Between Kase and Meto

Abstract

Over the past 40 years, life in Timor-Leste has changed radically. Before 1975 most of the population lived in highland villages, spoke local languages, and rarely used money. Today many have moved into urbanised lowlands settlements, and even those whose lives remain dominated by customary ways understand that those of their children will not. For the Atoni Pah Meto of the island’s west, the world was neatly divided into two distinct categories: the meto (indigenous), and the kase (foreign). Now things are less clear. This thesis revolves around seven tales from two years in Timor-Leste’s Oecussi enclave that showcase how, in an age of urbanisation on the island, daily practice emerges from the interplay between these formerly distinct domains. There the good things of the outside world are pursued not through rejecting the meto ways of the village, or collapsing them into the kase, but through the often ritually mediated negotiation of continual crossing between them. Through this method, the people of Oecussi are able to identify in the struggles of lowland life, the comforting and often decisive presence of familiar highland spirits.