The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste
University of Wisconsin Press, 2024
eISBN: 978-0-299-34933-2 | Cloth: 978-0-299-34930-1
Library of Congress Classification HN710.3.K46 2024
See other books on: 2002- | Collective memory | Dead | Death & Dying | Spirits
See other titles from University of Wisconsin Press
eISBN: 978-0-299-34933-2 | Cloth: 978-0-299-34930-1
Library of Congress Classification HN710.3.K46 2024
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
“What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?” asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation’s victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them.
With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—at least a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.
See other books on: 2002- | Collective memory | Dead | Death & Dying | Spirits
See other titles from University of Wisconsin Press
![](https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-0-472-11222-7-thumb.jpg "Managing "Modernity": Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia")
