Standard Tetum English Dictionary

A fully revised and expanded edition which provides an exhaustive list of words and idioms belonging to the Tetum lanaguage as it is spoken in the territory of East Timor, all with English equivalents. The lexical range covers the register of common colloquial and literary Tetum, archaic rural and local dialects.

An essential source of reference for this linguistic community, as well as for linguists working on typology and syntax.

In the second edition of this study of religion and kinship in East Timor, David Hicks argues that reproductive rituals and ideas regarding fertility and gender direct the notion that for the Tetum-speaking people of Caraubalo suku, in the district of Viqueque, life and death derive from the same source. This source is the world of the ancestral ghosts (the mate bein). The soul of a person (the klamar mate) who has died becomes transformed by ritual action into an agency for life-affirming fertility, that is, an ancestral ghost, and it is from the ancestors that fertility, which sustains life down the generations, originates. Incorporated into this complex of ideas regarding life, fertility, gender, and death, are two recreational institutions, cockfighting and kick-fighting, which Dr. Hicks argues are ritualized manifestations of fertility and infertility respectively, as well as gendered aspects of the sacred (lulik) and secular (sau) worlds. In addition to contributing to the comparative study of ritual and indigenous notions of reproduction, the second edition of Tetum Ghosts and Kin: Fertility and Gender in East Timor, provides an ethnographic portrait of village life among a people whose traditions were about to be abruptly devastated by war and conquest. In a summary retrospect he outlines the events that overtook the East Timorese between the time of his first period of fieldwork and East Timors becoming a nation on May 20, 2002, and concludes with a brief description of the present condition of Caraubalo.

"Throughout its history, East Timor has been a lesson in what not to do: how not to run a colony, how not to run a province, how not to prepare a territory for independence, and how not to treat a smaller neighbour. While many foreign commentators have been prompt to write East Timor off as a "failed state", they conveniently ignore the fact that other states are also to blame for its failings, particularly Portugal, Indonesia and Australia, as well as the United Nations. East Timor's first ten years since self-determination have been marked by denial, nav̐et,̌ ignorance, prejudice, incompetence, maladministration, and an unwillingness of people from different countries to work with each other instead of against each other. It is a lesson for those places in the world seeking independence, and those governments who seek to deny independence to others. Yet despite all this, East Timor remains a place with hope." --rear cover.

In the village of Funar, located in the central highlands of Timor-Leste, the disturbing events of the twenty-four-year-long Indonesian occupation are rarely articulated in narratives of suffering. Instead, the highlanders emphasize the significance of their return to the sacred land of the ancestors, a place where "gold" is abundant and life is thought to originate. On one hand, this collective amnesia is due to villagers' exclusion from contemporary nation-building processes, which bestow recognition only on those who actively participated in the resistance struggle against Indonesia. On the other hand, the cultural revival and the privileging of the ancestral landscape and traditions over narratives of suffering derive from a particular understanding of how human subjects are constituted. Before life and after death, humans and the land are composed of the same substance; only during life are they separated. To recover from the forced dislocation the highlanders experienced under the Indonesian occupation, they thus seek to reestablish a mythical, primordial unity with the land by reinvigorating ancestral practices. Never leaving out of sight the intense political and emotional dilemmas imposed by the past on people’s daily lives, The Land of Gold seeks to go beyond prevailing theories of postconflict reconstruction that prioritize human relationships. Instead, it explores the significance of people’s affective and ritual engagement with the environment and with their ancestors as survivors come to terms with the disruptive events of the past.

This book explores the challenges to linguistic vitality confronting many minority languages in the highly diverse and geographically far-flung Austronesian language family. The contributions bring together Indigenous language activists and academic researchers with a long-standing commitment to language documentation.