the tobe and tara bandu: a post-independence renaissance of historical forest regulation authorities...

CHAPTER 9

The Tobe and Tara Bandu

A Post-independence Renaissance of Historical ForestRegulation Authorities and Practices in Oecusse, East Timor

Laura S. Meitzner Yoder

Introduction

The new nation of East Timor has experienced decades of politicaltumult, culminating in full independent statehood in May 2002. Politicaltransitions precipitated rapid forest decline under Indonesian rule(1975–99) and during the violence and reconstruction surrounding the1999 transition to independence.1 In response, villagers and governmentofficials alike turned to displaced traditional mechanisms for forest regu-lation to manage locally important crises of forest degradation, specifi-cally to address recent losses of sandalwood (Santalum album L.) andgewang palm (Corypha sp.). Local actors revived and adapted the ecolog-ical institutions of ritual authorities (tobe) and forest prohibitions (tarabandu) to give new form to state-supported customary practices for forestprotection. This chapter examines developments in forest regulation inone rural district of East Timor, the Oecusse enclave, during the first twoyears of the new nation’s administration (Figure 9.1).

Sandalwood Trade History and its Local Political Context

The history of East Timor’s Oecusse enclave includes centuries of localand extra-local traders jockeying for control over the region’s lucrativesandalwood, which thrives in disturbed soils of the interior mountains.Asian traders visited Timor before the thirteenth century (Ptak 1983,1987;

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Villiers 1985). One of the earliest Chinese descriptions of Timor (c. 1350)stated that sandalwood was a dominant and abundant species on theisland (Ptak 1983: 37; 1987: 89). A pre-1600 source added detail toTimorese authorities’ involvement in coastal trade (Zhang Xi 1981): localfigures performed sacrifices, and, when a merchant ship landed, a localking travelled to the marketplace with his entourage to collect a tax andto oversee the sandalwood trade, which could only take place in his pres-ence (Ptak 1983: 40–41). Competing Portuguese and Dutch mercantileinterests from the 1500s eventually led to the formal colonial partitioningof the island between Portuguese areas, constituting eastern Timor andthe Oecusse enclave on Timor’s northwest coast, and Dutch areas, acrossthe western half of the island (Farram 1999).

Exogenous factors including trade and non-native rule have longplayed important parts in written and oral narratives of changing forestcover and a long, but incomplete, sandalwood decline in Oecusse (seeJarosz 1996; Ellen 199; Sandlund et al. 2001). Oral histories in Oecusseinsist that, before early Asian and later European trade, there were nolocal uses for the ubiquitous native sandalwood; it is said that local peo-ple did not know what the purpose of this plant was. Its value wasrevealed only when Chinese traders appeared on Oecusse’s shore with asandalwood branch, which they showed local people and asked them tobring for trade on the coast. Traders obtained the sandalwood throughdealing with mixed-blood rulers and indigenous kings, who commandedthat the wood be brought to them.

Extensive trade reduced the sandalwood stocks, which had enjoyedlegendary abundance; early European and Asian traders believed thesupply to be inexhaustible and reported that Timorese used the tree forfirewood (Ptak 1983: 40; Villiers 1985: 64). But, even by the late 1600s, mer-chants blamed Oecusse-based Eurasian rulers for decimating the region’ssandalwood to the point that the Timorese trade was no longer worth-while (e.g. Boxer 1947; Leitão 1948: 248–49). In the mid-1800s, aPortuguese governor viewed sandalwood as insignificant to Timor’strade (de Castro 1867: 304), but the beginning of the twentieth centuryagain saw peak exports of Timorese sandalwood (Ormeling 1956: 156). In1901, the Portuguese governor blamed native leaders for sandalwooddepletion (Cinatti Vaz Monteiro Gomes 1950:14). Subsequent legislationrestricting sandalwood trade made Oecusse the exception to the colonialban: a 1929 decree acknowledged that vast quantities of Oecusse sandal-wood continued to be cut for trade to Dutch territories and that the gov-ernment was unable to supervise compliance in the enclave (ibid.: 15–16).Soon after, one colonial administrator suggested that the Oecusse regionwas so poor since the disappearance of sandalwood from its forests thatthe Portuguese should consider trading it to the Dutch for some morefavourable piece of Timor (Martinho 1945: 38, 268).

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Contested access to the region’s sandalwood among Asian andEuropean traders, two colonial powers and powerful native and Eurasiankings contributed to the formation of Oecusse as a political enclave undernominal Portuguese authority. For centuries, local kings proved unwillingto relinquish their control over the trade, rebuffing multiple colonial mili-tary and political efforts to control the Oecusse region (Fox 2000). Oecusseserved as a hub for sandalwood export for centuries and was the firstPortuguese political capital until local rulers forced the Portuguese east-ward in 1769 (de Castro 1867). This one-time economic centre became aneglected zone, receiving little attention from the central government. Fromthe 1700s to the present, the persistent isolation of the enclave permitted, orrequired, a high degree of autonomy from local governing officials and thecustomary authorities who collaborated with them in forest oversight.

For centuries, sandalwood access has been closely regulated by ritualauthorities legitimized by local kings, with severe penalties for non-approved harvest. On Magellan’s expedition in January 1522, AntonioPigafetta (1969 [1522]: 139) went ashore at Oecusse to secure food and meta local chief. Pigafetta’s account noted the presence of Asian traders anddescribed sacred and ritual elements surrounding sandalwood; he notedthat sandalwood had to be ‘cut at a certain phase of the moon, for otherwiseit would not be good’ (141).2 In addition, ‘when they go to cut the sandal-wood (as they told us) the devil appears in divers forms, who tells them, ifthey have need of anything, to demand it of him. Because of this apparitionthey are sick for some days’ (141). Although people observed rituals aroundcutting sandalwood, they still met with supernatural consequences.

Oecusse’s central ritual authority is called a tobe, a figure foundthroughout western Timor, although decades ago some noted theirdeclining power in formerly Dutch-claimed territories (Middelkoop 1960:22; Schulte Nordholt 1971: 55–83; McWilliam 1991, 2002). As custodians ofspecialist ecological knowledge, the tobe have broad oversight of land andforests: they carry out all stages of agricultural rituals; collect an annualbeeswax tribute for the kings; establish and enforce forest prohibitions;and have the power to grant or to deny land used for agriculture in agiven year. Today, there are about seventy tobe in Oecusse, each responsi-ble for clearly bounded, named, nested territories that cover the entireexpanse of the district.

While some tobe are restricted to performing agricultural rituals, as agroup they are best known popularly for their role in sandalwood regu-lation. During the Portuguese era, when the king – or the colonial admin-istration, through the king – ordered sandalwood to be cut, the tobeperformed pre-harvest rituals and then went alone into the forest to checkfor the presence of adequate aromatic heartwood as judged by barkthickness, using a chisel originally conferred by the king for this purpose.People frequently mention that sandalwood cut inappropriately, without


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proper ritual and authority, would not yield the valuable heartwood, evenif the trees were large and should be expected to have heartwood. The tobemarked trees approved for harvest, which villagers then cut, taking thebest portion to the king and small amounts to the tobe and other villageauthorities. People caught cutting sandalwood outside this procedure orfarmers who damaged sandalwood seedlings in the cutting or burning ofswidden field preparations were reported by the tobe and subjected tophysical punishment by the king’s guards, heavy fines assessed by thetobe and potential exile from Oecusse.

In Portuguese times, the tobe were powerful and feared as much fortheir ability to charge and fine people as for their spiritual–ritual powers,and people reportedly rarely risked transgressing a tobe’s prohibitions ordared to cut sandalwood. In contrast to outsiders’ blame of local authori-ties for sandalwood degradation in the pursuit of a trade monopoly,Oecusse villagers portray local kings and tobe as extremely parsimoniouswith sandalwood requests over the past century; during the 1950s and1960s, Oecusse-based traders often sourced sandalwood in IndonesianWest Timor for trade beyond the island, as they were unable to obtain anysubstantial quantity within the district, given the strength of local restric-tions. Oecusse people consistently report that very large sandalwoodtrees were commonplace in the mid-1970s.

The Parallel Decline of Ritual Authorities andSandalwood

Soon after Indonesia began ruling East Timor in 1976, an Indonesianparastatal corporation commenced massive purchasing expeditions,which rapidly depleted Oecusse’s sandalwood, by the mid-1980s leavingonly saplings in the district, following a pattern replicated in foreststhroughout the province (Aditjondro 1994; Sandlund et al. 2001; Boumaand Kobryn 2004). Although Oecusse was not subjected to the extremelevels of violence and social disruption that occurred in the easternregions (Budiardjo and Liong 1984, Taylor 1999), some Oecusse residentsreport that farmers who did not present sandalwood for sale were threat-ened with its forcible and unpaid removal from their land. Villagers wererequired to sell the wood at low prices within Oecusse; those who daredto sell wood for more profit over the border in West Timor risked severepunishment if caught. Indonesian military governance combined withcorporate activity to weaken the local kingdom structure, and existingcontrols on sandalwood harvest broke down.3

While the tobe’s other ritual activities continued, their sandalwoodmonitoring role faded as the wood was cut and sold in record quantities(see also Ellen 1993: 140 on economic motives to transgress traditional


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prohibitions). Villagers say that in 1977/78, when they initially cut san-dalwood against the tobe’s prohibitions, they would smuggle the sandal-wood for sale at night to avoid detection and identification, but by 1980people sold the wood openly and without fear of fines. People frequentlycomment that the Indonesian administration ‘replaced’ the tobe withforestry officers, who under Indonesia had power to approve felling oftrees. Many Oecusse residents closely associate the decline of tobe author-ity with degradation of forest resources in general during the Indonesianperiod, and with sandalwood loss in particular. Comparable cases of stateinvolvement in forest decline are amply described throughout theIndonesian archipelago ( Peluso 1992; Dove and Kammen 2001; Sandlundet al. 2001; de Jong et al. 2003; Bouma and Kobryn 2004; McWilliam 2005).

The Over-harvesting of Palm Leaves and theImplementation of Forest Protection Measures

With the development of Indonesian civil servants’ and highlanders’resettlement housing in the lowlands from the early 1980s, Corypha palmforest on Oecusse’s north coast declined. Residents tell how, during the1960s, they hunted a wide variety of animals in thick forests on the out-skirts of the then sparsely populated coastal district capital, areas that fol-lowing housing expansion remain largely cleared of vegetation. Whilemaintaining roofing is a persistent challenge throughout Oecusse, the cri-sis in thatch leaf supply occurred following the widespread burning ofpeople’s thatch houses at the time of the 1999 political transition, whenthe vast majority of families in Oecusse had to rebuild their homes all atonce. One survey4 estimated that two-thirds of the district’s homes weremade unlivable by the September–October 1999 violence; many settle-ments suffered complete destruction of every home and public structure.

Instead of families replacing their roofs in a staggered pattern as nor-mally required every ten to fifteen years, the simultaneous need causedsudden and serious depletion in district stocks of lowlanders’ gewangpalm (Corypha sp.) and highlanders’ alang-alang (Imperata cylindrica L.)leaves used for thatch. Prices soared: in 2000 and 2001, the cost of enoughImperata grass – purchased from Indonesian West Timor – to roof onehouse went as high as two large cattle, worth up to US$400 at that time.An international relief agency that planned to supply labour and trans-portation to provide palm thatch as part of an emergency shelter kit soondepleted available stocks of the leaves within Oecusse, and had toredesign the programme to supply corrugated metal roofing. One low-land community noted the toll that over-cutting had taken on its palmsupplies, and in 2001 declared a three-year total ban on harvesting itsleaves for thatch, to permit recovery of the palms, to be followed by


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limited harvesting upon approval by a village committee headed by atobe. This community initiative was the start of what grew into a district-wide forest protection programme, supported by the local governmentand mediated by customary authorities.

Tara Bandu Forest Protection Ceremonies and Reinstatingthe Tobe

The first two post-independence tara bandu ceremonies held in Oecussewere coastal community initiatives in 2001 (Figure 9.2). After the firstpalm frond harvesting ban, a second community held a tara bandu to‘restore’ a breached prohibition on logging in a sacred forest near theIndonesian border that was opportunistically cut during the refugee cri-sis of 1999–2000; in this case, the district Agriculture Department assessedadditional penalties to those charged by the villagers. In 2002 and 2003,the district government became directly involved in the tara bandu cere-monies, which eventually developed into an Agriculture Department pro-gramme. The third and fourth (highland) villages that held tara bandu


Figure 9.2. Village tobes listen to the ritual speech describing tara bandurestrictions, while standing next to an altar ornamented with representativesamples of restricted items

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conducted them as part of fine payments by individuals who cut village-protected forest, with the animals, rice and drink consumed in the feastbeing part of the fine paid by the perpetrators. The fifth and sixth cere-monies were part of state-funded agricultural development programmes.

In the remaining villages, bringing the total by late 2004 to fifteen outof Oecusse’s approximately twenty-one traditional villages,5 the tarabandu ceremony was part of the district Agriculture Department’s forma-tion of ‘(Agri)Cultural Associations’ in most villages. In explaining thepurpose of these Associations during village meetings, local governmentstaff emphasized the inseparable link between agricultura and cultura(national Tetum-language terms) in the almost entirely agrarian Oecussecontext. The Associations recognize and organize the tobe, and other lead-ers designated by villagers, into committees charged with forest oversightand two-way communication between villages and the AgricultureDepartment. The first activity of many Associations was a tara bandu, dur-ing which the Agriculture Department formally reinvested these groupswith the former forest control functions and powers enjoyed by the tobe inPortuguese times. From the district government’s perspective, tappinginto traditional leaders’ authority in this way was an economical, prag-matic extension to their severely limited state budget and staff.6

Tara Bandu: Ceremony, Documents and Effects

The term tara bandu, which labelled the focal point of the district govern-ment programme, is Tetum for seasonal or extended restrictions on usingnamed forest products. It designates an institution akin to sasi and othersimilar practices elsewhere in the region (Manehat 1990; Zerner 1994;Benda-Beckmann, Benda-Beckmann and Brouwer 1995; Thorburn 2000;see also the contributions to this volume by Ellen and Soselisa). The nor-mal visible symbol of a tara bandu is hanging (tara) an inverted cut branchin a prominent spot near the protected area or species to inform and toremind people of the prohibitions (bandu). The Oecusse language (knownas Meto, Dawan or Baiqueno) term for tara bandu is kelo or kero, or simplybanu for prohibition.7 As Tetum, one of East Timor’s national languages, isnot widely spoken in Oecusse’s highlands, using the term tara bandurequired government staff to translate it for community groups, signallingthe Oecusse local government’s attempt to participate in this aspect ofnational life and modern identity.

On the national level, tara bandu became a core part of the stated con-servation strategy of agriculture and forestry policies (Ministry of Agri-culture, Forestry and Fisheries 2003: 25–26). In the new nation, manyactors (including local non-governmental organizations,8 village commit-tees, academics and others) have promoted tara bandu as a unique


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national tradition that should be revived and respected (Azerino 2001;Babo-Soares 2001; Sandlund et al. 2001: 34). Particularly where forestswere reduced through conflict or sandalwood extraction during theIndonesian period, people present tara bandu and its associated pre-Indonesian institutions as important expressions of national pride andrestored national identity. For Oecusse, the only East Timorese districtthat has a ritual authority with roles as specific as the tobe, state recogni-tion of these authorities signals a welcome closer collaboration amonglocal traditional and state authorities.9

In Oecusse, a tara bandu prohibition is publicly initiated by a ceremonyin which tobes announce or pronounce the restrictions with ritual speech,sometimes referring to samples of forbidden items presented on an altar.After animals are sacrificed, local authorities read a letter of between oneand three pages (written in Indonesian, and translated to the local lan-guage) detailing the conditions of the tara bandu, prepared by the tobesand printed by the district Agriculture Department. The letter lists thenamed areas and tree or animal species protected by that village’s tarabandu, along with the specific fines for transgressing each prohibition.Villages list sacred forests, springs and other ritually important locationsin the letters; letters from half the villages in Oecusse totalled 374 namedprotected locations.10 Protected tree species include up to eight ‘economi-cally valuable species’ of trees, always including sandalwood. Fines con-sist of livestock of a specified age or size, rice, palm wine and either cashor traditional items such as coins or bead necklaces. Sandalwood cuttingis usually the most serious offence, in one case bringing a fine more thanfive times higher than any other offence. Each village has unique, locallydetermined prohibitions and sanctions, set by the tobe and other membersof the association. The intent is that anyone breaking the prohibition mustprovide the fine for consumption at the restoration ceremony that rein-states a breached tara bandu.

The letters combine national forestry regulations and traditionalauthority in novel ways. For example, the letters refer to official restric-tions on harvest of sandalwood and other economic species, while apply-ing traditional penalties carried out by local authorities. This legitimizestraditional leaders’ authority to assess fines, which, if necessary, can bereinforced by the state, potentially involving – community members aretold – police arrest or court trials for those who refuse to comply. Afterseveral hours of lively community discussion and debate, the tobe andother members of the Association sign or put their thumbprint on the let-ters, followed by a feast.

In 2003 and 2004, four villages had payments of debts incurred by cut-ting forest areas protected by tara bandu. In one case, the district govern-ment paid the designated fine of one cow, fifty kilograms of rice and palmwine to the community that implemented the first tara bandu on their


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palm forest, when a government irrigation project removed some pro-tected trees without prior tobe permission. This is a remarkable instance ofthe state being subject to a newly formalized customary law.11 In anothercase, villagers jointly paid eight cattle, worth over US$1,000, for allowingescaped swidden fires to destroy a protected area.12 While cutting prohib-ited areas has not ceased, people believe it has been checked, and people’swillingness to pay fines indicates some measure of their acceptance of thereinstated tobe and new Associations. During the pre-planting season inlate 2004, farmers and customary authorities in many regions of Oecusseviewed the past two years’ tara bandu programme as having a significanteffect in reducing incidence of escaped fires during swidden preparations,although they report that it did not greatly reduce theft of individual san-dalwood trees or normal burning for swidden fields. Customary authori-ties in one border settlement applied the tara bandu fines to a WestTimorese individual who cut and removed sandalwood trees from a pro-tected forest for sale across the border, with ongoing negotiations involv-ing tobe and other village leaders in neighbouring Indonesia.

Giving New Form to Established, Displaced Institutions

These changes in traditional ecological institutions and knowledgedemonstrate their mutability in new situations, combining old and newfeatures to lend novel form to established institutions in response to per-ceived crises in forest decline. Long-familiar elements of the tara banduinclude authority and oversight of the tobe in forest product regulation(especially sandalwood), the giving of fines for specified offences, the cer-emonial form of conducting sacrifices with ritual speech to initiate oral andvisual prohibitions, and reaffirming the specific restrictions on access anduse of each sacred or protected forest area. New aspects include govern-ment recognition and collaboration with the tobe, who previously had lit-tle direct contact with ruling governments,13 including weighing thepropriety of activating tobe authority without clear leadership from a king.Incorporating native and non-native tree species ‘of high economic value’and specifications given in forestry regulations (e.g. concerning minimumdistances from water sources for cultivation) indicate the hybrid nature ofthe ‘traditional’ forest regulation. The importance of having government-witnessed letters for tara bandu prohibitions set by customary leaders, vil-lagers’ eagerness to confirm that the state would enforce the tobe-assessedfines if necessary and making even the state and non-citizens subject to theprohibitions all point to a complex and dynamic relationship of customaryand state authorities surrounding forest control in the independent state.

The importance of outside influences on local mechanisms of forestregulation is evident. While the tobe figure lost power decades ago and


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has now nearly disappeared in parts of Dutch–Indonesian West Timor(Schulte Nordholt 1971; McWilliam 1991, 2002), the Oecusse toberemained influential in sandalwood regulation until the late 1970s and inagricultural rituals to this day. Some reasons for this difference include afar more active government forest service in Dutch West Timor than inPortuguese Oecusse (Cardoso 1937; Ormeling 1956), the solid presence ofthe Protestant Church in parts of West Timor, which displaced traditionalrituals more than the sparse Catholic leadership in Oecusse (McWilliam1991; Daschbach 1992), and more extensive transition from swidden topermanent cultivation in West Timor, with associated decline in agricul-tural rituals. National-level interest in and support for tara bandu doesexist (though largely rhetorical), but that gave little impetus to the eventsin isolated Oecusse; in practical terms, Oecusse had virtually no contactwith the central government regarding the programme, and Oecusse farsurpassed the extent of tara bandu happening elsewhere in the nation. Theprogramme primarily developed out of the local initiative of districtAgriculture Department staff working together with customary authori-ties. However, the impulse to launch such a programme emerged fromthe broader context in which political independence is a time to do newthings, and the transition afforded an opportunity to redress some of therecent forest declines.

In this case, reinstating the traditional figures was of central impor-tance to bridging old and new forms of special knowledge and authority.Each tobe has expert knowledge about land uses, forest composition,resource access and the locations and numbers of sandalwood seedlingsand mature trees within his territory, as well as exclusive rights to namethe boundaries of his domain. Since all of Oecusse has long been dividedamong tobe jurisdictions, mobilizing this traditional network enabled thegovernment to reach all areas of Oecusse with virtually no administrativeeffort.14 As the state was unable to operationalize forest oversight,villagers and government saw this as an appropriate role for the tobes.Although tobes’ sandalwood monitoring role disappeared underIndonesian administration, they maintained local village legitimacy fortheir essential role in conducting the annual agricultural rituals. Newrecognition by the state further bolstered their authority, extending it onceagain to sandalwood control. Villagers were already familiar with theposition of the tobe as forest overseers and sandalwood protectors, andrural residents and the district government largely support this renais-sance of tobe authority at this point in time. Villagers frequently highlighthow the continuity provided by the tobe’s ritual authority contrasts withthe successive, disruptive political changes, serving as a stabilizing factorthrough the past few tumultuous decades of political transitions fromcolonialism through independence in East Timor. The perceived criseswere multiple: not only sandalwood depletion from the late 1970s and


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acute thatch leaf shortage after 1999, but also extending to social disrup-tions and uncertainties over locally legitimate authorities. Local govern-ment and villagers explicitly linked socio-political crises and ecologicaleffects in reinstating customary figures’ roles in environmental regulation.

With the recent disintegration of kingdom structure, the tara bandu pro-gramme lent new sources of authority to customary figures, although thismove was not immediately accepted. In a December 2002 governmentmeeting with traditional leaders invited from every Oecusse village todiscuss the tara bandu programme, several village heads and tobes raisedthe matter of the current uncertainty surrounding the status and identityof Oecusse’s king(s). Since the village-level customary authorities ulti-mately draw their legitimacy from the king, they insisted that the cus-tomary authority structure be clarified – a new king publicly recognizedand crowned – before taking up the responsibilities proposed by the dis-trict government. Top church and government officials responded thatsuch action was outside their mandate and control, and eventually mostvillage authorities agreed to participate in the tara bandu despite the per-sistent uncertainty regarding kingship.

Prohibition as the Means to Forest Recovery

The operational purpose of tara bandu is merely to limit harvest of ordamage to particular species or areas in order to allow their increase.This is a modest intervention in ‘natural’ forest systems: offenders are notrequired to establish seedling nurseries or to replant cut trees, but just toprotect the trees that do come up so they may persist. Both suddendeclines in sandalwood and gewang palms were answered by returningto forest oversight by traditional authorities, establishing the social struc-tures that support management with virtually no attention to technicalinterventions or activities that would foster forest expansion. This localapproach to forest protection centred on social regulation stands in con-trast to some outside actors’ afforestation or conservation-developmentprogrammes that promote aggressive tree-planting but pay scant atten-tion to the social aspects needed to support seedling survival. The sameresponse – absolute, temporary prohibition – was given for losses in bothspecies: for sandalwood, with its key historic and trade value and elabo-rate ritual protections; and for gewang palm, chiefly used for domesticroofing, a species without specific ritual importance and meriting no spe-cial attention by tobe in the past. Neither species is normally planted;15 yetboth are known to emerge on their own in abandoned swidden fields,conferring a status as semi-cultivated, economically important speciessuitable for regulation by customary mechanisms (see also Ellen 1999).The tara bandu programme extended the known forms of forest


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protection already practised in Oecusse, over forested areas and indivi-dual species, to include a broader range of individual species undercontrol by the village authorities.

Forest Protection Serving Diverse Purposes

The Oecusse tara bandu programme highlights the many complexities ofstate interaction with customary institutions, including divergent pur-poses surrounding forest regulation, implications of state recognition andempowerment of certain individuals as local authorities, and redirectionof customary mechanisms to suit government purposes (Zerner 1994;Ward and Kingdon 1995). While the stated government purpose is forestprotection, village leaders who participate in tara bandu are enthusiasticabout two accompanying aspects of political recognition: first, recognitionfrom the state concerning customary authority structures at the villagelevel; and, secondly, state recognition of village territories vis-à-vis neigh-bouring villages.

Following decades of state neglect of locally important authorities, vil-lage leaders are pleased with the independent government’s effort toacknowledge and to reinforce their positions. As mentioned in footnote 5,Oecusse’s administrative villages are not exactly congruent to traditionaldivisions, so the tara bandu affords an opportunity for village leaders toseek validation of their internal structure and geographical domains. Theexistence of a customary hierarchy is seen as the defining characteristic ofa village’s legitimate existence, so cooperating with the government pro-gramme is a means to solidify and to formalize a place for the village andits leadership in the new government. Certain villages, not among theeighteen currently recognised, successfully held their own tara bandu cer-emonies with government participation, furthering their case that theyare legitimate political entities. When the district government denied one(unrecognized) village their request to hold a separate tara bandu event,the villagers stated their refusal to participate in the programme until theyreceive political recognition as an independent village. By imposing localknowledge of customary mechanisms that exist in rural areas on the stateapparatus, villagers hope to secure official recognition.

Through the tara bandu programme, several Oecusse villages alsosought state recognition of their boundaries, often using the ceremony toassert claims to disputed land. Taking advantage of the state’s limitedknowledge of multiple, remote, locally named protected areas, the villageauthorities listed contested border locations or even forests that clearlybelonged to a neighbouring village in their own tara bandu letters.Government officials’ signatures on these letters then lent unwitting sup-port to such claims, in several instances precipitating large-scale,


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intractable conflicts with the other village. Such incursions illustrate themultiple means to which villages put their local knowledge, especiallywhere it is different from that known to the state.

In conclusion, local ecological knowledge includes but is not limited tobiophysical aspects of people’s environments; it extends to the social ele-ments considered relevant for desired forest changes. Villagers and gov-ernment officials alike in East Timor’s Oecusse enclave district are seekingto redress recent forest losses associated with political transitions by giv-ing new form to the customary institutions of the tobe and tara bandu.These are seen as anchors to an idealized, more stable past, and at presentpeople hope this renewed reliance on local authorities and practices canallow forest recovery.

Acknowledgements

This chapter is based on research conducted in East Timor, Indonesia,Australia and the United States between 2001 and 2004, with generoussupport from the Yale University School of Forestry and EnvironmentalStudies, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the AustralianNational University, Fulbright–Hays Doctoral Dissertation ResearchAbroad Fellowship, International Dissertation Field Research Fellowshipof the Social Science Research Council and the American Council ofLearned Societies, Mustard Seed Foundation, Yale Center forInternational and Area Studies, Yale University Southeast Asia Program,Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies and the Charles Kao Fund ofthe Yale University Council on East Asian Studies. I offer sincere appreci-ation to East Timorese and international staff of the land research andadministration institutions, alongside local land authorities in each ruraldistrict, for their time, patience and collegiality.

Notes

1. After a 1999 vote to separate from Indonesia, East Timor had a transitionalUnited Nations administration until full independence in May 2002.

2. This is reminiscent of the oft-stated Oecusse belief that sandalwood cut with-out proper ritual will not contain aromatic heartwood, as mentioned below. Atpresent in Oecusse, there seems to be no ideal lunar time for sandalwood har-vest. Evidently, in 1833 a Portuguese official in Mangalore also suggested thatsandalwood trees should be cut in the waning moon (Cinatti Vaz MonteiroGomes 1950: 11–12).

3. Warren (1993) describes how Indonesian state involvement with customaryinstitutions served to weaken those institutions, following a similar effectattributed to colonial Dutch efforts to codify tradition (Burns 1999).

4. While other estimates and actual housing reconstruction figures are higher,


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this survey noted that 7,294 Oecusse homes were destroyed, plus nearly allpublic buildings (East Timor Transitional Administration et al. 2001: 34, 64).This represented approximately two-thirds of houses district-wide, althoughthe violence affected some areas far more than others.

5. The official number of administrative villages (Indonesian desa, Portuguese/Tetum suco) in Oecusse since at least the 1950s has been eighteen (Sherlock1983: 36). However, some administrative units combine several autonomouscustomary units that have the full complement of hierarchical leadership, rit-ual practices and land area to constitute villages in the traditional system. Theclandestine movement and early United Nations administration recognizedtwenty-four villages in Oecusse, and the district government gives de factorecognition to anywhere from eighteen to twenty-three villages, depending onthe programme.

6. Under Indonesia, there were more than seventy Department of Agriculturestaff in Oecusse. Now there are just six permanent staff, including only onedealing with forestry, and their field activities are often constrained by lack oftransport and programme funds.

7. The kelo or kero prohibition is usually applied to extensive areas of mixedforests, especially for timber trees or large areas of fruit trees (e.g. Areca catechupalms) that have many different individual owners. An individual can alsoplace a sign on his or her privately owned fruiting trees warning passers-bythat some dire consequence would befall any thieves; this individual prohibi-tion on specific trees is called bunuk, or curse (see Middelkoop 1960: 50). Animportant distinction here is in the responsible authority for each prohibition:only a tobe can institute or lift a kero/kelo, but any individual can place a bunuk.In addition, someone transgressing a kero/kelo must recompense the affectedcommunity with claim to the protected region, while someone violating abunuk owes only the individual tree owner.

8. One of the most active proponents of restoring tara bandu practice is the Dili-based East Timorese NGO Haburas. Haburas staff disapprove of too muchgovernment involvement in tara bandu, voicing concerns that officializing itspractice robs the ceremony of its essential spiritual element and risks makingthe agreements culturally inauthentic.

9. No other district in East Timor has had formal government involvement intara bandu to the extent organized in Oecusse.

10. Ten villages named from ten to sixty-three protected sites in their letters.11. The letters, written in Indonesian, refer to the customary law penalties as

hukum adat, usually with a written and oral translation to Tetum as lei cultura.12. In this case, the villagers sold the cattle to store the cash. Three full days of vil-

lage-wide discussion determined that the offenders would be responsible forensuring natural seedling survival in the burned area, and that the fundswould be used to buy food for the village during the following year’s hungryseason, picking up on one former task of the tobe reported by Schulte Nordholt(1971: 77) but rarely mentioned in Oecusse. The district government allowedthe village association to securely store the funds until that time.

13. Curiously, given the centrality of the tobe in sandalwood control, Portuguesesources make virtually no mention of these figures. Even today, many indi-vidual tobes have some restriction on schooling and extensive travel outsidetheir domains. Regarding Indonesian state knowledge of the tobe, Oecusse vil-lagers and government officials have a uniform response: ‘Indonesia didn’teven know who the tobes were.’

14. The same strategy and justifications were used in colonial Portugal’s form of


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indirect rule and formalization of village units (de Castro 1867; Martinho1945).

15. Indeed, government forestry efforts in Timor have a long history of failurewith efforts to plant the semi-parasitic sandalwood (Cinatti Vaz MonteiroGomes 1950; McWilliam 2005). Farmers report that sandalwood emerges soabundantly in some abandoned swiddens that there is no need to plant it.

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