Affiliation:
1. the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific
Abstract
Soon I after I arrived back in Oecussi the people of its coastal fringe
were told to prepare for the mass expropriation of their land by the
state. Jake’s family was one of these households. Through the story of
how Jake’s grandmother, Marta, came down from the mountains as a
girl and made a life by the sea, I show how resettled mountain folk have
continued to engage with the land largely through spiritually mediated
frameworks and understandings traceable to their highland origins.
Through my own experience of an illness attributed by one of Mahata’s
resident mediums (ahinet) to these spirits I grapple with the ways in
which these understandings are manifested in somatic experience as
well as readily articulated belief.
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press