Damian Grenfell
(Associate Professor Centre for Global Research RMIT University of Melbourne, Australia; Investigador Visitante ICS-ULisboa)
14 de Julho, 13h30 – 14h50
ICS-ULisboa | sala 3
New institutions of state have emerged in Timor-Leste from the destruction of the Indonesian withdrawal in 1999, with the population drawn in uneven ways into a new political community. The continuing importance of ‘customary polities’ have in many regards been reinvigorated by these state-building efforts, as well as broader processes of modernization, a clue that it is difficult to make generalised claims and broad conclusions about the character or trajectory of Timorese life. In this paper I will use the figures of the ‘stranger’ and the ‘spirit’ to make arguments with regards to forms of sociality in post-colonial and post-conflict Timor-Leste. The social negotiation of both the ‘spirit’—the immortal force understood to persist following the death of the person—and the unknown outsider as the ‘stranger’ have shifted in ways that demonstrate how sociality is characterised by oscillating and uneven forms of ontological compression and distinction. This, it will be argued, is particularly notable in the patterns of social integration across time, space and knowledge, present in all kinds of social interactions though explored in this paper at moments of and in response to violence and conflict.
Integrado no ciclo de seminários do GI Identidades, Culturas, Vulnerabilidades do ICS-ULisboa.
Coordenação: Marta Vilar Rosales, Chiara Pussetti (ICS-ULisboa), Apresentação de Susana de Matos Viegas (ICS-ULisboa)
ENTRADA LIVRE
