ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a general reflection on the shifting ways in which indigenous ritual, with its orientation inward in space and backward in time, has cohabited with Catholicism over the Portuguese colonial period and beyond, and how it has both shaped and been shaped by nation formation since 1975. Customary rituals, moreover, require substantial investments of resources, and there were those, especially among urban elites, who felt that these could be better spent, whether on collective projects of regional development or on individual advancement. Indeed, as Andrew McWilliam has demonstrated with reference to Fataluku strategies, the contemporary return to ancestral custom unfolds in tension with a reverse orientation away from rural communities and ancestral obligations, outward towards urban centers in and beyond Timor-Leste. Discourse about the contributions of spirits to the independence struggle imbues customary rituals with national feeling: within the terms of local exchange economies, the future well-being of the nation is at stake in the resurgence of custom.
