The Unruly Dead : Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste Hardback
by Lia Kent
Part of the Critical Human Rights series
Hardback
Description
“What might it mean to take the dead seriously?” 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.
Information
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Pre-Order
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:222 pages, 18 b&w illus., 1 map
- Publisher:University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication Date:20/08/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9780299349301
Information
-
Pre-Order
- Format:Hardback
- Pages:222 pages, 18 b&w illus., 1 map
- Publisher:University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication Date:20/08/2024
- Category:
- ISBN:9780299349301
