Affiliation:
1. the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific
Abstract
Spending time in the highland village of Kutete I got to know the teachers
at the primary school, Eskola Lalehan. Towards the end of the year, worried
many of the children would fail their exams, the principal organised the
purchase of a pig, and for a ritual speaker to beseech the ancestors to
allow the children safe passage to the exam centre and success once there.
This chapter juxtaposes the reluctance of Kutete’s farmers to adopt new
agricultural methods with their embrace of the village school. Through
an exegesis of the ritual speech they use for this I explore how, for the
people of Oecussi, kase education can draw on and validate meto notions
of interventionist, geographically embedded spirits.
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press