Between land and sea: Relational environments in Makili, Atauro Island, East Timor

Abstract

Located on the island of Atauro in East Timor, people in Makili lead lives that are inextricably linked to both the land and the sea. Daily life involves engagement with a range of ecological domains, whose material qualities and subsequent affordances, are experienced and recognised in multiple ways. In this thesis I address what it means for people in Makili, living as they do with these diverse environs, to inhabit a marine environment. Specifically, I explore how people in Makili engage with, make use of and draw meaning from their environment through their intimate and everyday engagements with it. Recent anthropological endeavours to understand the diverse ways in which humans and their environs intersect have turned towards relationality and relational ontologies. In the context of marine environments, a desire to move beyond Western land/sea dichotomies has seen the utilisation of terms such as 'flow' and 'mobility' in an effort to understand the dynamic nature of marine lifeworlds. Based on fourteen months of fieldwork on Atauro Island, I examine the ways in which relationality informs Makili engagements with their environment, as well as their experience and perceptions of it. In particular, I draw on Hviding's (1996:10) notion of land and sea as an 'interrelated whole' to argue that in Makili relationality involves iterative, ongoing processes of reciprocity and exchange between people and their environment. By exploring the diverse ways that Makili people engage with their environment, I show first, that meaning is not imputed onto an abstract or impersonal environment but is made in the everyday engagements and personal entanglements between the physical, material world and those beings - human or otherwise - who inhabit it. Second, following the everyday movements, tactile engagements and preoccupations of people in Makili, I explore how people navigate this interrelated world. Third and in particular, I examine different aspects of these relations as they play out over temporal, spatial, material and social life in Makili. It is through these processes that people know their environment and therefore know themselves and what it means to be from Makili and to live with the sea. Show more