Engaging Processes of Sense-Making and Negotiation in Contemporary Timor-Leste
Date
2013-11
Authors
Bexley, A.
Nygaard-Christensen, M.
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Taylor & Francis
Abstract
The articles in this special issue build on past ethnographic inquiries and focus on
political and social change since Timor-Leste
independence. One of the things we
have found particularly exciting about researching post-independent Timor-Leste has
been to carry out fieldwork in a context where not just researchers, but also our
informants, are caught up in processes of
sense-making of determining what kind
of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is becoming. The reality of
ethnographic research in such a context is far different from, as Ferguson (1999,
208) has it, the archetypal image of the anthropologist dropped into the middle of a
cultural homogenous village community
where the researcher acquires from local
informants a degree of cultural fluency. Rather, while we as researchers have tried to
learn about Timor-Leste, our informants, as citizens of a new nation, have been
absorbed in a parallel process of learning, deliberating and at times contesting what
kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is, and should become in the
future (see Kammen 2009). In other words, making sense of independent Timor-
Leste has, over the past decade, been a project that preoccupies Timorese citizens as
much as the foreign researcher. This issue addresses some of these processes of
sense-making and negotiation; and highlights the ambiguities and paradoxes, while
stressing the heterogeneity and unpredictability of contemporary Timor-Leste.
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Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 14.5 (2013): 399-404
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Journal article
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