sound of crowing roosters, the crispness of a voice recorded in an individual office, the director’s white coat, his metal chair, the piles of paper – stacked yet spilling over on his desk. At one point, the film cuts to his staff in another office, engrossed in paperwork and accounting activities, with medicines piled high on the shelves.

Later in the interview, Guterres seems to affirm that these practices and ‘forest medicines’ are valuable in their own right, whether as treatments in a biomedical sense or for the care and comfort they give patients [25:01]. The perceived quality of treatments within formal service provider settings is something that patients frequently refer to when justifying their own health care decisions. Palmira and her patients recount stories of unsatisfactory visits to the clinic, while Palmira’s home-based care has enabled their healing. Januario’s patients tell how the bone-setter’s clinic was their first choice for treatment, despite the Baucau hospital’s nearby location [21:38]. Indeed, as the photo below attests (Figure 7), the director of the clinic is himself open to, and a participant in, traditional healing practices. Nevertheless, when worn, the white coat does demand this director take on a certain institutionalised sensibility.

Figure 6. Mau Solda in his garden. (photo credit: Lisa Palmer).

Figure 7. Venilale Health Centre director Domingos (right) recording Palmira and Joaquin’s medicines. (Photo credit: Lisa Palmer).

Conclusion

The evocative ambience of the social space of healing pervades the audiovisual record of Holding Tightly. Healing occurs in the telling, the doing and the listening. It also consists of movement through and with the always co-mingled time–space of people, their ancestors, and their environments. In the final scene of the film, we return to the lakadou healing ceremony. We hear and/or see the lakadou, the wind, voices, prayer, chickens, dogs, dance footsteps, touch, caressing, laughing, smiling, coughing, and the splashes of water as it washes away sickness and glistens in the sun. Returning to Gallagher’s insights, these sounds are integral to establishing our sense of place, providing cues and clues to the simultaneously dynamic and emplaced nature of healing practices. This dynamic soundscape and the variety of healing modalities depicted generate a sense that life’s vitality and flourishing, and conversely the necessity of clearing of blockages leading to ill-health (Palmer 2020), are grounded in deep connections and exchanges between people and their environments.

Moving beyond diegetic sounds, the inclusion of a recorded soundtrack and the montage and arrangement of sound and image (sometimes to make up for technical hiccups and our own filmic shortcomings) seeks to ‘build a thicker and more meaningful’ audiovisual experience (Boudreault-Fournier 2020: 158). Together the rich visuals, diegetic sound, and added production elements open new and productive ways of working with Indigenous knowledges and ecological thinking. In the tradition of Feld (1987), we have combined diegetic sounds with musical and environmental recordings and images to bring into presence local life-ways. Our intention has been to provide opportunities for audiences to reflexively engage with the multi-sensorial and multi-species entanglements that make up these life-worlds in Timor Leste. Our desire is to compel a move beyond passive hearing to active listening (Ingold 2007), in ways which both reflect and sensate people’s connections with each other and their environments.

Acknowledgements

This research was carried out under the auspices of an Australian Research Council Grant (ARC DP160104519). Ethics approval was by the provided by the Australian National University Human Ethics Committee (2016/098). We thank all of our long-term collaborators and interlocutors in Timor-Leste and the film’s post-production team comprising Seth Keen and Cormac Mills Ritchard at RMIT University. We also acknowledge and thank Samuel Curkpatrick for his guidance in the writing of this paper and Sarah Bacaller for her careful editing, as well as three anonymous reviewers. All errors and omissions are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DP160104519].

Notes on contributors

Lisa Palmer

Lisa Palmer is a professor of geography who teaches and researches on indigenous environmental knowledge and practices at the University of Melbourne. Her research is focused on south-east Asia (particularly Timor-Leste) and indigenous Australia. In addition to Holding Tightly, Lisa directed Wild Honey: Caring for bees in a divided land (2019, Ronin Films), a short film documenting a community-based nocturnal honey harvest on island Timor. She has published widely and is the author of an ethnography on people’s complex relations with water in Timor-Leste titled Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology: Custom, environmental governance and development (2015, Routledge) and Island Encounters: Timor-Leste from the outside in (2021, ANU Press). She may be contacted at [email protected].

Susanna Barnes

Susanna Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research focuses on customary relations and land, as well as customary approaches to health and healing. She is a co-author Property and Social Resilience in Times of Conflict: Land, custom and law in East Timor, an interdisciplinary study of property relations and social resilience in Timor-Leste (2016, Routledge). Holding Tightly is her first visual methods collaboration. She may be contacted at [email protected].

Tamsin Wagner

Tamsin Wagner is a Melbourne-based editor with interests in cross-cultural collaboration and interdisciplinary environmental studies. She has held roles in non-government organisations supporting the revitalisation of Australian indigenous languages and has worked with prize-winning authors of narrative non-fiction. Tamsin may be contacted at [email protected].

Amias Hanley

Amias Hanley is an artist and researcher working at RMIT University’s School of Design and School of Media and Communication, Melbourne, Australia. Working at the intersection of sound studies and queer ecologies, their practice examines how critical listening processes give rise to the experience of ecological awareness and how sound, and the manipulation of sounds, evoke a sense of being, place and relationality. They are the author of Translating Ambiance Through Queer Ecologies: A Speculative Cartographic Imaginary (2020, Unlikely Journal) and their work has been shown by respected Australian art galleries and internationally—most recently at Ars Electronica Festival 2022, Linz AT. Amias may be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

1 See also https://vimeo.com/538947137.