Making Kin and Population: Counting Life in the Wake of Abandonment in Timor-Leste

Abstract

Maubisse, a central mountain town in Timor-Leste, has the highest fertility rate in the country, yet people there describe the land as ‘empty’ and the population as ‘reduced’ due to decades of conflict. As people rebuild houses and family relations, they talk about replenishing life and ‘fixing’ families by having more children. This local perspective contradicts development discourses that favour lowering fertility to achieve sustainable ‘development’. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork I explore how reproduction in Timor-Leste is now being conceived in the wake of abandonment by previous colonial regimes and new development narratives; whereas people in Maubisse count ancestral lineages connecting kin and landscape, showing how reproduction is ‘distributed’ beyond individual bodies. Whilst critical of practices of counting and calculating reproduction, I argue that pursuing reproductive justice still requires considering how people count themselves.

Keywords:

• Reproduction
• Abandonment
• Conflict
• Population
• Timor-Leste

‘People in the UK only have one or two children. The UK must be lacking in space!’, Cristiano teased. We sat drinking coffee in his family’s garden near Maubisse, a small town in Timor-Leste’s verdant central mountains. Cristiano and his father quizzed me about the differences between families in Timor-Leste and the UK. ‘There is a limit on the number of children people can have in the UK, right?’, Cristiano inquired more seriously. ‘Like in China, they can only have one child’, Cristiano’s father added.

As a British–Irish person in Timor-Leste, I encountered a common assumption about the UK: families have only one or two children due to a strict population policy. I always explained, as I did to Cristiano and his father, that there is not a restrictive policy, but there are many reasons why people have one or two children compared to the six or eight children¹ that were common in Maubisse. I reeled off excuses: living costs are very high, making raising children expensive, and many people do not own houses or land. Nodding sympathetically Cristiano’s father said: ‘Here the land is empty (T, rai mamuk)² and we are few, because many died in the war’. Then he reasoned ‘Maybe in the future, when we are many more, we will change to a system like the UK’.

In conversations, people sometimes commented that, perhaps, in the future Timor-Leste would be like ‘developed’ countries such as the UK, China and Singapore, which already had large populations and people had fewer children. More often they talked about the loss of lives that had taken place in the past, describing the land as ‘empty’ (T, mamuk) or spacious (T, luan). They also described themselves as being ‘few’ or ‘reduced’ (T, menus) in number due to multiple experiences of conflict.

The eastern half of the island of Timor was permanently settled by the Portuguese in 1703 (Feijó & Kent 2020).³ After centuries of indirect and direct rule, the Salazar regime fell in 1974, making the future of Portuguese Timor uncertain, and civil war ensued. As the Portuguese retreated, Indonesia invaded leading to 24 years of military occupation (1975–99). This resulted in thousands of deaths due to violence, displacement and starvation. The Commission for Truth, Reception and Reconciliation (CAVR 2005) reported a total of 186,000 conflict-related deaths but considered figures could be much higher. The most widely quoted number is 200,000 deaths, a quarter to a third of the pre-invasion population.⁴ Many consider the Indonesian occupation a genocide, and a coercive state family planning programme was accused of operating with genocidal intent (Sissons 1997). In 1999, a UN referendum resulted in overwhelming support for independence, and in 2002 the territory became the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.

In stark contrast to the years of occupation, the first national Demographic and Health Survey (Ministry of Health and National Statistics Office, Timor-Leste, et al. 2004) recorded rapid population growth (3.9 per cent), largely due an extremely high fertility rate (7.77), the highest in the world. During the Indonesian occupation, life was forcibly reduced by violence and oppression. However, I argue, in independent Timor-Leste the abandonment of life and its reproduction takes a new form.

Several months after my conversation with Cristiano and his father, I attended a public lecture at the National University of Timor-Leste (UNTL) in Dili, the national capital. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was giving a presentation on the ‘Demographic Dividend'. A room of students listened as a Timorese doctor explained that family planning was concerned with ‘the quality of Timorese, not the quantity’. A European demographer described how, after independence, Timor-Leste had experienced rapid population growth with women having on average 7.2 children. This fertility rate had since fallen dramatically to 4.2 in 2016 (GDS 2017). However, Timor-Leste still had one of the fastest growing populations in the world. Using population pyramids, the demographer showed how a lower fertility rate could have a positive effect on the economy. Reducing the ‘dependency ratio’, the percentage of working adults in relation to dependants, e.g. children and the elderly, would open a window of opportunity called ‘the demographic dividend’ which, if capitalised on, would improve the country’s overall economy and wellbeing.

At the front of the lecture hall, a midwifery student doubled over in laughter when one of the presentation slides showed a graph of Timor-Leste reaching an average fertility rate of 2.3 by 2030. She spoke up, ‘I agree we need more information about family planning but what about what happened in Portugal and Japan, the fertility rate declined very quickly, and the governments are panicking, what will the government do if our fertility rate keeps falling here?’ The Timorese doctor clarified: ‘There is something called “replacement rate”. This is the rate at which the population reproduces itself but does not grow and is sustainable’. In general, the students were not against education or access to family planning, but they were critical of the government’s ability to mobilise family planning and the sort of problems reduced fertility might bring in the future. One student pointed out the issue of accessing family planning in rural areas where the government had trouble even providing clean water to communities.

The two ethnographic examples above illuminate contending ideas about reproduction and population that are at the heart of reproductive politics in Timor-Leste. As families count descendants, and as development professionals calculate fertility rates, both look for a sense of balance through ideas of ‘replacement’ that will bring prosperity. However, one approach values higher fertility and population growth, whilst the other seeks to limit it.

‘Reproductive abandonment’ (Munro and Widmer, this volume) describes situations where peoples whose reproduction is unwanted are subjected to reductionist or unwanted assistance, as well as circumstances in which support for reproduction is unmet. Reproductive abandonment manifests in the discourse of the demographic dividend, which encourages reduced fertility rates to stabilise health and economic indicators. Here I examine how reproduction is now being conceived in the wake of abandonment by previous colonial regimes and new development narratives. Expanding on anthropological understandings of reproduction and reproductive justice, I examine the narratives of population and reproduction that I observed in Timor-Leste.

Make Kin and Population

Anthropologists of reproduction have extensively critiqued how biopolitical regimes implement ways of counting and categorising reproduction. Such techniques lead to population policies that govern reproduction and reproduce violence through racist and sexist hegemonies. Within the anthropology of Timor-Leste however, reproduction, explored through notions of kinship, fertility and regeneration, has largely been connected with customary practices and peoples’ relationship to land (Fox 1980; McWilliam & Traube 2011; Palmer & McWilliam 2019). Here I bring these discussions together by exploring local ways of counting reproduction. Specifically, I demonstrate local modes of counting reproduction as forms of ‘distributed reproduction’ (Murphy 2017). Distributed reproduction draws attention to the way in which reproduction is a set of processes that takes place within and beyond the body across a broad political, spatial and temporal sphere, including how concepts of life are shaped through different infrastructures, within the environment and across generations (Murphy 2017). Whilst critiques of number regimes (Guyer et al. 2010), metrics (Adams 2016) and demographic calculations of reproduction (Greenhalgh 1995; Murphy 2017) often focus on how people are quantified by others (e.g. the state), this article draws attention to how people count themselves and their own collective reproduction within the wider environment. In the context of abandonment by previous colonial regimes, the lack of care and support provided by the current state as well as populationist development programs, I explore how life in Maubisse is conceived through local ways of counting. I examine ethnographically how people think about reproduction, and the other concepts, imaginaries and structures they evoke. I argue that local ways of counting are part of an insistence on survival, not only a way of ensuring continuity but also a way to remake life in abundance as a form of prosperity. These ideas about reproduction differ from development discourses that encourage reproduction to be reduced for the sake of health indicators tied to economic development.

Recent scholarly debates about reproduction and environment grapple with the issue of population and survival in the face of environmental destruction and multiple forms of violence (Dow & Lamoreaux 2020; Sasser 2018). Counting and numbers are recurring themes in these debates: what quantities and qualities of life do we have, and how do we measure these? What sort of life, and what aspects of it are encouraged, and what is discouraged or abandoned? Scholars have adopted a reproductive justice framework to capture the way social and biological reproduction are inexplicably tied to unequal relationships. Reproductive justice tries to address structural inequalities including gender, class and race. This intersectional approach originates from Black and Indigenous feminist activists in the US in the 1990s who advocate for a wider understanding of reproductive rights to include a more collective sense of reproduction and the right to raise children in safe, healthy environments free from racism, environmental toxicity and other forms of violence (Ross & Solinger 2017).

Engaging with this approach, Donna Haraway argues for ‘composition, not accumulation’ when it comes to creating human life (Clarke & Haraway 2018, 93, author’s emphasis). She calls for radical feminist scholars to champion the different ways we know kin can be made, beyond biogenetical baby making, to imagine a future in which babies are rare, nurtured and precious. Haraway suggests cultivating alternative kinship relations in which people and kin are composed through social experiences. In Making Kin Not Population (Clarke & Haraway 2018), extended kin networks, spiritual connections with ancestors (Benjamin 2018) and non-monogamous relationships (TallBear 2018) are very much part of this multi-relational, multispecies, multi-spirited kin-making. Haraway (2018) argues that through nurturing such relationships, we can make fewer babies for a less human-heavy earth where all species have a better chance of surviving all together—her maxim: ‘make kin not babies’. This approach can be considered in terms of what Jade Sasser (2018) describes as ‘populationist’: the view that human numbers are socially and environmentally problematic and should be reduced through non-coercive rights-based solutions (Angus and Butler 2011). Populationist thinking stems from and reproduces forms of racism that cast aside considerations of consumption and inequality in favour of reducing life in particular forms e.g. non-White lives in the Global South (Sasser 2018). As part of these discussions, Michelle Murphy argues that ‘population’ as a concept needs to be done away with because, through colonial practices and racist science, population has tied reproduction to economy, leading to the notion that some lives are economically valuable whilst others are not even worth being born (Murphy 2017; Strathern et al. 2019).

Engaging with these debates I explore what happens when counting occurs within families and ancestral groups, at a local level, as well as an institutional level. What do numbers mean to people, particularly after conflict? And how does it shape their perceptions of development and future prosperity? To answer these questions, we must pay attention to people’s understandings, experiences, desires, preferences and future imaginaries.

Below I describe some encounters with Maubisse families and their ancestral houses. Then I consider the politics of counting through which people count and recount kin and show how these challenge capitalist assumptions about prosperity, which promise development by sacrificing life for economy. First, however, I start by introducing Maubisse, its landscape and the agents within.

Maubisse and Rai Mamuk

Maubisse’s central town, ‘villa’, is tucked on one side of a large, rounded valley. Smaller villages and hamlets are spread over the mountain sides which stay green all year round. Patches of ironwood forests shelter coffee trees which thrive in the high altitude (1000–1500 m). Around them are the green slopes of the mountains. Most of the houses are concentrated around the market, where the Pousada, the old Portuguese colonial residence, sits on its own conical hilltop. Below sit the primary and secondary schools, hospital and government offices. Dispersed in between are concrete or corrugated iron, wood and thatch houses and their terraced gardens. Maubisse’s fertile ground, and its potential for agricultural and tourism development, were emphasised in speeches at local events and meetings.

At the time of my fieldwork in 2018–19, the centralisation of the government and NGOs in Dili meant there were stark inequalities between the countryside and the capital city. Small towns like Maubisse suffered frequent power outages and difficulties with water supply. There was an agricultural college, but no senior high school. Those who could went to the capital for further education.

Local leaders encouraged local community efforts rather than relying on the state. ‘The town used to be full of Portuguese and foreigners’, the village head explained, referring to the presence first of Indonesian soldiers and then UN peacekeepers following the referendum on independence. He pointed out the deteriorated Portuguese houses, painted white with orange tiled roofs. ‘Where the pousada⁵ sits’, he gestured to a small hill sticking up in the middle of the circular valley, ‘there used to be seven ancestral houses, but they were taken down so the Portuguese could enjoy the view’.

Ancestral houses that were destroyed during the Portuguese and Indonesian colonial periods are now being rebuilt. These Mambai⁶ style houses, mostly wooden with large conical thatched roofs, can be seen on the mountain tops around Maubisse, a noticeable part of the landscape. As homes and markers of group identity, ancestral houses (T, uma lisan; M, fada lisa)⁷ trace heritage through patrilineal lines. Family members of an ancestral house are connected to living descendants and ancestral spirits through participation at customary events. Ancestral houses are connected to one another through marriages between members, tying houses into obligatory exchanges of gifts at marriage and mortuary events. Ancestral houses also connect members to the local landscape through harvest festivals and animist customs related to specific trees, rocks, water sources and other features of the environment which are considered lulik (T), meaning these places are both sacred and taboo, potent and powerful (Bovensiepen 2014; McWilliam & Traube 2011; Trindade 2012).

Land that is not used for houses or farmland is not uninhabited. Alongside lulik places, wild animals, plants, non-human agents, and other forces enliven it. People’s connection to the land has been a significant concern in the aftermath of the conflict in which many were forcibly displaced from mountain villages to central towns. As people returned to ancestral lands, engaging with the land through customary practices including the rebuilding of ancestral houses has become part of local post-conflict recovery (Bovensiepen 2015; McWilliam & Traube 2011; Trindade & Barnes 2018).

Despite the various structures and inhabitants of the landscape in Maubisse, several inhabitants, including Cristiano and his father, described the land as empty ‘rai mamuk’. As people explain, this is related to the loss of life during the Indonesian occupation. Multiple phases of colonial rule left ruined places in the landscape; this and the lack of development in the independence era added to the feeling of abandonment and destruction. Although independence had brought a new school and hospital funded by international aid, there were few new buildings, and the main road through Maubisse was only finished and sealed during my stay in 2018. This material emptiness added to the sense of loss brought by the genocide and destruction that had threatened people’s survival.

‘Rai mamuk’, or empty land, is a phrase that litters conversations about land rights (Cryan 2015). Here it describes land left without owners after the occupation, land that is now considered to belong to the state. This includes land without an identifiable owner, abandoned properties and any land once used by the Portuguese or Indonesian governments. This ‘state land grab’ has proven to be a larger concern for communities than land disputes between neighbours (Cryan 2015). However, here I draw attention not to legal ownership but to how people used this phrase to describe the lack of people on the land, the loss of lives in the conflict and the reproduction of a new generation. Judith Bovensiepen has shown how recultivating productive relationships with ancestral land has been a key part of post-conflict recovery in Timor-Leste. This was realised through the rebuilding of ancestral houses and conducting ceremonies according to traditions passed down through the ancestors (Bovensiepen 2015, 15). Proliferation and renewal of ancestral or customary practices in the aftermath of independence have been acknowledged as a strategy for rebuilding group identities, solidifying local and national identities and restating political hierarchies.

In addition to the loss of life during the Indonesian occupation, abandonment continued into the independence era. In 1999, after 70 per cent of Timorese voted in favour of independence, the Indonesian military left in a fury of violence and destruction, targeting much of the infrastructure. Hospitals and schools were destroyed, and remnants of ruined buildings still litter the landscape. Despite improvements since independence, development of sectors such as health and agriculture are being left behind in the pursuit of oil wealth (Bovensiepen 2018; Cruz Cardoso 2020). Healthcare in rural areas suffers from issues of availability and accessibility (Burke 2021).

In the rebuilding of life in Maubisse, people emphasise their number through the expression of rai mamuk. This emphasis clashes with technocratic forms of counting that follow modernist thinking, favouring slower population growth for economic prosperity.

When I began fieldwork, in 2018, Maubisse had the highest fertility rate in Timor-Leste (GDS 2017). Women had on average six children, although many of the older women I talked to had around ten living children. In development terms, this was an indicator of failed development because lower fertility levels are associated with better economic outcomes. Development reports on Timor-Leste warn that high fertility and unsustainable population growth lead to poverty, poor health and education, unemployment and threat of violent unrest (Hosgelen & Saikia 2016; Saikia 2018; UNDP 2018). These indicators are connected to higher-than-average mortality rates and poor nutrition, and competition over resources in line with Malthusian notions of overpopulation. Other reports link the small amount of viable agricultural land and lack of agricultural development to negative impacts on nutrition and child development (Bulatao 2008; Thu & Judge 2017). In development logic the solution is to slow down population growth by adjusting fertility. This makes more productive citizens with fewer dependants to support, and more disposable income, raising GDP. This logic also assumes that people will have economically productive work, and it discounts things like domestic labour. In this way fertility becomes entangled with economy, making reproduction the target of development programs that view adjusting fertility rates as a solution for economic prosperity.

Replacement—From Two to Twenty

I stoked the fire while Maria prepared a tea of hot water and tangerine leaf in a plastic jug. I had been living with Maria and her family for almost a year in Maubisse. Today Maria was concerned. A nephew was getting married which meant that gifts (T, barlake) would need to be given to his bride’s family. Maria was worried about how the young couple, who didn’t have any income, would participate in customary life as a new household. On top of making customary contributions (T, lia), she complained they would need to build a house and raise children. She reminded me how she had warned her own children to study and work first, marry later.

João, Maria’s husband, came into the kitchen to warm his hands over the fire. I asked him what he thought about couples having children soon after marriage. Usually they do, he said, adding that in Timor people have lots of children. However, in Indonesian times people were only allowed three⁸ children because the population of Indonesia was very big, he explained. When he visited Java and West Timor, he had seen for himself that Indonesia had many poor people and not enough food: ‘ … you can see people begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges, cleaning shoes, or busking at roadside restaurants. But Timor isn’t the same, there are poor people here, but in Indonesia there are many, many more’. He went on to counter that ‘Timor needs people because we are few and the land is spacious [T, rai luan]’. He described how the population of Timor-Leste was only about 1 million people. ‘Once the population is bigger’, he reasoned, ‘in the future perhaps people will reduce the number of children they have again’.

João and Maria were extremely proud of their ten children and, so far, their five healthy grandchildren. Most of their children had completed high school, some had diplomas and worked as public servants in clinics or schools, and one daughter had even become a nun. Maria and her husband had worked hard to keep their children safe and were careful to steer them in the right direction if they were acting out. They had also taken in a young girl to look after, Mila. Mila’s parents were João’s daughter’s husband’s family who lived in a remote mountain hamlet, far from the local primary school. Like other young family members, she had been brought down from the mountains to attend school. In return, she helped in Maria’s house with cooking, cleaning and looking after the grandchildren, particularly now that Maria’s youngest daughter Rina had left to attend university.

During the Easter holidays, Rina and I were dawdling by the fire, keeping warm and cooking banana fritters. João joined us and asked Rina about her studies. She was training to become a teacher, like her father. She wanted to help improve education in Maubisse. This holiday she had an assignment to record the story of her ancestral house (T, uma lisan) and present it back to her class. She took out her phone and looked at the questions she needed to answer:

‘What is the name of your uma lisan … ’, she read out.

‘Hu-kai’, João responded automatically.

‘ … wait Dad’, Rina said, and began listing more questions. ‘What is the origin of your uma lisan?’

João interrupted again. ‘Wait Dad!’, said Rina, ‘we need to go to the uma lisan’.

Rina explained that she needed to take photos and record interviews. The rainy season had made the narrow dirt paths up to the family’s ancestral village incredibly muddy, but today was sunny and João decided we should go to the ancestral village that afternoon. We were joined by Maria, Rina’s older sister, her younger brother, and her nephew, and set off in a convoy of motorbikes. After one and a half hours of riding up through the mountains, we arrived in the village. João pointed out the house in which he’d been brought up, a wooden house with a thatched roof that had now collapsed. He pointed to where the cattle used to be kept on the slopes of the mountain, and then to the uma lisan.

The ancestral house was raised on wooden posts, with a conical-shaped low-hanging thatched roof. It sat on a cliff that jutted out overlooking the valley, its path lined with wildflowers. As we walked towards it, Maria told me that the uncle who guarded the ancestral house was very proud of Maria and her family. João and his siblings had numbered ten altogether but eight had died before they could have children. There were just two left, João and his brother. The uncle had expressed his pride to Maria because she and her husband had ten children. João’s remaining brother and his wife also had ten children. Together they had made a new generation of over twenty. They had gone from two to twenty, beamed Maria with pride as she told me.

João had recounted this story of familial rejuvenation to me on more than one occasion. ‘We were ten, then two, but now we’ve had ten children each, we’ve “replaced”! [T, troka fali]’. He explained that his siblings had died because there had been no medicine to save them. It was just him and his brother left. People talk about themselves and their siblings as a collective. For example, rather than saying ‘I have one sibling’, people say ‘we are two’. ‘Only two!’, João and Maria often reminded me of João and his brother. Two was considered a small number, which is why João and Maria remarked on it so often.

When we reached the ancestral house, Rina, João and his uncle sat down on the stone altar next to the ancestral house, and Rina asked them about its history. The house had been founded by two brothers. Their ancestors came from a village, in Ainaro, then broke away to a village closer to Maubisse. The two brothers had married women there, but they had not had children. One day while fetching water from a spring, the wives had turned into eels and joined the river. Their husbands couldn’t find them, or anyone else, anywhere. So the two brothers moved again closer to Maubisse, but the land there was too small. They heard about a village where people practised customary exchanges called ‘lia’. If the brothers wanted to marry any women from there, they would need to give animals in exchange. They had no livestock, so they caught a bird and a snake, but they were told they needed to give buffalo. Eventually, they found two buffalo, one male and one female, and were able to marry two women, but they still didn’t have any children. So they and their wives moved again, but still no children were born. Finally, they married women from a village close to where we were now sitting, and lots of children were born. To this day, João and his uncle explained to us, they follow the traditions and customs (lia) that the ancestors passed down to them, and worship their culture, asking always to have descendants (T, bei’oan bele ba nafatin) and continue into the future.

The ancestral house had eight pillars, four male, four female. Inside were lulik (sacred or potent) objects, including swords (T, surik), large gold disks and silver disks worn like pendants (T, belak) and a necklace of orange clay beads (T, morten). Maria was ushered over to show the necklace she was wearing. She explained that it was lulik. If she wore the necklace and a bead broke, it meant that one of the male members of the uma lisan was going to die. Their ancestral house had two sets of these bead necklaces, one called Mau-Mali after an ancestor. The other set was lost when the house burnt down. It had been burnt a total of maybe five times, João counted. In the Japanese occupation, again during the Indonesian invasion, and another time during the 2006 crisis, Bella, his elder daughter added.

The story of João’s ancestral house is one of looking for people, for good land and for children. The survival of João, his wife, his brother and his brother’s wife, and their now 20 descendants who were starting to have children of their own, is reflected through this origin story. It is a story of looking for more life, survival, rebuilding and replenishment through periods of struggle and destruction. João led the story, but others who listened, including Maria and Bella, added to it. According to their traditions, their uncle explained, telling the stories of the generations from the ancestors to the descendants is extremely important. Recounting these things means they are all tied together as one, not individual families. It is important to tell the stories and gather people together also to learn about the incest taboo, meaning members of the ancestral house who are considered ‘mau-alin’ (siblings) cannot marry. ‘If you don’t follow lisan you won’t have lots of children’, Bella explained. I asked the uncle, the guardian of the ancestral house, how he felt when he saw that the uma lisan had many members. He explained,

We are grateful; when the uma lisan has lots of members the guardians (T, uma nain) are also happy. We grow the generations, some stay here and continue our lisan, others go and join another house. We count how many families we are, how many come, how many go, and if we are a lot.

‘We recount our stories to continue for the next generation’, Joao added, ‘we know where we come from and recount [T, konta tuir] to the next generation. Other groups to the east or the south don’t do that, they leave their uma lisan and forget’.

Counting and recounting for João and his family are part of continuing practices and traditions and are also crucially linked to the rebuilding of life, creating descendants and replacing those lost. Rebuilding life means not only building physical houses and following their lisan but is also entwined with creating descendants and making up for those who had been lost. In this way, João and Maria’s uma lisan represents a generation that has gone ‘from two to twenty’. This is part of moving towards the future and ensuring continuity of life. Maria and João’s family value an abundance of life and the liveliness of the uma lisan. For Maria, the impracticalities of getting married young, before you are ready to participate in exchange obligations and other economic responsibilities, are an important consideration. Yet having children and contributing to the life of the uma lisan, whose origin story is a struggle for survival, is equally significant. Quality is not discounted by quantity of people; rather, it adds to it.

The wish to replenish a generation lost to war is not surprising. The desire to replace family members and grow populations have long explained high fertility rates in post-conflict environments. In Timor-Leste high fertility has been described as a ‘peace dividend’ (McWilliam 2008, 5) or a ‘post-war baby boom’ after losing family and friends (Belton, Whittaker, & Barclay 2009, 20). The idea that Timor-Leste needed more people, and that people were few, was also expressed to me in other interviews outside of Maubisse. ‘People must have children, a lot of people died during the war’, a Timorese NGO worker told me in Dili. Similar sentiments have been expressed in interviews about maternal mortality ‘There are not enough people in Timor-Leste now. We must grow the population’, a midwife answered when asked why she did not perform abortions.

‘Replenishing stolen generations’ is vital for ‘genuine’ reproductive justice (Clarke 2018, 31). Donna Haraway is careful to preface her most provocative view—that the human population needs to decrease to save the planet—with the caveat that those whose existence has been threatened through genocides and war should be allowed to replenish their numbers. However, there are no limits set out for this. Who would replenish, and how? What would be enough? Does this include those whose reproduction has been abandoned by the absence of policies and technologies that enable and assist reproduction? People in Maubisse have experienced the absence of technologies and policies that enable survival and consider their understandings, experiences, desired preferences and futures. In many ways, renewal of life through customary means—social and biological—can be viewed as a response to reproductive abandonment in Timor-Leste.

Abandonment by the Portuguese, Indonesian and now the current state has created structural inequalities and added suffering. Whilst development logic associates fewer dependants with better economic development, at a local level life is valued in abundance due to the failures of development to rectify abandonment. In a similar way, development logic results in people asked to abandon local ways of counting and valuing life in favour of economic progress. Why, when abandoned by the state in terms of development, should people abandon their own logic of reproduction?

Broken Houses, Fixing Families

Throughout the dry season of 2018 (May–October), many of the families I knew in Maubisse were overwhelmed by the high number of deaths. One morning, Cristiano rang to tell me that his uncle had died and that I should go and pay my respects with his relatives. At the house of the deceased uncle, we were served coffee on the verandah. Shortly after, we were guided inside to pray beside the uncle’s body which was laid out on a table. He was smartly dressed in a suit and wrapped in tais,⁹ his portrait photo at his feet. A group of older women and children sat on the dirt floor, huddled together, praying and crying. A daughter cried over her father’s body. We said our prayers and returned outside for more snacks and coffee. Cristiano and his father hurried off to talk to relatives. From our seats on the verandah, Cristiano’s mother and I watched a flurry of activity around us. Young girls fussed over a tablecloth for lunch. Guests arrived with animals (buffalo, horses, pigs, goats, and chickens), trays of beer and soft drinks, rice, oil, and tais as part of their contributions to the family. Opposite us, a troupe of small children arranged themselves on a bench playing noisily. Cristiano’s mother and I chuckled at them.

‘Timorese like to have lots of children’, Cristiano’s mother announced matter-of-factly.

‘Why?’, I asked.

‘There are no people [Ema la iha]’, she said. ‘If you have a farm, you need children, you can’t be alone. The girls leave to go to their husband’s land, and you need boys to stay with you’.

I asked what she meant by ‘there are no people’.

‘During the war many people died, people were lost. Now people need children, they are fixing [T, hadia] their families’.

Cristiano’s mother connected the loss of people, and people being few, to the reproduction of children and the social structures and expectations. Her comment about men staying within the family and women marrying out explains the common preference for families in Maubisse to want an even balance of male and female children. Upon marriage, a husband’s family, the wife-takers (T, fetosan), pledge gifts (T, barklake) to the woman’s family, the wife-givers (T, umane), in return for the woman leaving her uma lisan (Bovensiepen 2014). People described ‘looking’ for another boy or another girl to complete their families and ensure enough boys to stay and manage the land as well as to go away and work. When daughters marry they bring in barlake, but when men marry barlake must be paid. Upon marriage an alliance is formed between the two families through the payment of barlake, and exchanges that happen at other events such as funerals or events relating to an uma lisan of either family when fetosaan-umane are asked to contribute. Marriage alliances such as these are widely seen as reproductive, in that they ensure continuity of the ‘flow of life’ (Fox 1980). In Maubisse, obligatory gift giving is referred to most commonly in Tetum as ‘lia’, and the ceremonies where gifts are exchanged lia moris (life ceremonies) and lia mate (death ceremonies). Lia mate–lia morris ceremonies are attended by the hosts, the descendants of the uma lisan, and family members joined through marriage,

Anthropological literature from Timor-Leste has emphasised the importance of ancestral houses and customary rituals. Elizabeth Traube describes Mambai ancestral houses as ‘a source of life’ (1986, 66). The concept of relatedness as a condition grounded in past events and rituals conducted at the house are a reconstitution of wholeness and unity. Members of an ancestral house gather from afar to contrast separations and become one as a group. David Hicks has also emphasised the role of rituals dedicated to ancestral ghosts to ensure fertility and continuity through generations ([1976] 1988). Here I re-emphasise the role of uma lisan in reproducing life and ensuring continuity—not only through reproducing social relations between people but also reproducing the existence of members—enabling life and the counting of people as families and groups are replenished. If ancestral houses are ‘people’ as Carolina Boldoni argues (2020), and ancestral houses are the most important heritage, then heritage is people. To have many relations, including many children, makes all these relations precious in number, particularly when a group feels they have been diminished.

One evening in Maria’s kitchen, Rina and I played with Maria’s two grandchildren who lived with us. ‘Children make the house lively [rame]’, Rina commented. ‘It’s great, it’s better like this’, she said, pulling her niece on to her lap as she squealed with delight. Rina usually lived with some relatives (her older brother and his wife) who were struggling to conceive, and there were no children in the house. Rina’s sisters and Camillia, one of the other renters in my house, often commented about how poorly they ate when they ate alone. When new renters moved in, the house became noisy again, with music blasting from the speakers every morning at 6 am as people got ready for work. ‘I used to eat so badly’, Camilla said, ‘because I was alone, but now we eat “rame-rame”—I’m eating lots’. In Maubisse, houses that were seldom occupied or newly built would blare out loud music, and events were judged on how ‘rame’ they were. This usually meant plenty of people, a lively atmosphere and good food. Rame can be associated with things being well or having a positive effect on people’s individual and collective wellbeing. In Southeast Asia, having a lively household is part of living well, and the importance of sound (music, noise and talking) and eating together is a wider part of kin making (Allerton 2012; Carsten 1995).

In Maubisse the process of being together and taking part in customary practices associated with uma lisan show how members of uma lisan are bound by blood (in the patrilineal descent), and through other substances such as food, and participation at the uma lisan. Furthermore, the deaths of some people in Maubisse provoked conversations about how often they visited their uma lisan and engaged in customary practices. Not following customs properly is widely believed to result in sickness and death. This shows how participating in such events, often referred to generally as ‘kultura’ (culture),¹⁰ sustains the life of a person both socially and physically. Making events lively was part of showing appreciation to the ancestors and creating a good atmosphere and sense of sociality. The reconstruction of uma lisan thus includes the physical creation of people, individuals and groups that count when it comes to fixing families.

‘Distributed reproduction’ (Murphy 2017) best describes the social engagements and negotiations that, in Maubisse, are part of recognising relationships and ‘fixing families’ across generations and in multiple environments. Thinking about reproduction as distributed refers to the way that reproductive processes are shaped within and beyond individual bodies, within structures and environments, and across space and time. The revival of customary practices, including the rebuilding of many uma lisan, has proliferated in Timor-Leste in the aftermath of independence. This revival of customary relationships can be seen as a way of reproducing social connections that manifest through relationships of obligation and entitlement, which reproduce the ‘social fabric’ and enable people to deal with economic uncertainty through mutual support (McWilliam & Traube 2011). Customary relationships have also been shown to resolve obligatory exchange relations and to renegotiate hierarchical relationships between houses (Bovensiepen 2014). The rebuilding of these houses in Maubisse relates to replenishing and growing descendants, the human structure of the house, as well as the material building and the practices that continue traditions related to it. I do not argue that people have more children because of these things but, rather, that experiences and practices which connect people to the socio-cultural landscape, and to the past and future through ancestral houses, give value to reproduction. Sociality is highly valued and children are part of this affective sensorialisation of feeling many, plenty, and lively together.

At multiple levels, we are trying ‘to figure out ways through different and simultaneous regimes of counting measurement and logic’ (Nelson 2015, 9). Paying attention to these differences can help find common ground and identify which values clash and converge. The replacement of life lost to conflict is an important part of balancing life and death in Maubisse. The number of people contributes to a form of prosperity associated with an abundance of human life and ensuring its continued existence. However, this is at odds with development ideals that arguably value quality of life over quantity. Stories of replenishment emphasise continuation and survival, and this includes the counting and recounting of kin to make a landscape that is abundant in life.

Often critiques of quantitative practices focus on institutions of international development, global health or state agencies, but as the stories of Cristiano’s and João’s family show, these are not the only domains or arenas in which numbers carry importance or make claims about the means and methods for building prosperous lives. Uma lisan and relationships with the ancestors involve practices of counting in a customary numeracy of replenishing and continuing life.

The descriptions of the landscape, abandoned houses, lost family members and feeling of ‘being a few’ by the population in Maubisse are not represented in development reports warning about ‘demographic danger’ that could be curbed by aiming for replacement rate fertility (approximately two children per couple). That said, demographic numbers are not unimportant—more schools, hospitals and food production must be planned to rectify abandonment and support life for a new generation. Arguably, it is the absence of what development has promised—in terms of a better quality of life, of economic prosperity to the country, and good healthy lives—that requires people to ensure prosperity in other ways, such as in the number of kin.

Making Population AND Kin—Counting in the Absence of Development and Prosperity

What counts as reproductive justice in a place where the loss of life has left people feeling diminished? In the wake of reproductive abandonment, local ways of counting are part of an insistence on survival, not only a way of ensuring continuity but also a way to ‘remake’ life in abundance as a form of prosperity. A populationist approach to reproduction considers lower fertility to be indicative of development and/or social and environmental sustainability. A reproductive justice framework uses an intersectional approach that includes the wider social and political environment beyond the individual. As scholars of reproduction have shown, this requires us to think about how reproduction is distributed and relational, in ways that are both biological, social, economic, political and more-than-human. Rather than just thinking about what reproduction is and what it is not, it can be more helpful to think about what reproduction means to people, and how it is valued and imagined in particular contexts.

The examples of rebuilding uma lisan, and counting kin, as part of ‘fixing families’, show a form of reproductive justice that is ‘distributed’ beyond individuals within the environment and across generations. It is a form of reproductive justice that favours a prosperous abundance of life, challenging development ideologies focused on lowering fertility and slowing population growth.

The concept of reproductive justice captures the way in which social reproduction and biological reproduction are inexplicably tied to unequal relationships. But if reproductive justice is about sustaining the condition for collective thriving (Sasser 2018), how do we balance competing claims about what creates and sustains those conditions? As this article has shown, particular visions of future prosperity in Timor-Leste are linked to sustaining more life, because it is valued in its abundance in the post-conflict context. Cultural revisitation is part of forging belonging and identity after the conflict, but more than that it is tied to the process of reproduction that involves ensuring the next generation is replenished, both materially in terms of making children and socially in continuing tradition.

In Maubisse, reproduction has been distributed physically, socially and culturally through colonial occupation and violence. Local ideas relating to the spatial and temporal landscape most often came up in explanations about the past loss of life, population and having children. This suggests action to counter a situation, a form of reproductive agency in response to past conflict, as people talked about rebuilding families and collective life through having children because of those who died, and to replenish life for future collective survival and prosperity. Replenishing lives that have ‘disappeared’ is central to reproductive justice and freedom (Haraway 2018), but high fertility in Timor-Leste is often cast as a barrier to development. Furthermore, while the examples from Maubisse also show that kinship relations can be flexible, multi-relational and multi-spiritual, people are still precious in number. Particularly in the absence of other forms of prosperity and development, making life in the aftermath of conflict is part of building a ‘lively’ form of prosperity where quality of life and relationships includes quantity and abundance. Numbers and local ways of counting matter as part of reproduction. It is people in greater numbers, I argue, that creates a lively form of prosperity that clashes with economic ideals of ‘sustainability’ in capitalist thinking—a thinking that seeks to govern reproduction for the sake of a better quality of life measured through health and development outcomes. Local and international logics have the same end goal, a more prosperous Timor-Leste, but they differ in terms of how to get there, whether through more people, or less. If reproductive justice matters, we must consider how reproduction is, and has always been, distributed but also, crucially, how people count themselves.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by UK Research and Innovation [Economic and Social Research Council PhD Scholars].

Notes

1 The DHS 2016 placed the average fertility rate of the Maubisse administrative area at 6 living children per woman (GDS 2017), but locally the average was perceived to be closer to ten, often counting infant deaths and sometimes miscarriages.

2 T refers to Tetum or Tetun, the national language of Timor-Leste spoken by the majority of the population. Portuguese is also considered a national language but spoken by approximately 5 per cent of the population.

3 For a full history of the territory, see Hägerdal (2012).

4 For a discussion of the death toll, see Cribb (2001), Kiernan (2003) and Feijó and Kent (2020).

5 Former Portuguese administrators’ residence.

6 The ethno-linguistic group of the central mountain area of Timor-Leste, covering the municipalities of Ainaro, Aileu and Emera. Timor-Leste has a total of 32 Indigenous language groups of which Maubisse is the second largest (RDTL 2015). The national languages are Tetum, which is widely spoken, and Portuguese.

7 M refers to Mambai/Mambae words.

8 While the official Indonesian Family Planning program promoted ‘two children is enough’, it was implemented to different degrees in different regions. Several people in Maubisse reported that three children only could be supported by a government job salary.

9 Traditional woven cloth used in customary ceremonies.

10 ‘Culture’ is a crude translation of what people referred to as ‘kultura’, which generally referred to traditional practices related to family, similar to lisan.