Reading against the grain : ethnography, commercial agriculture and the colonial archive of East Timor

Often, it is left to the reader to decipher what is actually meant by “ethnography” in any given context. In this chapter, we employ multiple senses of the term as we take up the challenge posed by Ricardo Roque, namely to consider how former colonial-era encounters and ethnographies contribute to shaping scholarly understandings and how they might impact more widely on the generation of postcolonial interpretations of the history and anthropology of East Timor. We are urged to view the rich and complex Portuguese archival history of East Timor as a laboratory for wider reflections on the virtues and vices, connections and discontinuities between colonialism, post-independence, post-colonialism, and ethnography. But field-ethnography and historical investigation rarely come together seamlessly. Indeed, this chapter is premised on a stark disjuncture between “ethnography-as-fieldwork” undertaken in the final decade of Portuguese Timor (1966–75) and the particular facets of the Portuguese archive on Timor that concern plantation agriculture; the first tells us nothing about the second (for reasons that are treated in detail below). This disjuncture is articulated in the structure of this chapter. In the first two sections we attend to the question of ethnography. In the latter sections we explore what the archival sources can tell us that ethnographies cannot.