Agenda

Susana Matos Viegas (University of Lisbon)
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Empty mountains are hyperinhabited:
The cosmopolitical status of the land among the Fataluku (East Timor)

Abstract
The landscape of the easternmost region of the island of East Timor, the region where the Fataluku live, is made up of lowland and mountainous areas. The mountains are known in the history of East Timor as a refuge in the struggle against the violent invasion of the Indonesian state that took place between 1975 and 1999. The lowlands are now home to most of the Fataluku villages and houses, including a grassland area that is home to buffalos and horses that integrate the network of exchange live. The status of the mountains can be seen in the light of what James Scott argued in his now classic study: that foraging, shifting cultivation and segmentary lineages are not forms of 'secondary adaptation' by a population marginalised by the state, but a 'political choice'. In this paper I take a perspective on the historicities of these mountains and their many caves, pits and ancient dwellings, drawing on the lived experience of two Fataluku clans and their ancestral paths to discuss the land as imminently cosmopolitical. While the literature on East Timor reiterates that places without human intervention acquire greater cosmological potency and that makes them 'sacred' (Tét: lulik; Fat: tei), I follow the equally clear proposition from the Fataluku perspective that they are hiperinhabited. Diplomatic forms of relationships between people and their ancestors in planting small vegetable gardens, cultivating fruit trees, interacting with animals such as bees or crocodiles, or simply visiting ancient sites of origin and their huge limestone tombs, characterize this hyper-inhabitation of landscapes. The paper explores the historicity of these ancestral lands and proposes a pragmatic view of what it means to be a 'sacred' landscape.

Nota biografica
Susana de Matos Viegas is an anthropologist, Research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She did her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Coimbra (2003). Her fieldwork research among the indigenous people Tupinambá de Olivença in Brazil included being the coordinator of the anthropological report to demarcate the indigenous land (1997-2009). Her research topics are on personhood, indigenous people’s territorialities, ancestorship and historicities in the indigenous Atlantic. Since 2012 also among the Fataluku (Timor-Leste). She focuses on the diversity of ways of associating with the land and landscape,  currently incorporating the climate crisis and the revitalisation of landscapes ruined by tree monocultures, connecting indigenous ways of dealing with the land in Brazil and East Timor with situations in Portugal. Since 2022 she is Editor-in-Chief of Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. Complete CV at this link Email: Susana.viegas@ics.ulisboa.pt

Partecipazione libera - Seminario valido per il tirocinio DEA/ACEL. Coordinatrice: Franca Tamisari: tamisari@unive.it