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Adat:
Community Life in the Oecusse Enclave
Adat
are those customary practices/laws which govern
community life in Timor Leste, as in most of
the region. Despite the impinging pressures
of the modern world in Timor Leste, Oecusse
is renowned for the fact that its adat system
retains considerable strength and community
support, arguably much more so than in the rest
of Timor Leste.
Between
2002 and 2004, Laura Suzanne Meitzner Yoder,
an American Ph.D. student at Yale University,
lived and researched traditional life/authority
structures in the Oecusse enclave. It is the
first such study to be conducted, and as such
is required reading for all those interested
in understanding what underpins daily life for
the vast majority of the population of the Enclave.
Below
is an excerpt from her dissertation: Custom,
Codification, Collaboration: Integrating the
Legacies of Land and Forest Authorities in Oecusse
Enclave, East Timor.
Click
here to download the full text [PDF
1400kb]
"Historical
and contemporary practices of rural land and
forest regulation demonstrate a wide range of
interactions among customary and state authorities.
In East Timor's Oecusse enclave, autonomous
local authorities have long sought to access
and to control forest products, including sandalwood
and beeswax, through a political and ritual
hierarchy that demonstrates a fluctuating relationship
to state governance.
After
centuries of mercantilism, Portuguese colonialism,
Indonesian rule, and United Nations administration,
the newly independent nation of East Timor bears
the environmental and political effects of a
long history of forest product extraction. Oral
narratives and written accounts illustrate periodic
forest abundance and decline in response to
trade, customary regulation, state intervention,
and changing agricultural practices. Political
histories parallel popular environmental histories,
particularly regarding the changing position
of customary authorities and the decline or
resurgence in accompanying practice of forest
prohibitions. To counteract the forest losses
that occurred when customary authorities lost
power under recent administrations, the new
government has supported collaborative initiatives
to reinstate these figures and to revive the
forest protection ceremonies, leading to new
roles for customary authorities. Tracing the
changing place of embodied local state and customary
authorities in rural land and forest oversight
is central to understanding the causes of change
in forests and landscapes.
Successive
states' efforts to formalize landholdings in
East Timor, alongside modern codification of
forest protection, demonstrate the complexities
and ambiguities of efforts to codify existing
land and forest practices. Different political
regimes' rhetoric and laws about customary land
recognition have variously emphasized a legally
distinct status for East Timorese, regional
commonalities, and urgency for the new nation
to develop a modern land administration system,
without offering substantive recognition of
rural people's status as landowners."
Laura
Meitzner Yoder
works on rural peoples' resource claims and
agricultural development in Latin America and
Southeast Asia. Bridging academic and farmers'
experiences, her focus areas include rural land
and forest policy in transitional periods, native
plant uses and improvement, and the forms and
practices of resource ownership. She holds a
Masters in International Agriculture and Rural
Development (Cornell University) and a Ph.D.
in Forestry and Environmental Studies (Yale
University).
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