Nationalism at scale in Timor-Leste : between Rai na'in and Rai Timor

Historically, the diverse ethno-linguistic communities of Timor-Leste have defined themselves through local ancestral resource jurisdictions and mythic histories of exchange, alliance, and settlement. Central to this conception of place and belonging is the idea of the rai na’in, a Tetun language term with local language variants that refers to ‘custodians of the land’. However, the brutal, generation-long struggle for independence promoted new forms of imaginative connection and belonging encapsulated in the concept of Rai Timor, or ‘homeland’. The notion of Rai Timor is not merely a more encompassing ‘homeland’ than the landed inheritance of locally embedded communities; it is imagined as a territory shaped from below and collectively by the ordeals of ‘the people’, who become the active originators of the nation. If the constitutive act of a subject in the traditional ideology of rule is to recognise and defer to authority vested in ritual and political leaders (the rai na’in), the constitutive act of belonging to the nation is to suffer and sacrifice for it (the Rai Timor) (McWilliam and Traube 2011). This presentation considers the contemporary force of this expansive sense of the imagined community in Timor-Leste, a notion that Anderson described as ‘aggregated nativeness’ (2003), in the light of the well-documented resurgence of custom and traditional authority. How do these different scales of allegiance and belonging contribute to the shaping of contemporary society in post-independence Timor-Leste? In this chapter, I discuss these and other questions with reference to the Fataluku ethnography.