This book examines the dynamics of a ‘return to custom’ in post-independence Timor-Leste; a set of practices connecting ancestral house communities with the complex spirit ecologies upon which people’s livelihoods and well-being depend. Drawing on detailed comparative studies, it considers the contribution of custom and its inter-generational legacies to the development of sustainable social and environmental policies of governance in Southeast Asia’s newest nation-state. The book is both a timely study of social renewal in post-conflict societies, and a creative contribution to the possibilities of sustainable environmental and cultural resource management in Timor-Leste and the wider region.
Andrew McWilliam was Professor of Anthropology at Western Sydney University (2017-2024 – now Adjunct Professor). He is a specialist in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Recent publications include: 1) Post-Conflict Social and Economic Recovery in Timor-Leste: Redemptive Legacies, 2020 Routledge; 2) Distilling Livelihoods in Timor‑Leste: Fataluku Ecologies of Practice, Human Ecology, 2022 Vol 50 (4) 606-615. 3) Making Money, Missing Home: Reflections on Timorese Informal Labour Migration to Britain, 2022 The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 23:3, 266-285.
Lisa Palmer is a Professor of Environmental Studies in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely and is the author of an ethnography on people’s complex relations with water in Timor-Leste titled Water politics and spiritual ecology: Custom, environmental governance and development (2015, Routledge) and Island Encounters: Timor-Leste from the outside in (ANU Press, 2021). She is a co-editor of Economic Diversity in Contemporary Timor-Leste (LUP, 2023).
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