Entangled worlds: villages and political community in Timor-Leste

This essay is about the interaction of different life-worlds, of different ways of understanding and constituting political community, and the challenges of working—and, for East Timorese, living—across these differences.1 As with many formerly colonised states, Timor-Leste is characterised by the coexistence of fundamentally different socio-political cultures and logics of governance.2 Timor-Leste’s social, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity is often noted.3 Here, however, I am referring to the more far-reaching divergence between what could be called the customary or ‘local’ life underpinning the various clan networks and community structures across the country, and the forms of institutional governance and economic exchange underpinning the liberal state.4