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Abstract
In Timor Leste, customary healing practices are deeply embedded in the inter-relationships between people, the ancestors and the environment. Meanwhile being ‘modern’ has long meant being both educated and Christian, ushering in ongoing shifts in moral worlds. These seemingly contradictory forms of sociality, relationality and subjectivity are, we argue, uniquely woven together through a deeply political meshwork of performative practices. Drawing on the experience of our collaborative research into mental health systems in Timor-Leste, we ask what this means for attempts to engage with diverse approaches to healing through an integrated approach to the nation’s public health programmes and policies.
Notes
1. Kleinman et al., “Culture, Illness, and Care”; Kleinman, “Depression, Somatization and the “new cross-cultural psychiatry.””
2. Sorsdahl et al., “Traditional Healer Attitudes and Beliefs.”
3. Kakuma et al., “Towards an Integrated and Accessible.”
4. In this paper, we refer mainly to Catholic or Protestant faith-based healers.
5. Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies, 15.
6. Dikeç, “Space, Politics, and the Political.”
7. Silove et al., “Estimating Clinically Relevant Mental.”
8. McWilliam, “Fataluku Healing and Cultural”; While mentally ill people in Timor Leste are generally cared for in and by family and community, there is stigma attached to certain behaviours associated with mental illness and fear of (spiritual) contagion and very often physical violence. In the absence of viable care alternatives, some people are shackled or otherwise restrained.
9. For logistical reasons no participants from the Special Economic Zone of Oecusse were able to take part in the study.
10. While local interpretations of illness seldom differentiate between mind and body, in this paper we focus on interactions with the newly introduced mental health care system. The term mental illness used here is drawn from the traditions of Western medicine, while acknowledging the inter-dependent relationship between the two, nevertheless distinguishes mental and physical health/illness.
11. cf. Hoskins, “From Diagnosis to Performance: Medical.”
12. Within the National Hospital in Dili, religious sisters perform pastoral visits on a regular basis as do visiting priests. All private health care providers, including those run by the Catholic Church or Protestant churches are regulated by law (Decree Law 18/2004). Informal links also exist between church-based healers and the formal health system. For example, the only practicing psychiatrist in the country is a member of a Charismatic church and member of their healing community. He told the authors he frequently refers patients to church healers when all possible avenues have been pursued within the formal health system. Informal linkages between the church and customary healers abound. One of the customary healers who participated in the enactment of customary healing practices in the 2015 national forum was also a charismatic healer associated with his local Protestant church.
13. Price et al., ““I Go I Die, I Stay I Die”; Zwi et al., Timor-Leste: Health Care.
14. cf. McWilliam, “Fataluku Healing and Cultural Resilience”; Sakti, “‘Thinking Too Much’: Tracing”; Zwi et al., Timor-Leste: Health Care.
15. Fox, “The Flow of Life: Essays.”
16. While the fetosaa and umane alliances systems vary in their detail and terminology across the country, partilineal systems are usually glossed by anthropologists in English as wife-taker and wife-giver alliances. Wife givers/takers do not reflect the meaning of Indigenous terms which speak more to the transferral of generative power and house affiliation. In these systems the local language terms refer, in general, to the relationship formed between the marriage house of a man’s sister (and her children) and the house of the man’s patriline (and his children). Once the barlake process is completed, children belong to the house of their father (who are in effect fertility-takers from the wife’s natal house). While in matrilineal systems (and indeed, in certain circumstances, in many of the systems which are nominally patrilineal), men marry into their wife’s natal house, in which case the children of the union belong to the mother’s house (who are in effect fertility-takers from the husband’s natal house).
17. Palmer, Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology.
18. cf. Hatala et al., “Narrative Structures of Maya Mental,” 479; Rodger et al., Between Trauma and the Sacred.
19. The cyclical movement (but also spatio-temporal co-existence) between darkness and light, day and night, the world of the dead and the world of the living is the core principle of local cosmologies and spirit ecologies among various socio-cultural and linguistic groups in Timor Leste (see Traube (1986) for Mambai; Palmer (2015) for Makassae and Waima’a; Barnes (2017) for Naueti).
20. The Tetun term oratorio is derived from the Portuguese word meaning ‘oratory’, place of prayer. While oratorios draw on certain Catholic rites and saints, they are in fact appropriating (drawing in) their symbolic powers and attributing new meaning to them (see also Fidalgo Castro (2012)).
21. cf. Strathern, The gender of the gift; Bialecki and Daswani, “What is an Individual?.”
22. cf. Sakti, “‘Thinking Too Much’: Tracing.”
23. Law and Singleton, “Object Lessons,” 16.
24. Ibid., 12–3.
25. Ibid., 17.
26. Ibid., 17.
27. Ibid., 16.
28. Ibid., 19.
29. Rodger and Steel, Between Trauma and the Sacred, 139–40.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. It is also the case that Timorese customary cosmologies recognise the spirit world as having both benevolent and malevolent features. Within this dualism, the threat and need to placate various ‘devil’-like or angry spirits is a constant force which must be negotiated and attended to. However, this acceptance is different to asserting that customary practices themselves are promulgating ‘the work of the devil’ and are therefore illegitimate.
33. Wiyono, “Timor Revival: A Historical.”
34. cf. Strathern and Stewart, The Python’s Back.
35. cf. Schram, “A Society Divided: Death”; Chua, “Horizontal and Vertical Relations.”
36. See Wiyono (2001) for an historical account of the periodic emergence of these charismatic traditions in the region.
37. In addition to fact of the inadequate services and access issues in the ‘free’ formal health system, it is also the case that people engage with such charismatic faith healing practices because of its enchantment (as opposed to secular health services) and associated inter-group sociality and support systems (a sociality circumscribed by the valorization of collective individualism).
38. Mol, The Logic of Care, 89.
39. Ibid., 91.
