Paying for the Dead: On the Politics of Death in Independent Timor-Leste

Abstract

Since Timor-Leste regained independence in 2002, there has been a revival of customary practices across the country. In the village of Funar, this has taken the shape of intensive investment in death ceremonies. This article takes death as a lens through which to examine changing social and political relations in Funar during the post-independence period. It analyses how exchanges that occur upon death serve to sever relations between house groups that are indebted to one another through marriage exchange, and how funerary practices enable people to renegotiate status differences that have become more contested since independence. While death confronts people with tragedies from the past, it also provides occasions for dealing with the aftermath of the Indonesian occupation. Moreover, reburial allows local residents to re-inscribe themselves in nationalist discourses, from which they have been largely excluded due to the region's ambiguous role during the Indonesian occupation.

Keywords:

• Southeast Asia
• Pacific
• Exchange
• Debt
• Alliance
• House-based Societies
• Mortuary Ceremonies
• Post-conflict Recovery
• Nation-building

Several hours after dawn on 8 April 2012, the ‘traditional ruler’ (liurai) of Funar died in a hospital in Timor-Leste's capital city, Dili, following a heart attack he had suffered two days earlier. The news about the sudden death of their liurai had shocked everyone in Funar, a village in the mountainous interior of the Laclubar subdistrict. ‘Why are they all dying?’ asked one of the girls in the village, remembering that another member of the liurai's house had passed away just a year earlier. The liurai's ninety-year-old aunt added, ‘Why do they all die so young? I have nothing to do all day…Why don't they take me?’ Trying to elicit a reaction from his distressed relatives, a young man from the liurai's house started shouting, ‘I am not scared of death [au bi maes mate]!…I am not scared! There are still plenty of us left!’ Unspecified events in the past were being mooted as the cause of the ruler's sudden and premature death, and many of his relatives were worried that they would soon follow suit.

During twenty-two months of fieldwork in Timor-Leste (between 2005 and 2012), I was struck by the time and effort Funar residents invested in the exchanges and ritual practices that occurred upon death. The proliferation of death rituals in Funar tallies with observations from other regions of Timor-Leste, which have been subject to an intensification of ritual activities since the country regained independence (McWilliam 2005, 2011; Palmer and de Carvalho 2008). In Funar, the revival of ancestral practices has involved not just the florescence of mortuary ceremonies but also the reconstruction and inauguration of origin houses (Bovensiepen 2014; cf. McWilliam 2005) and the reinvigoration of the ancestral landscape (Bovensiepen 2009).

In this article, my main focus is the proliferation of death rituals, which were accompanied by strong expressions of anxiety about unresolved problems from the past that manifested themselves in the untimely death of local residents. Writing of death in post-socialist Bulgaria, Deema Kaneff (2002, 103) describes the growing perception that ‘no one dies naturally any more’. She interprets this as indicative of the changing relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘the individual’ in the post-Soviet era. Similarly, in Funar there seems to be an increased pre-occupation with premature or ‘unnatural’ deaths, which were interpreted as signs of deeper underlying problems that had to be resolved. Such deaths were related to past killings, or injustices, or else to a failure to follow ancestral ways appropriately. This article examines how, through their intensive investment in death rituals, Funar's residents tried to make sense of their new circumstances in the post-independence period. Its aim is to take the topic of death as a lens to examine changing social relationships, and to relate the revival of ancestral practices to the transformation of the political landscape in the country. In post-independence Funar, dead bodies have become sites for struggles over meaning and political influence (cf. Verdery 1999).

Funar is a suco (administrative village) located on a steep mountain ridge about two hours’ walk from Laclubar Town, in the district of Manatuto. The village was entirely destroyed during political conflicts in 1975, and all residents of the rural areas of the Laclubar subdistrict were forcibly resettled in Laclubar Town during the Indonesian occupation (1975–99). Today, the majority of dislocated communities have moved back to their place of origin (Bovensiepen 2009). Most villagers are subsistence farmers, using swidden agriculture to grow maize, as well as planting a variety of root crops and rice. The language spoken in the Laclubar subdistrict is Idaté, but many residents also know Timor-Leste's national language, Tetum (both are Austronesian languages). Although most residents are Catholic, the majority only converted to Catholicism in the 1980s following the Indonesian government's policy, based on the Pancasila, that every citizen had to be a member of a monotheistic religion.

During my first period of fieldwork in 2005–2007, Funar was relatively isolated, there was little investment in roads and water facilities, hardly any NGOs worked on post-conflict reconstruction in the region, and few national events (such as independence) were celebrated in the village. Funar residents were hesitant to talk about the time of the Indonesian occupation. They focused their efforts on reviving ancestral practices, which they associated with a period of prosperity (Bovensiepen 2009). The intense material, physical and spiritual investment in mortuary ceremonies was part of this attempt to renew productive relations with the ancestors, who could otherwise bring misfortune to the living.

Every person in Funar is part of an ‘origin house’, referred to as an ada lulin (sacred house) or ada ulun (head house), which are the main units of social organisation and identification in this region (cf. Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Lewis 1988; McWilliam 2005; Schulte Nordholt 1971). There are five to six main origin houses in Funar (depending on their classification), and each house is said to have been founded by ancestral brothers in the distant past. Members of the same house are considered to be siblings and cannot intermarry, and they therefore have to enter into exchange relations with other house groups. There is an ideal of patrifiliation, according to which children are supposed to be integrated into the father's house. In practice, however, this does not always happen (Bovensiepen 2010). Exchanges that take place when a person dies (‘paying for the dead’) are a way of compensating the wife-givers for their loss of a member.

In his discussion of the re-emergence of customary exchange among Fataluku-speaking communities in Timor-Leste after the withdrawal of the Indonesian military in 1999, Andrew McWilliam (2011) argues that such exchanges provided people with the opportunity to reproduce social relations and to deal with the economic uncertainties of the post-occupation years. The revitalisation of the exchange economy, he contends, was a cultural response to the withdrawal of the repressive military regime and the dramatic decline of the market economy. It is a sign of the resilience of Fataluku communities and their ability to reconstitute their lives after nearly a quarter of a century of Indonesian military occupation. Echoing Mauss's classic observation that gift exchange creates debt, McWilliam (2011, 746) stresses that exchanges among Fataluku-speakers create ‘webs of mutually appropriated debt obligations (and claims) between exchange partners: a weaving together of multiple strands of obligation and entitlement in the reproduction of the social fabric’. Building on McWilliam's analysis, I argue that the proliferation of mortuary ceremonies in Funar must similarly be understood in relation to past and present political circumstances in the country.

Following the long-standing tradition of anthropological research (see, for example, Fox 1980; Lévi-Strauss 1949; van Wouden [1935] 1968), I concur that marriage exchange creates social relations between groups by linking them through gift obligations. However, my analysis differs from previous works by demonstrating that, in contrast to marriage exchanges, death exchanges in Funar have become a way of severing relations between groups by temporarily resolving the obligations between them. This is possible only because the direction of exchange between exogamous house groups in Funar is no longer sustained today over several generations, as it was in the past. Asymmetrical exchanges have hence become more shifting and temporary.

Exchanges that occur upon death establish the political autonomy of house groups by resolving outstanding obligations. To fully understand the significance of this process, we need to consider the political and historical context in which death rituals in Funar have proliferated, especially the power vacuum that was created at the local level by the withdrawal of the Indonesian military. My argument is that this power vacuum intensified the competition amongst different groups over status and influence, a competition that was reflected in the proliferation of death rituals, which offered opportunities for renegotiating hierarchical relations.

In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery (1999) asks why it is that dead bodies are such powerful political symbols, especially in moments of historical transition. She argues that since others can ascribe meaning to them, dead bodies can be used to emphasise continuities with the past and establish a connection with a specific territory—gestures that figure widely in nationalist discourses. In this article, I draw on Verdery to explore the political significance of death in Funar by showing how social groups renegotiate their relations with one another after a person has died. Unlike Verdery's discussion of the role of dead bodies in post-socialist contexts, my case study illustrates how death rituals also signify exclusions from national politics.

Another line of inquiry centres on the prevalence of ‘unnatural’, ‘bad’ or ‘red’ death, a common distinction in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Kwon (2006, 7), for example, has examined how the revival of ancestor worship in post-war Vietnam was accompanied by a proliferation of ‘ghosts’ of the displaced war dead who did not undergo appropriate burial or whose remains were missing. The revived tradition of ancestor worship in Vietnam, according to Kwon, represents an attempt by the survivors to deal with the enduring social wounds caused by mass violence and the systematic killing of civilians. The Indonesian occupation was also marked by mass killing and by the infusion of local conflicts with the violent dynamics of national politics. My argument is that the proliferation of death rituals in Funar since independence was similarly an attempt by people to deal with conflicts from the past.

In this article, I first examine how death rituals resolve debts and obligations between house groups by analysing the exchanges that take place after death, a process called ‘paying for the dead’. Secondly, I focus on the politics of death by exploring how status differences are renegotiated during mortuary ceremonies and burials. In the last section I return to the dangers of death, exploring the ritualised practices aimed at dealing with ‘unnatural’ death by creating a boundary between the living and the deceased. However, before I investigate these issues in more detail, let me briefly return to the death of the liurai mentioned in the opening paragraph, and provide a generic overview of the different stages of mortuary ceremonies in Funar.

Black Words

Late in the evening on the day after his death, the liurai's body was brought to Funar so that he could be buried in the place where he was born.¹ People travelled from far and wide to attend his funeral. Some relatives even crossed the international border from West Timor to participate in the ceremony. Gathering under a large marquee that had been erected in front of the liurai's house, the visitors waited patiently for the coffin to arrive from Dili. When the first car headlights illuminated the dark village, a low wail shuddered through the waiting crowd. As the wooden coffin was carried into the house, the mourning reached an almost unbearable intensity. People desperately tried to grasp the heavy casket. Some threw their hands behind their heads in pain, bent double by grief. The coffin was placed onto a table, which was lovingly covered with black and colourful cloth (tais). Another piece of black cloth hung over the coffin from the ceiling, and flowers and candles had been placed carefully around the table. In the left corner was a table on which stood a large wooden mirror, a gigantic rosary and a framed photo of the liurai. It portrayed him full of life, dancing in traditional clothes, a metal plate around his neck, enthusiastically waving a sword. As the visitors pushed into the room, they were received with open embraces by those inside. There was a tender urgency in the way people hugged one another, placing their heads gently onto the other's shoulder without the surface of their bodies touching.

The mourning went on for longer than usual. Close relatives had gathered around the liurai's body, but rather than standing in silence they hugged the coffin in the same way that they had been hugged by the other mourners. The liurai's younger sister affectionately stroked the casket that held her brother's corpse; bending over it, she cried, ‘my older brother, my older brother [u bouk, u bouk],’ before breaking into a loud lament with no decipherable words.

As the crying abated, a small elderly man in traditional dress—a tais around his waist and a colourful cloth wrapped around his head—pushed through the crowd. He was carrying a large sword with goat hair attached to the handle. He stopped at the end of the coffin next to the dead man's feet and waited in silence. Then, he suddenly raised the sword high above his head and swung the blade down towards the coffin, stopping just before it hit the wood. This was an exceptional gesture of protection. The man was part of the liurai's formatura, a military force that was summoned for his protection. Later, when the body was brought to the cemetery, it was accompanied by an entire parade of soldiers (moradores) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 The liurai's formatura (April 2012).

In the Laclubar subdistrict, ritualised practices surrounding the death of a person are called ‘black words/rituals’ (haha metan) (cf. Traube 1980). A deceased person is immediately spoken of as mainheri or matebian (Tetum), which may be translated as recently deceased ancestor or ancestral spirit.² Whereas the body of the deceased (yisin lolon) is taken to the cemetery to be buried, the matebian can still return to the village. To avoid this, a series of ritualised practices have to be carried out to demonstrate that the relatives love (admomi) and think (anoin) about the dead (cf. Traube 1986, 202).

In the days after a person dies, groups of people, bearing gifts of candles and money, visit the relatives of the deceased in order to cry and pray with them (sero mate). Every night for a fortnight, friends, relatives and visitors stay at the house of the deceased to remember him or her (adeer mate—‘guarding the dead’). During the first week, this vigil is called ‘guarding the bitter flowers’ (adeer ai-hunan meluk); in the second week, it is called ‘guarding the sweet flowers’ (adeer ai-hunan bear). Burial (a'oe mate) usually takes place a couple of days after death. A large group of people accompanies the coffin to the cemetery, saying prayers as they walk. These are interspersed with hymns and recitations of the names of Catholic saints. After the coffin is buried, flowers and candles are placed onto the grave. At the end, everyone leaves the cemetery as quickly as possible, often running back to the village, before reassembling at the house of the deceased. A meal of boiled meat and rice is prepared and eaten together after food has been offered to the ancestors who ‘eat first’.

In the weeks that follow a death, exchanges are made to ‘pay for the dead’ (selu mate). The wife-takers (anamahinak) meet the wife-givers (naiuun) to negotiate payments and gifts.³ Once the wife-takers have managed to raise the necessary resources, they pass buffalo, money and horses to the wife-givers in a ritualised encounter. The wife-givers, who are the ‘owners of the dead’ (mate nain), reciprocate with pigs, rice and woven cloths. Such events are accompanied by elaborate speech performances by representatives of each group. In addition, the wife-givers of the deceased have to give ‘one’ (animal) to their own wife-givers so that ‘the fire does not burn the eyes’ (wai na'luhi mata), that is, so that they can maintain good relations with their own origin. The children of the deceased also bring animals: one to pay for the dead and one to slaughter (selu jisa, taa jisa). In addition, they bring clothes and woven cloth, which are put inside the coffin to prevent the dead person from coming back to ask for them.

After a person's death, close relatives are not allowed to wash and have to wear black clothes or at least cover their heads with a piece of black cloth. Distant relatives can ‘take off the black’ after three months, but the children of the deceased must continue to wear black for six months. After twelve months, the spouse of the deceased can take off the black and a large celebration is held, called kore metan (‘taking off the black’).

So what do these ritualised practices achieve? How can we understand the emphasis on mortuary rituals in the independence period and the anxieties and concerns that arise when a person dies? Some clues to these questions can be gathered from the description of the liurai's death. The liurai had died suddenly of a heart condition; he was only in his fifties. His death shocked Funar residents because he was the latest in a number of members of his origin house to have died in recent years. People wondered what could be ‘wrong inside his house’ and were concerned about the survival of their house. When news of the liurai's passing reached Funar, the residents tried to make sense of what was happening, suggesting that in the past someone must have made a ‘mistake’ that caused members of the liurai's house to die prematurely. A woman from a different origin house told me that her house would no longer ‘give’ women in marriage to the liurai's house because her fellow house members were scared of dying.

The days following the news of the liurai's death were filled with hushed, fretful exchanges and heated discussions. First, the dead man's relatives had to deal with the news that his wife wanted her husband to be buried in Dili so that he would be close to her. Once she had agreed to let him be brought to Funar, the next hurdle was the wife-givers, who had refused to allow him to be buried in Funar because of the problems inside his house. The wife-givers also made claims when the time came to appoint a new liurai. The liurai's son was supposed to take on this role, but the wife-givers were initially very reluctant to ‘give’ the liurai's son to Funar's ruling house out of fear that he too would die. Numerous negotiations had to take place before any agreement could be reached and the liurai's son was ‘given’ to Funar as the new ruler.

Paying for the Dead

According to the patrifilial ideology in Funar, men should remain part of their origin house throughout their lives, while women leave their origin house to become part of their husband's house. This means that house groups are in a permanent state of indebtedness towards those origin houses from which they receive women, and these debts need to be settled upon death. If exchanges are maintained over several generations, this creates hierarchical or asymmetrical relations, since wife-givers are superior to wife-takers. The marriage payment (helin) serves to reimburse the wife-givers for their loss during the woman's lifetime, while the death payments seal the integration of the woman and her descendants into the new origin house. The exchanges between wife-givers and wife-takers that take place in such instances play an important part in ensuring the continuity of life (Bloch and Parry 1982; Clamagirand 1980; Fox 1980; Hicks [1976] 2004).

During life, house membership is ambiguous, and it is only upon a person's death that membership is permanently resolved by ‘paying for the dead’. Exchanges between houses are literally a payment for the deceased person to enter the receiving house. The severance of relations is a common feature of death rituals across Timor-Leste and Eastern Indonesia, separating the living and the dead, and completing the exchange relationship that created the life of the person in the first place. Forth (2009, 561–3), for example, has similarly interpreted Nage and Keo mortuary payments in Flores as the ‘final instalment’ of the marriage payments, since they confirm the incorporation of the deceased (and their children) into the wife-taking house (Forth 2009, 568). Marriage creates connections between origin houses, while selu mate resolves them. The proliferation of death rituals I encountered during my fieldwork in Funar indicates that severing connections (by resolving house membership) was more important at this particular historical moment than entering into new alliances.

Exchanges surrounding marriage and death are seen as key to understanding social organisation across the Eastern Indonesian archipelago. Following J.P.B. Josselin de Jong, van Wouden ([1935] 1968, 1) defined what is today Timor-Leste and Eastern Indonesia as a unified ‘field of ethnological study’ based on the widespread practice of cross-cousin marriage (connubium), seen as the ‘pivot’ to a comprehensive organisation of cosmos and society. James Fox's (1980) classic edited volume The Flow of Life develops van Wouden's argument (via Needham) by providing a comparative analysis of marriage rules, metaphors and symbols across Eastern Indonesia and Timor. His main argument is that the alliances produced through marriage reproduce the ‘flow of life’ in this region.

In the past, exchange relations between houses in Funar were always said to be unidirectional: wife-giving houses were not allowed to marry women from their wife-takers. The ideal was for a man to marry his matrilateral cross-cousin (tuananga), a practice that has since been forbidden by the Catholic Church. According to van Wouden ([1935] 1968, 7), marriage exchange is asymmetric ‘if affinal relationships are unilateral: in this case a descent group gives women to another but cannot receive women from the same group’. Several of Funar's inhabitants told me that in the past they used to follow such a marriage pattern, whereby the direction of exchange between two houses would not be reversed. Reviewing genealogical data I collected, this seems to have been particularly the case for members of liurai houses, who tended to maintain the direction of exchange for at least three to four generations. Nowadays, however, there are many cases across the social spectrum where houses ‘give’ and ‘take’ women from the same house, thereby reversing the direction of exchange within one generation. Even though we find many comparative cases in Timor and Eastern Indonesia where alliances are similarly shifting (Fox 1996, 149), for Funar residents this ‘lapse’ from their ideal of never-changing alliance relations is accompanied with a sense of unease. As one ritual speaker told me with embarrassment, ‘Today we give them buffalos, and the next day we get the buffalos back again. We give them buffalos, and we get them back again. Back and forth, back and forth’.

To what extent the Catholic prohibition of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage has contributed to the shifting alliances is unclear; however, there is no doubt that the quick reversal of the direction of exchange in Funar has made alliances more fragile (cf. Hoskins 1993, 20, 25; McKinnon 1991). If relations of exchange are not maintained with the same house group in the same direction over several generations, the connections between origin houses may indeed be severed more permanently once death payments are completed. Because people are now less invested in maintaining the direction of exchange, alliances and relations of superiority between exchanging groups are less permanent, which tallies with my general observation that hierarchical relations in Funar have been particularly contested during the post-independence period (Bovensiepen 2014; cf. Barnes 2013).

Another instance when the loss of a person demands compensation is when someone is killed or dies due to the actions or negligence of others. When I visited the suco of Manelima, I was told that the villagers had been unimpressed by the meetings organised by the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) to deal with the crimes committed during the Indonesian occupation. They felt the process was based on ‘foreign’ notions of justice and responded by arranging their own meeting to ‘cut justice’ (tesi justisa) instead. In one case, a former member of a pro-Indonesian militia had to give his son to the origin house of a man whom he had killed. Consequently, the son, by now a grown man, was living in the victim's origin house. Therefore, the loss of one person is reimbursed through the gift of another (see also Bovensiepen 2010).

In both Funar and the Laclubar subdistrict more generally, I heard many stories of children being exchanged to compensate for a person who had been killed. Sometimes the child was given generations later, long after the culprit had died, if, for example, the latter's descendants found themselves suffering ill health. This form of justice seems to be an alternative to the more confessional models of ‘truth and reconciliation’ instigated by the CAVR (cf. Babo Soares 2004; McWilliam 2007). By compensating those who had lost someone, the balance in the origin house was restored.

However, the loss of a person is not inevitably recompensed with another life. For example, members of one of Funar's origin houses, Bubai, were exonerated for killing members of another house, Berlibu, when they gave horses, buffalo and ‘black’ (fertile) land to the latter. The former decided to make these gifts because many of them had experienced ill health in recent years. They hoped that by paying for the deaths caused by their ancestors, their own lives would be spared. Gift exchange thus resolves conflicts from the past. However, in the case of Funar, mortuary exchanges facilitate such resolution not by creating social relations and obligations, but by temporarily absolving house groups from their debts towards one another.

The Politics of Death

Asymmetrical relations between house groups in Funar are cross-cut by another level of stratification based on distinctions between rulers (liurai), nobles (dato) and commoners (povu). During the Portuguese colonial period and to an extent during the Indonesian occupation, the status of the ruling house was strengthened through its affiliation with the colonisers. Once Timor-Leste regained independence, however, there was a power vacuum in Funar, since liurai no longer had support from powerful outsiders. The changing political landscape gave rise to a race for political influence at the local level, with different house groups trying to assert their status and their independence from the traditional rulers (Bovensiepen 2014). This political competition could also be seen during death rituals, as the following case studies make clear. One is the funeral of Marco, the ritual speaker from a high-status origin house, whose members repeatedly emphasised their position as dato (nobles) or aristocracia. The other is the funeral of Benedita, who was a member of a lower-status house.⁴

In March 2007, Marco, a well-respected ritual speaker, died unexpectedly in his field hut after two days of severe fever. In the evening, I went to ‘guard the bitter flowers’ in order to keep Marco's relatives company and show affection and respect for the deceased. The multi-room house where the ceremony took place was very spacious, and at least thirty-five people had gathered inside. People sat close together, whispering quietly, while Marco's wife crouched in the corner looking dazed. The ceremony lasted all night. The women sat around praying, talking and crying, while some of the men passed their time gambling, drinking and playing cards. The Lord's Prayer was recited in Tetum throughout the night.

Like Marco, Benedita was in her mid-to-late forties when she died quite suddenly. Unlike Marco, however, she was a relatively poor member of a low-status house. When she died, her body remained in the stilted hut where she had lived. In order to guard the dead, about fifteen people climbed up the narrow ladder to her house and squeezed into the room. Throughout the night, they sang beautiful melodic chants called loli or sidoo. These chants were largely wordless, containing only brief phrases.

When Marco died, the priest from Laclubar Town came to Funar to hold a small mass. Some of Marco's relatives had come from Dili by car and had brought a coffin with them, and it was they who pushed to give Marco a Catholic burial. During the priest's moving speech, Marco's relatives cried in a restrained way, quite unlike the vociferous mourning that I had observed during Benedita's funeral. After the mass, the men carried the coffin out of the house, and some of those gathered started to cry loudly, only to be promptly reprimanded by a female relative from Dili, who told them that they should restrain themselves because they looked stupid and uneducated (beik).

Benedita did not receive a Catholic mass. Yet, after her burial, her daughter refused to leave the cemetery. She clung to the cross on the grave, crying bitterly, until her relatives dragged her away. The cemetery, they explained, was a dangerous place, and one could not simply stay there, especially just after a person had been buried. The burials of Marco and Benedita ended like most others, with a hasty departure from the cemetery. People ran back to the village through the red mud, some discarding their flip-flops to speed their way.

The main difference between Marco's and Benedita's burial ceremonies was their varying inclusion of Catholic elements. Emphasising such elements was perceived as a way of being educated (matenek) and modern (modernu) rather than uneducated/stupid (beik). Catholicism in this instance was used to raise the status of Marco's house group, to present them as being connected with foreign practices. Indeed, there were invariably more Catholic elements in the death rituals of higher-status origin houses than in those of their lower-status counterparts, resonating with Kelly da Silva's (2013) observation of how, in the urban centres of Timor-Leste, Christian values are strategically used to reproduce, enhance or modify customary practices, specifically with regards to marriage negotiations.

Another site of status differentiation between origin houses in Funar is the cemetery. In the past, I was told, ‘heathen cemeteries’ (rate jentio) were scattered throughout the area and the dead were buried together rolled up in a mat. Today the dead are buried at the same cemetery, in single graves near other members of their origin house. It is possible that the Catholic practice of assembling the dead in one place has augmented the danger of that particular place, and this would explain why people always leave the cemetery in such a hurry and why it can only be approached in large groups.

The graves in Funar's cemetery do not point in any particular direction, but there are clear differences between those of high- and low-status origin houses. Whereas low-status residents were usually buried under earth mounds, the graves of liurai members were built entirely of stone and tiles (see Figures 2 and 3). The elaborate and monumental liurai graves are situated on a small hill overlooking the plain graves of lower-status residents. Upon death, then, the status differences between house groups are cemented and fixed. In one respect, this represents a process of deterritorialisation, since today everyone is buried at the same cemetery. Rather than bringing people together in an egalitarian community, however, this practice brings status differences between houses to the fore.

Figure 2 Funar Cemetery in 2006.

Figure 3 The Graves of liurai.

Reflecting on fieldwork carried out in the 1960s, David Hicks ([1976] 2004, 114) notes that liurai funerals among Tetum were distinctly more elaborate than those of commoners or nobles. This status difference was expressed in different ways, such as through the use of a different term for the coffin of liurai, which was referred to as the ‘boat of the foreigner’ (ro malae). Speaking more generally, Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1982, 6) have argued that at the time of death the social order is reasserted and reproduced. The tombs of the Merina, for example, are ‘an idealised map of the social order’ (Bloch and Parry 1982, 38). During death rituals, they maintain, the dead are transformed into an otherworldly and eternal force that comes to represent a transcendental authority that legitimises the social hierarchy.

At the cemetery in Funar, the differences between origin houses are clearly visible. Thus, the cemetery may be described as an ‘idealised map’ of the social hierarchy, but it is also a site where status relations are recalibrated.⁵ This was made clear to me when Marco's relatives told me that they were planning to buy tiles for his grave once they had managed to acquire the appropriate resources. I was also told that in the past only liurai had been permitted to have stone graves, whereas nowadays, everyone is granted this privilege, though not many can afford it. Today, the liurai do not have as much power as they are said to have had at some point during the Portuguese colonial period, but they have nonetheless managed to secure a number of economic privileges that shore up their status. The unequal status and aspirations of the various house groups are not only visible in the different ways in which mortuary ceremonies are conducted, but are also reproduced through the differential form of graves.

In 2010, when I returned to Funar after a two-and-a-half-year absence, I was somewhat surprised to discover that a member of a non-liurai house had become village chief (Bovensiepen 2014). This change in local power relations was reflected at the cemetery. The first thing I noticed when I went to the graveyard was that a significant number of non-liurai residents had now built stone graves for their dead. When I asked villagers where the money for this had come from, I was told that the people had used the ‘pensions’ that the Timorese government had started to provide to citizens over the age of fifty. The cemetery is hence a key site for the articulation and reification of status, but also the place where changes in the socio-economic status of house groups become visible. Elsewhere I have examined how the reconstruction of origin houses in the post-independence period has made it possible for origin houses to break with the hierarchical structures that were imposed during the Portuguese colonial period (Bovensiepen 2014). Death rituals and burial were also occasions when house status was recalibrated because they allowed origin houses to establish their autonomy.

Red Death

While ‘guarding the bitter flowers’ for Marco, we repeatedly heard loud banging noises coming from nearby. Some women whispered that this was Marco's matebian, who was annoyed that his wife had started to doze off; he was making this commotion to wake her up. I was asked to take a photo of Marco's corpse, but when I was about to do so, my camera broke. Marco's brother said that this was a sign (signal) that Marco did not want to be photographed and that he had broken my camera because his face had already become swollen and he was ashamed to be pictured in that state. After his death, Marco still had agency.

I knew of a number of other cases of the dead visiting their loved ones. Around Christmas 2006, tragic news arrived in Funar: Tanha, a teenage girl who had previously lived with my host family, had died suddenly in Dili. Tanha had moved to the capital to attend secondary school. It emerged that she had drowned in the sea, her body having been found by a rescue boat following an extensive search operation. Everyone in Funar suspected that there was something suspicious about her death. Why would she have gone to bathe in the sea when she was unable to swim? There were rumours that a jealous boyfriend had lured her into the sea and that she might have been killed by witchcraft. Some villagers also suggested that she had died because her father, the ritual speaker of a lower-status house, had tried to represent himself as being ‘bigger’ and more influential than he really was. She died because her father did not follow ancestral ways.

In the months after her death, Tanha continued to pay visits to her parents, her friends and other members of her origin house. She also appeared through the medium of spirit possession (ribola), ‘falling’ into the bodies of her kin. Since Helena, with whom I lived, had been one of Tanha's best friends, Tanha's metabian kept on visiting our house. Helena told me that Tanha would walk around the house at night, keeping everyone awake with the sound of her flip-flops. She also stole things from the house, such as tapes from the tape recorder, to warn Helena not to play music, which would be a sign that she had forgotten her dead friend.

Visits from people who had died almost always occurred at night, because it is the day for the dead when it is night for the living (cf. Forth 1998, 253). Many residents of Funar told me that the dead spoke to them in dreams, or that people who had recently died would come to visit them during the night to ensure they were not forgotten. However, if a person had suffered an ‘unnatural’ death, such visits would be even more frequent and insistent, since the dead person would be seeking to draw attention to the suspicious circumstances surrounding their demise. These deaths were called ‘red deaths’ (mate meran) and were opposed to those from ‘natural’ causes, known as ‘black deaths’ (mate metan). The category of ‘bad deaths’ is well known in Timor and Indonesia (Fox 1973, 352; Sell 1955; Valeri 2000, 27) and usually refers to deaths which are sudden, violent and inauspicious. In Funar, ‘red death’ includes not just deliberate acts of killing, but also accidents (drowning, falling from a tree, car accidents) and death from illness and disease (especially of a comparatively young person who is considered to have died prematurely).

Red death is said to cause the blood to become dirty, polluting future generations and affecting the relatives both of those who have died and those responsible for the death. Hence, when Tanha's body was brought back to Funar, a special ritual had to be carried out in order to ‘separate the red’ (eta meran; haketa mean in Tetum). For the purposes of this ceremony, a ritual specialist had to walk seven times around her body, uttering words of ritual speech; then a dog was beheaded to keep the dangerous ‘red’ away. By separating out the ‘red’, the ‘black’ was reinstalled (atama metan), thus allowing the body to be buried.

A similar ritual was required if a resident killed another person. An elderly villager who had been part of the resistance (FALINTIL) told me that he had killed many people during the time of the Indonesian occupation, and that for this reason he had later felt it necessary to rid himself of the ‘pollution’ or ‘dirt’ (ka'hoer) caused by his acts. To achieve this end, a black dog and a red chicken (in other cases a duck) had to be beheaded and put into a river. In these cases, the river takes the bird away while the beheaded dog waits on the bank to stop the red from returning. Failure to ‘separate the red’ can lead to infertility and infant mortality among the perpetrator's relatives. The pollution that arises from an ‘unnatural’ death is thought to contaminate the relatives of those responsible.

When the ritual guardian of a lulik house fell ill in 2005, people blamed this on a murder that had taken place inside the house. The guardian's dead husband had killed one of his relatives (from the wife-givers), whose blood had spilled onto the floor and subsequently dribbled down the ladder and onto the ground. Although the lulik house was later destroyed and was only rebuilt when people returned to Funar, the ‘dirty blood’ (ran ka'hoer) still adhered to the building and the earth, and it was this that caused its guardian to become ill (cf. Allerton 2013, 57).

Despite all the efforts made by the living to keep the dead away and to separate themselves from the ‘dirty blood’ spilled by their relatives or ancestors, the separation from the red is not always successful. Tanha kept on returning to our house, just as Marco's matebian continued to pay visits to his relatives shortly after his death. The dangers posed by death increase if a person dies of ‘unnatural’ causes, but even a ‘natural’ death can spell trouble for the living.

In Timor-Leste today, residents of the Laclubar subdistrict are often considered to have been collaborators with the Indonesian military, since several residents were key players in the APODETI party which favoured integration with Indonesia. The last governor of Indonesian-occupied Timor, Abílio José Osório Soares, is from Laclubar. Funar's political elite, who mostly supported the pro-Portuguese UDT party, had long-standing marriage relations with Osório Soares's family. The region's association with the pro-Indonesian APODETI party in the national imaginary may explain its relative exclusion from nation-building processes today. In reality, political affiliation was much more diverse: although some members of the political elite took on key positions within UDT or APODETI, many residents joined the pro-independence party FRETILIN.

The conflicts between the different political parties before and during the Indonesian occupation produced many unresolved ‘red deaths’ that had to be dealt with after independence. In September 2012, Funar residents resolved to deal with some of the outstanding problems by organising the (symbolic) reburial of two men from the liurai's house who were killed by FRETILIN during conflicts with UDT in 1975. This was a response to the liurai's death in April 2012, since his house members were trying to get to the bottom of the problems ‘inside the house’. To ‘separate the red’, the house in Dili where the men had lived was ‘cleaned’, which involved mixing pig's blood and coconut juice and pouring this onto the stairs at the entrance of the house. Coconut and pig's blood are considered to be ‘cooling’, they ease the ritual heat created by ‘red deaths’ and are also used in peace-making rituals. Since the men had been members of the UDT party, several party representatives attended the ceremony. There was a feeling among those gathered that the deaths of these men, who had not been part of the independence party FRETILIN, had been somewhat forgotten on the national stage. These two men had received little attention from national leaders, unlike those who had died in the struggle against Indonesian occupation, many of whom were buried in the ‘hero’ cemetery in Metinaro.

The reburial of the two men killed by FRETILIN demonstrates how Laclubar's elite feels excluded from national politics. Although some UDT representatives attended the event, victims of previous conflicts who did not fit into the clear-cut ‘hero’ category generally received little attention at the national level (Kammen 2003). In his analysis of the consequences of the Vietnam-American war, Kwon (2006, 4, 119) argues that the centralisation of commemoration by the state produced tensions between ancestor worship and hero worship, since the institution of war heroes excludes the ambiguous war dead. While the reburial of UDT members was an attempt to address problems from the past that threatened the living by ‘separating the red’, it was also an attempt to bring attention to the exclusion of UDT supporters from the national stage.

Examining the repatriation of dead bodies in post-Soviet contexts, Verdery (1999, 33) argues that reburials often take place in moments of epochal shifts. Dead bodies are potent symbols for nationalist discourses, and reburials instantiate these discourses in specific territories. Similarly, by bringing the (symbolic) remains of these two men back to Funar and burying them in the ancestral land, villagers sought to re-inscribe themselves in the nationalist narrative.

Conclusion

In ‘The Political Economy of Death’, Feeley-Harnik (1984) describes the florescence of mortuary rituals in Sakalava, Madagascar, which she interprets as a response to the intrusion of the French colonial administration. People took refuge in death rituals because the realm of the dead was the one zone that could not be controlled by colonial officials. Can we interpret the proliferation of death rituals in Funar in a similar way, that is, as a response to the intrusion of outsiders, such as the Indonesian military or Portuguese colonisers?

In this article, I have shown that mortuary ceremonies provide people with the opportunity to deal with problems from the past, especially the aftermath of the Indonesian occupation and related conflicts, since they serve to redress imbalances and pollutions caused by past killings and to resolve outstanding obligations and tensions between different house groups. Timor-Leste's history is one replete with ‘unnatural’ (‘red’) deaths and communal violence (cf. Myrttinen 2013, 478; Sakti 2013). Death rituals are one of several ways in which people deal with such killings, either through exchange or by ‘separating the red’ so that the spirits of the dead cannot return to haunt the living. In this sense, the proliferation of death rituals can indeed be understood as a direct response to foreign interventions.

Whereas the Portuguese colonial administration, and to an extent the Indonesian government, strengthened the position of the liurai in the Laclubar subdistrict, the post-independence period has been characterised by a power vacuum and the reshuffling of power relations. House groups have thus been afforded the opportunity to reassert and raise their status vis-à-vis one another, made manifest in both the conduct of ceremonies and in the construction of graves. By bolstering the autonomy of house groups, mortuary ceremonies were used to recalibrate hierarchical relations between origin houses.

However, to understand why the situation in Funar is different from other regions of Timor-Leste, such as that described by McWilliam (2011), we also need to look beyond local-level politics. Verdery (1999, 33) has observed that the dead are frequently appropriated by nationalist discourses. This typically takes place in moments of epochal shifts. Timor-Leste's transition to independence presents such a shift. Dead bodies have become sites for struggles over meaning and political influence. Because the inhabitants of the Laclubar subdistrict are seen as having collaborated with the Indonesian military in the national imagination, this area has been comparatively isolated from nationalist commemorations that celebrate the participation of ‘heroes’ in the resistance struggle. The reburial of those who died during past conflicts was a way for people to claim a stake in the nationalist discourse.

When the soldier protecting the liurai's coffin swung his sword towards it during the mourning ceremony, the process of separation was vividly enacted. Death rituals create separations between the deceased and the living, and they serve to sever relations between exchanging groups. Hence in contradistinction to Feeley-Harnik (1984), I would suggest that in Funar, death rituals are not about creating autonomy from outsiders, but rather they serve to bolster the autonomy of house groups towards one another by resolving obligations (and thus dependencies) between them. Nevertheless, this process is not always successful. When Funar's liurai died, the wife-givers made claims to his corpse and to his son. This shows that despite people's best efforts to settle the debts that tie them together, such attempts can fail and so the struggles over dead bodies continue.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank friends and acquaintances in Timor-Leste who supported this research and my colleagues at the University of Kent, especially Roy Ellen, David Henig and Miguel Alexiades, for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Funding

Postdoctoral fieldwork was made possible by grants from the Association of South-East Asian Studies in the UK and by the Evans Fund of Cambridge University, whereas doctoral research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant number: 7366) and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: Postdoctoral fieldwork was made possible by grants from the Association of South-East Asian Studies in the UK and by the Evans Fund of Cambridge University, whereas doctoral research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant number: 7366) and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Notes

[1] The term liurai has been translated as ‘king’, ‘Timorese native chief’ or the ‘active ruler’ opposed to the passive ritual authority (Schulte Nordholt 1971, 236; cf. Traube 1986, 259).

[2] Funar's residents tend to use the Tetum term matebian rather than the Idaté word mainheri. Unless otherwise stated, all italicised words are in Idaté.

[3] The Idaté term naiuun may be translated as ‘mother's trunk/origin’, whereas anamahinak means ‘female children’. Fox (1996, 132) has criticised the terms ‘wife-givers’ and ‘wife-takers’ for failing to capture the dynamic and fluid nature of these groups and proposes ‘progenitor’ and ‘progeny’ as alternatives. My preferred solution would be to use the Idaté terms, but this would make it hard for an English speaker to follow the argument and to comprehend the way in which people are transferred from one origin house to another.

[4] I use pseudonyms for all personal names to protect the anonymity of research participants.

[5] Fox (1996) distinguishes between precedence and hierarchy by arguing that hierarchy is fixed, whereas precedence, which is thought to confer position, rank and status by stressing priority in time, is subject to competition and contention. I use the term ‘hierarchy’ here when referring to the discursive emphasis on the fixity of status groups, even though in practice status differences are contested, as the notion of precedence implies and as is common amongst Austronesian populations.