ABSTRACT
This book presents an ethnography of post-conflict social and economic recovery among the Fataluku ethno-linguistic communities of Timor Leste. The work draws on extensive comparative literature and field-based empirical research over two decades of engagement with Fataluku households, in their homeland municipality of Lautem. The introductory chapter presents an analytical framework for the study organised around the limited choices available to communities in the post-occupation environment from 1999. One choice, which I gloss as a ‘return to custom,’ has been directed inward to the process of rebuilding and the restoration of community life in situ. A second pathway led outward to the perceived opportunities and risks of a cosmopolitan modernity; one that has given rise to the unexpected emergence of a thriving informal, transnational labour migration to Britain for aspiring young Fataluku. The study charts these divergent pathways and their subsequent convergence and intermingling through the power of social media and a flow of cash remittances from distant dutiful sons and daughters. The process influences social practice, in both directions and arguably forms part of a widespread and continuing project of redemption to honour the sacrifice of cherished family members who suffered and were lost during the war of liberation.
