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Paying for the Dead: On the Politics ofDeath in Independent Timor-LesteJudith BovensiepenPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.

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Paying for the Dead: On the Politics ofDeath in Independent Timor-LesteJudith Bovensiepen

Since Timor-Leste regained independence in 2002, there has been a revival ofcustomary practices across the country. In the village of Funar, this has taken theshape of intensive investment in death ceremonies. This article takes death as a lensthrough which to examine changing social and political relations in Funar during thepost-independence period. It analyses how exchanges that occur upon death serve tosever relations between house groups that are indebted to one another throughmarriage exchange, and how funerary practices enable people to renegotiate statusdifferences that have become more contested since independence. While death confrontspeople with tragedies from the past, it also provides occasions for dealing with theaftermath of the Indonesian occupation. Moreover, reburial allows local residents to re-inscribe themselves in nationalist discourses, from which they have been largelyexcluded 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 ina hospital in Timor-Leste’s capital city, Dili, following a heart attack he had suffered twodays earlier. The news about the sudden death of their liurai had shocked everyone inFunar, a village in the mountainous interior of the Laclubar subdistrict. ‘Why are theyall dying?’ asked one of the girls in the village, remembering that another member of theliurai’s house had passed away just a year earlier. The liurai’s ninety-year-old auntadded, ‘Why do they all die so young? I have nothing to do all day…Why don’t theytake me?’ Trying to elicit a reaction from his distressed relatives, a young man from theliurai’s house started shouting, ‘I am not scared of death [au bi maes mate]!…I am notscared! There are still plenty of us left!’ Unspecified events in the past were being

Judith Bovensiepen is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology. Correspondence to: Judith Bovensiepen, School ofAnthropology and Conservation, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NR, UK. Email: J.M.Bovensiepen@kent.ac.uk

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2014Vol. 15, No. 2, 103–122, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2014.892528

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mooted as the cause of the ruler’s sudden and premature death, and many of hisrelatives 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 ritualpractices that occurred upon death. The proliferation of death rituals in Funar tallieswith observations from other regions of Timor-Leste, which have been subject to anintensification of ritual activities since the country regained independence (McWilliam2005, 2011; Palmer and de Carvalho 2008). In Funar, the revival of ancestral practiceshas involved not just the florescence of mortuary ceremonies but also the reconstruc-tion and inauguration of origin houses (Bovensiepen 2014; cf. McWilliam 2005) andthe 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 thepast that manifested themselves in the untimely death of local residents. Writing ofdeath in post-socialist Bulgaria, Deema Kaneff (2002, 103) describes the growingperception that ‘no one dies naturally any more’. She interprets this as indicative ofthe changing relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘the individual’ in the post-Sovietera. Similarly, in Funar there seems to be an increased pre-occupation with prematureor ‘unnatural’ deaths, which were interpreted as signs of deeper underlying problemsthat had to be resolved. Such deaths were related to past killings, or injustices, or elseto a failure to follow ancestral ways appropriately. This article examines how, throughtheir intensive investment in death rituals, Funar’s residents tried to make sense oftheir new circumstances in the post-independence period. Its aim is to take the topicof death as a lens to examine changing social relationships, and to relate the revival ofancestral practices to the transformation of the political landscape in the country. Inpost-independence Funar, dead bodies have become sites for struggles over meaningand 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 wasentirely destroyed during political conflicts in 1975, and all residents of the rural areasof the Laclubar subdistrict were forcibly resettled in Laclubar Town during theIndonesian occupation (1975–99). Today, the majority of dislocated communitieshave moved back to their place of origin (Bovensiepen 2009). Most villagers aresubsistence farmers, using swidden agriculture to grow maize, as well as planting avariety of root crops and rice. The language spoken in the Laclubar subdistrict isIdaté, but many residents also know Timor-Leste’s national language, Tetum (bothare Austronesian languages). Although most residents are Catholic, the majority onlyconverted 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 monotheisticreligion.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)

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were celebrated in the village. Funar residents were hesitant to talk about the time of theIndonesian occupation. They focused their efforts on reviving ancestral practices,which they associated with a period of prosperity (Bovensiepen 2009). The intensematerial, physical and spiritual investment in mortuary ceremonies was part of thisattempt to renew productive relations with the ancestors, who could otherwise bringmisfortune 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 socialorganisation and identification in this region (cf. Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995;Lewis 1988; McWilliam 2005; Schulte Nordholt 1971). There are five to six mainorigin houses in Funar (depending on their classification), and each house is said tohave been founded by ancestral brothers in the distant past. Members of the samehouse are considered to be siblings and cannot intermarry, and they therefore haveto enter into exchange relations with other house groups. There is an ideal ofpatrifiliation, according to which children are supposed to be integrated into thefather’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 ofcompensating 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 militaryin 1999, Andrew McWilliam (2011) argues that such exchanges provided peoplewith the opportunity to reproduce social relations and to deal with the economicuncertainties of the post-occupation years. The revitalisation of the exchangeeconomy, he contends, was a cultural response to the withdrawal of the repressivemilitary regime and the dramatic decline of the market economy. It is a sign of theresilience of Fataluku communities and their ability to reconstitute their lives afternearly a quarter of a century of Indonesian military occupation. Echoing Mauss’sclassic observation that gift exchange creates debt, McWilliam (2011, 746) stressesthat exchanges among Fataluku-speakers create ‘webs of mutually appropriated debtobligations (and claims) between exchange partners: a weaving together of multiplestrands of obligation and entitlement in the reproduction of the social fabric’. Buildingon McWilliam’s analysis, I argue that the proliferation of mortuary ceremonies in Funarmust similarly be understood in relation to past and present political circumstancesin 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 marriageexchange creates social relations between groups by linking them through giftobligations. However, my analysis differs from previous works by demonstratingthat, in contrast to marriage exchanges, death exchanges in Funar have become a way ofsevering relations between groups by temporarily resolving the obligations betweenthem. This is possible only because the direction of exchange between exogamoushouse groups in Funar is no longer sustained today over several generations, as it was inthe past. Asymmetrical exchanges have hence become more shifting and temporary.

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Exchanges that occur upon death establish the political autonomy of house groupsby resolving outstanding obligations. To fully understand the significance of thisprocess, we need to consider the political and historical context in which death ritualsin Funar have proliferated, especially the power vacuum that was created at the locallevel by the withdrawal of the Indonesian military. My argument is that this powervacuum intensified the competition amongst different groups over status andinfluence, a competition that was reflected in the proliferation of death rituals, whichoffered 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 historicaltransition. She argues that since others can ascribe meaning to them, dead bodies canbe used to emphasise continuities with the past and establish a connection with aspecific territory—gestures that figure widely in nationalist discourses. In this article, Idraw on Verdery to explore the political significance of death in Funar by showinghow 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, mycase 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), forexample, has examined how the revival of ancestor worship in post-war Vietnam wasaccompanied by a proliferation of ‘ghosts’ of the displaced war dead who did notundergo appropriate burial or whose remains were missing. The revived tradition ofancestor worship in Vietnam, according to Kwon, represents an attempt by thesurvivors to deal with the enduring social wounds caused by mass violence and thesystematic killing of civilians. The Indonesian occupation was also marked by masskilling and by the infusion of local conflicts with the violent dynamics of nationalpolitics. My argument is that the proliferation of death rituals in Funar sinceindependence 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, aprocess called ‘paying for the dead’. Secondly, I focus on the politics of death byexploring how status differences are renegotiated during mortuary ceremonies andburials. In the last section I return to the dangers of death, exploring the ritualisedpractices aimed at dealing with ‘unnatural’ death by creating a boundary between theliving and the deceased. However, before I investigate these issues in more detail, letme briefly return to the death of the liurai mentioned in the opening paragraph, andprovide 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 Funarso that he could be buried in the place where he was born.1 People travelled from farand wide to attend his funeral. Some relatives even crossed the international border

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from West Timor to participate in the ceremony. Gathering under a large marqueethat had been erected in front of the liurai’s house, the visitors waited patiently forthe coffin to arrive from Dili. When the first car headlights illuminated the darkvillage, a low wail shuddered through the waiting crowd. As the wooden coffin wascarried into the house, the mourning reached an almost unbearable intensity. Peopledesperately tried to grasp the heavy casket. Some threw their hands behind theirheads in pain, bent double by grief. The coffin was placed onto a table, which waslovingly covered with black and colourful cloth (tais). Another piece of black clothhung over the coffin from the ceiling, and flowers and candles had been placedcarefully around the table. In the left corner was a table on which stood a largewooden mirror, a gigantic rosary and a framed photo of the liurai. It portrayedhim 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 werereceived with open embraces by those inside. There was a tender urgency in the waypeople hugged one another, placing their heads gently onto the other’s shoulderwithout 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 thesame way that they had been hugged by the other mourners. The liurai’s youngersister 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 intoa 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. Hewas carrying a large sword with goat hair attached to the handle. He stopped at theend of the coffin next to the dead man’s feet and waited in silence. Then, he suddenlyraised 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 forhis protection. Later, when the body was brought to the cemetery, it was accompaniedby an entire parade of soldiers (moradores) (see Figure 1).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 isimmediately spoken of as mainheri or matebian (Tetum), which may be translated asrecently 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 thevillage. To avoid this, a series of ritualised practices have to be carried out todemonstrate 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 (seromate). Every night for a fortnight, friends, relatives and visitors stay at the house ofthe deceased to remember him or her (adeer mate—‘guarding the dead’). During the

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first week, this vigil is called ‘guarding the bitter flowers’ (adeer ai-hunan meluk); inthe 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 peopleaccompanies the coffin to the cemetery, saying prayers as they walk. Theseare interspersed with hymns and recitations of the names of Catholic saints. Afterthe 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 isprepared and eaten together after food has been offered to the ancestors who ‘eatfirst’.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 negotiatepayments and gifts.3 Once the wife-takers have managed to raise the necessaryresources, they pass buffalo, money and horses to the wife-givers in a ritualisedencounter. The wife-givers, who are the ‘owners of the dead’ (mate nain), reciprocatewith pigs, rice and woven cloths. Such events are accompanied by elaborate speechperformances by representatives of each group. In addition, the wife-givers of thedeceased have to give ‘one’ (animal) to their own wife-givers so that ‘the fire does notburn the eyes’ (wai na’luhi mata), that is, so that they can maintain good relationswith their own origin. The children of the deceased also bring animals: one to pay for

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

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the dead and one to slaughter (selu jisa, taa jisa). In addition, they bring clothes andwoven cloth, which are put inside the coffin to prevent the dead person from comingback 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 relativescan ‘take off the black’ after three months, but the children of the deceased mustcontinue to wear black for six months. After twelve months, the spouse of thedeceased 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 andconcerns that arise when a person dies? Some clues to these questions can be gatheredfrom the description of the liurai’s death. The liurai had died suddenly of a heartcondition; he was only in his fifties. His death shocked Funar residents because hewas the latest in a number of members of his origin house to have died in recentyears. People wondered what could be ‘wrong inside his house’ and were concernedabout 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 pastsomeone must have made a ‘mistake’ that caused members of the liurai’s house to dieprematurely. A woman from a different origin house told me that her house wouldno longer ‘give’ women in marriage to the liurai’s house because her fellow housemembers 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 thenews that his wife wanted her husband to be buried in Dili so that he would be closeto her. Once she had agreed to let him be brought to Funar, the next hurdle wasthe wife-givers, who had refused to allow him to be buried in Funar because of theproblems inside his house. The wife-givers also made claims when the time came toappoint 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 outof fear that he too would die. Numerous negotiations had to take place before anyagreement 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 originhouse throughout their lives, while women leave their origin house to become part oftheir husband’s house. This means that house groups are in a permanent state ofindebtedness towards those origin houses from which they receive women, and thesedebts need to be settled upon death. If exchanges are maintained over severalgenerations, this creates hierarchical or asymmetrical relations, since wife-givers aresuperior 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

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integration of the woman and her descendants into the new origin house. Theexchanges between wife-givers and wife-takers that take place in such instancesplay 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’. Exchangesbetween houses are literally a payment for the deceased person to enter the receivinghouse. 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 theexchange 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 inFlores as the ‘final instalment’ of the marriage payments, since they confirm theincorporation of the deceased (and their children) into the wife-taking house (Forth2009, 568). Marriage creates connections between origin houses, while selu materesolves them. The proliferation of death rituals I encountered during my fieldworkin Funar indicates that severing connections (by resolving house membership) wasmore 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 deJong, van Wouden ([1935] 1968, 1) defined what is today Timor-Leste and EasternIndonesia as a unified ‘field of ethnological study’ based on the widespread practiceof cross-cousin marriage (connubium), seen as the ‘pivot’ to a comprehensiveorganisation of cosmos and society. James Fox’s (1980) classic edited volume TheFlow of Life develops van Wouden’s argument (via Needham) by providing acomparative analysis of marriage rules, metaphors and symbols across EasternIndonesia and Timor. His main argument is that the alliances produced throughmarriage 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), apractice that has since been forbidden by the Catholic Church. According to vanWouden ([1935] 1968, 7), marriage exchange is asymmetric ‘if affinal relationshipsare unilateral: in this case a descent group gives women to another but cannot receivewomen from the same group’. Several of Funar’s inhabitants told me that in the pastthey used to follow such a marriage pattern, whereby the direction of exchangebetween two houses would not be reversed. Reviewing genealogical data I collected,this seems to have been particularly the case for members of liurai houses, whotended 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 ofexchange within one generation. Even though we find many comparative cases inTimor and Eastern Indonesia where alliances are similarly shifting (Fox 1996, 149),for Funar residents this ‘lapse’ from their ideal of never-changing alliance relations

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is accompanied with a sense of unease. As one ritual speaker told me withembarrassment, ‘Today we give them buffalos, and the next day we get the buffalosback again. We give them buffalos, and we get them back again. Back and forth, backand 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 thequick 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 notmaintained with the same house group in the same direction over several generations,the connections between origin houses may indeed be severed more permanentlyonce death payments are completed. Because people are now less invested inmaintaining the direction of exchange, alliances and relations of superiority betweenexchanging groups are less permanent, which tallies with my general observation thathierarchical 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 visitedthe suco of Manelima, I was told that the villagers had been unimpressed by themeetings organised by the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation(CAVR) to deal with the crimes committed during the Indonesian occupation. Theyfelt the process was based on ‘foreign’ notions of justice and responded by arrangingtheir own meeting to ‘cut justice’ (tesi justisa) instead. In one case, a former memberof a pro-Indonesian militia had to give his son to the origin house of a man whom hehad killed. Consequently, the son, by now a grown man, was living in the victim’sorigin house. Therefore, the loss of one person is reimbursed through the gift ofanother (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 formof justice seems to be an alternative to the more confessional models of ‘truth andreconciliation’ instigated by the CAVR (cf. Babo Soares 2004; McWilliam 2007).By compensating those who had lost someone, the balance in the origin house wasrestored.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 killingmembers 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 ofthem had experienced ill health in recent years. They hoped that by paying for thedeaths caused by their ancestors, their own lives would be spared. Gift exchange thusresolves conflicts from the past. However, in the case of Funar, mortuary exchangesfacilitate such resolution not by creating social relations and obligations, but bytemporarily absolving house groups from their debts towards one another.

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The Politics of Death

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

In March 2007, Marco, a well-respected ritual speaker, died unexpectedly in hisfield hut after two days of severe fever. In the evening, I went to ‘guard the bitterflowers’ in order to keep Marco’s relatives company and show affection and respectfor the deceased. The multi-room house where the ceremony took place was veryspacious, 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. Theceremony lasted all night. The women sat around praying, talking and crying, whilesome of the men passed their time gambling, drinking and playing cards. The Lord’sPrayer 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 toguard the dead, about fifteen people climbed up the narrow ladder to her house andsqueezed into the room. Throughout the night, they sang beautiful melodic chantscalled 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 coffinwith them, and it was they who pushed to give Marco a Catholic burial. Duringthe priest’s moving speech, Marco’s relatives cried in a restrained way, quite unlike thevociferous mourning that I had observed during Benedita’s funeral. After the mass, themen carried the coffin out of the house, and some of those gathered started to cryloudly, only to be promptly reprimanded by a female relative from Dili, who told themthat 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 herrelatives dragged her away. The cemetery, they explained, was a dangerous place, andone could not simply stay there, especially just after a person had been buried. The

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burials of Marco and Benedita ended like most others, with a hasty departure fromthe cemetery. People ran back to the village through the red mud, some discardingtheir 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 away of being educated (matenek) and modern (modernu) rather than uneducated/stupid (beik). Catholicism in this instance was used to raise the status of Marco’shouse group, to present them as being connected with foreign practices. Indeed, therewere invariably more Catholic elements in the death rituals of higher-status originhouses than in those of their lower-status counterparts, resonating with Kelly daSilva’s (2013) observation of how, in the urban centres of Timor-Leste, Christianvalues 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 scatteredthroughout the area and the dead were buried together rolled up in a mat. Today thedead are buried at the same cemetery, in single graves near other members of theirorigin house. It is possible that the Catholic practice of assembling the dead in oneplace has augmented the danger of that particular place, and this would explain whypeople always leave the cemetery in such a hurry and why it can only be approachedin 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. Whereaslow-status residents were usually buried under earth mounds, the graves of liuraimembers were built entirely of stone and tiles (see Figures 2 and 3). The elaborateand monumental liurai graves are situated on a small hill overlooking the plaingraves of lower-status residents. Upon death, then, the status differences betweenhouse groups are cemented and fixed. In one respect, this represents a process ofdeterritorialisation, since today everyone is buried at the same cemetery. Rather thanbringing people together in an egalitarian community, however, this practice bringsstatus differences between houses to the fore.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 ofcommoners or nobles. This status difference was expressed in different ways, such asthrough the use of a different term for the coffin of liurai, which was referred to asthe ‘boat of the foreigner’ (ro malae). Speaking more generally, Maurice Bloch andJonathan Parry (1982, 6) have argued that at the time of death the social order isreasserted and reproduced. The tombs of the Merina, for example, are ‘an idealisedmap of the social order’ (Bloch and Parry 1982, 38). During death rituals, theymaintain, the dead are transformed into an otherworldly and eternal force that comesto 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

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it is also a site where status relations are recalibrated.5 This was made clear to mewhen Marco’s relatives told me that they were planning to buy tiles for his graveonce they had managed to acquire the appropriate resources. I was also told that inthe past only liurai had been permitted to have stone graves, whereas nowadays,

Figure 2 Funar Cemetery in 2006.

Figure 3 The Graves of liurai.

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everyone is granted this privilege, though not many can afford it. Today, the liurai donot have as much power as they are said to have had at some point during thePortuguese colonial period, but they have nonetheless managed to secure a number ofeconomic privileges that shore up their status. The unequal status and aspirations ofthe various house groups are not only visible in the different ways in which mortuaryceremonies are conducted, but are also reproduced through the differential form ofgraves.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 becomevillage chief (Bovensiepen 2014). This change in local power relations was reflected atthe cemetery. The first thing I noticed when I went to the graveyard was that asignificant 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 thepeople had used the ‘pensions’ that the Timorese government had started to provideto citizens over the age of fifty. The cemetery is hence a key site for the articulationand reification of status, but also the place where changes in the socio-economicstatus of house groups become visible. Elsewhere I have examined how thereconstruction of origin houses in the post-independence period has made it possiblefor origin houses to break with the hierarchical structures that were imposed duringthe Portuguese colonial period (Bovensiepen 2014). Death rituals and burial were alsooccasions when house status was recalibrated because they allowed origin houses toestablish their autonomy.

Red Death

While ‘guarding the bitter flowers’ for Marco, we repeatedly heard loud bangingnoises 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 thiscommotion to wake her up. I was asked to take a photo of Marco’s corpse, but when Iwas 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 mycamera because his face had already become swollen and he was ashamed to bepictured 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 hadpreviously lived with my host family, had died suddenly in Dili. Tanha had moved tothe 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? Therewere rumours that a jealous boyfriend had lured her into the sea and that she mighthave been killed by witchcraft. Some villagers also suggested that she had diedbecause her father, the ritual speaker of a lower-status house, had tried to represent

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himself as being ‘bigger’ and more influential than he really was. She died because herfather 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 themedium 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 onvisiting 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 fromthe 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 residentsof Funar told me that the dead spoke to them in dreams, or that people who hadrecently died would come to visit them during the night to ensure they were notforgotten. However, if a person had suffered an ‘unnatural’ death, such visits wouldbe even more frequent and insistent, since the dead person would be seeking to drawattention to the suspicious circumstances surrounding their demise. These deathswere 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 wellknown in Timor and Indonesia (Fox 1973, 352; Sell 1955; Valeri 2000, 27) andusually refers to deaths which are sudden, violent and inauspicious. In Funar, ‘reddeath’ includes not just deliberate acts of killing, but also accidents (drowning, fallingfrom a tree, car accidents) and death from illness and disease (especially of acomparatively 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 thedeath. Hence, when Tanha’s body was brought back to Funar, a special ritual had tobe carried out in order to ‘separate the red’ (eta meran; haketa mean in Tetum). Forthe purposes of this ceremony, a ritual specialist had to walk seven times around herbody, 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), thusallowing 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 manypeople during the time of the Indonesian occupation, and that for this reason he hadlater felt it necessary to rid himself of the ‘pollution’ or ‘dirt’ (ka’hoer) caused by hisacts. To achieve this end, a black dog and a red chicken (in other cases a duck) had tobe beheaded and put into a river. In these cases, the river takes the bird away whilethe 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’srelatives. The pollution that arises from an ‘unnatural’ death is thought to contaminatethe relatives of those responsible.

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When the ritual guardian of a lulik house fell ill in 2005, people blamed this on amurder that had taken place inside the house. The guardian’s dead husband hadkilled one of his relatives (from the wife-givers), whose blood had spilled onto thefloor and subsequently dribbled down the ladder and onto the ground. Although thelulik 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 wasthis 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 separationfrom the red is not always successful. Tanha kept on returning to our house, just asMarco’s matebian continued to pay visits to his relatives shortly after his death. Thedangers 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 keyplayers in the APODETI party which favoured integration with Indonesia. The lastgovernor of Indonesian-occupied Timor, Abílio José Osório Soares, is from Laclubar.Funar’s political elite, who mostly supported the pro-Portuguese UDT party, hadlong-standing marriage relations with Osório Soares’s family. The region’s associationwith the pro-Indonesian APODETI party in the national imaginary may explain itsrelative exclusion from nation-building processes today. In reality, political affiliationwas much more diverse: although some members of the political elite took onkey positions within UDT or APODETI, many residents joined the pro-independenceparty 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 afterindependence. In September 2012, Funar residents resolved to deal with some of theoutstanding problems by organising the (symbolic) reburial of two men from theliurai’s house who were killed by FRETILIN during conflicts with UDT in 1975. Thiswas a response to the liurai’s death in April 2012, since his house members were tryingto get to the bottom of the problems ‘inside the house’. To ‘separate the red’, the housein Dili where the men had lived was ‘cleaned’, which involved mixing pig’s blood andcoconut juice and pouring this onto the stairs at the entrance of the house. Coconut andpig’s blood are considered to be ‘cooling’, they ease the ritual heat created by ‘reddeaths’ and are also used in peace-making rituals. Since the men had been members ofthe UDT party, several party representatives attended the ceremony. There was afeeling among those gathered that the deaths of these men, who had not been part of theindependence party FRETILIN, had been somewhat forgotten on the national stage.These twomen had received little attention from national leaders, unlike those who haddied 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

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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 hisanalysis of the consequences of the Vietnam-American war, Kwon (2006, 4, 119)argues that the centralisation of commemoration by the state produced tensionsbetween ancestor worship and hero worship, since the institution of war heroesexcludes the ambiguous war dead. While the reburial of UDT members was anattempt to address problems from the past that threatened the living by ‘separatingthe red’, it was also an attempt to bring attention to the exclusion of UDT supportersfrom 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 bodiesare potent symbols for nationalist discourses, and reburials instantiate thesediscourses in specific territories. Similarly, by bringing the (symbolic) remains ofthese two men back to Funar and burying them in the ancestral land, villagers soughtto re-inscribe themselves in the nationalist narrative.

Conclusion

In ‘The Political Economy of Death’, Feeley-Harnik (1984) describes the florescenceof mortuary rituals in Sakalava, Madagascar, which she interprets as a response to theintrusion of the French colonial administration. People took refuge in death ritualsbecause the realm of the dead was the one zone that could not be controlled bycolonial officials. Can we interpret the proliferation of death rituals in Funar in asimilar way, that is, as a response to the intrusion of outsiders, such as the Indonesianmilitary 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 theIndonesian occupation and related conflicts, since they serve to redress imbalancesand pollutions caused by past killings and to resolve outstanding obligations andtensions between different house groups. Timor-Leste’s history is one replete with‘unnatural’ (‘red’) deaths and communal violence (cf. Myrttinen 2013, 478; Sakti2013). 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 deadcannot return to haunt the living. In this sense, the proliferation of death rituals canindeed 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 thereshuffling of power relations. House groups have thus been afforded the opportunityto reassert and raise their status vis-à-vis one another, made manifest in both theconduct of ceremonies and in the construction of graves. By bolstering the autonomyof house groups, mortuary ceremonies were used to recalibrate hierarchical relationsbetween origin houses.

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However, to understand why the situation in Funar is different from other regionsof Timor-Leste, such as that described by McWilliam (2011), we also need to lookbeyond local-level politics. Verdery (1999, 33) has observed that the dead arefrequently appropriated by nationalist discourses. This typically takes place inmoments of epochal shifts. Timor-Leste’s transition to independence presents sucha shift. Dead bodies have become sites for struggles over meaning and politicalinfluence. Because the inhabitants of the Laclubar subdistrict are seen as havingcollaborated with the Indonesian military in the national imagination, this area hasbeen comparatively isolated from nationalist commemorations that celebrate theparticipation of ‘heroes’ in the resistance struggle. The reburial of those whodied during past conflicts was a way for people to claim a stake in the nationalistdiscourse.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 ritualscreate separations between the deceased and the living, and they serve to severrelations between exchanging groups. Hence in contradistinction to Feeley-Harnik(1984), I would suggest that in Funar, death rituals are not about creating autonomyfrom outsiders, but rather they serve to bolster the autonomy of house groupstowards 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 bestefforts to settle the debts that tie them together, such attempts can fail and so thestruggles over dead bodies continue.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank friends and acquaintances in Timor-Leste who supported thisresearch and my colleagues at the University of Kent, especially Roy Ellen, DavidHenig 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.

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.

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[3] The Idaté term naiuun may be translated as ‘mother’s trunk/origin’, whereas anamahinakmeans ‘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 thiswould make it hard for an English speaker to follow the argument and to comprehend the wayin 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 priorityin time, is subject to competition and contention. I use the term ‘hierarchy’ here whenreferring to the discursive emphasis on the fixity of status groups, even though in practicestatus differences are contested, as the notion of precedence implies and as is commonamongst Austronesian populations.

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