Fieldwork in Timor-Leste: Understanding Social Change Through Practice

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