Abstract
Why write a regionally defined volume on fieldwork? Anthropological
studies have long moved away from spatial understandings of the field
(Coleman and Collins 2006; Dalsgaard 2013; Olwig and Hastrup
1997); and away from understandings of the field as a ‘site’ waiting to
be discovered by the ethnographer (Amit 2000: 6; Candea 2007: 172).
We think, however, that these attempts to de-objectify ‘the field’ can
usefully be incorporated in our understandings of field-based research
in independent Timor-Leste. For if the tendency in anthropology and
area studies has been to move away from associations between ‘the
field’ and bounded communities, political processes in Timor-Leste
have been marked by attempts to demarcate the boundaries of, and to
define the place, that would become ‘Timor-Leste’. Or put differently,
while anthropological debates have abandoned ‘the common sense idea
that such things as locality and community are simply given or natural’
and instead turned ‘toward a focus on social and political processes of
place making’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 6), such processes in TimorLeste have often revolved around making essentialist claims about what
constitutes Timorese national identity. The chapters in this volume go
to the heart of this tension
Original language | English |
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Place of Publication | Copenhagen |
Publisher | NIAS Press |
Number of pages | 280 |
Edition | 1 |
ISBN (Print) | 978-87-7694-208-3 |
Publication status | Published - 2017 |