Abstract
Timor-Leste has endured different foreign presences: the Portuguese colonisation (1515-1974), the Indonesian military occupation (1974-1999) and, since the restoration of the national independence (2002) which has been defined the “NGOs invasion” (Brunnstrom, 2003). These different governances have produced various Authorised Heritage Discourses – AHD (Smith, 2006) whose echoes are traceable in the current national AHD. This paper, based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, shows the entanglements between the previous colonial AHDs and the current one in Timor-Leste, in regard to ancestral houses (uma lulik). The aim is to examine heritage as a historical process by showing how the current post-colonial AHD is affected by the inference of the past and colonial perspectives on the local heritage, producing and reproducing neo-colonial governmentalities.
Highlights
Timor-Leste is the youngest nation in Southeast Asia
This paper focuses on the Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD; Smith, 2006) regarding the uma lulik developed by the national East Timorese governmental institutions, arguing that the current heritagization process developed by the Secretary of Arts and Culture (SEAC) and KNTLU is largely influenced by both a Western conceptualization of Heritage based on materiality and monumentality (Byrne, 2014) and by historical interpretations that were given of the uma lulik – both by the Portuguese and the Indonesian occupiers
The ancestral houses have been interpreted as paramount social configurations by the many anthropologists focusing on the Timor-Leste context
Summary
Timor-Leste is the youngest nation in Southeast Asia It became independent in 2002, after 24 years of occupation by the Indonesian military, which began in 1975. As Lúcio Sousa points out, this is the first formal and official document in which the new-born nation established a conceptual political framework regarding the definition and protection of National Culture and Heritage. It is the first governmental document in which there is a clear and open reference to uma lulik (T., potent houses) as part of the national Heritage (Sousa, 2017: 432).
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