SPIRITS OF THE PAST, GHOSTS OF THE FUTURE: HISTORY AND IDENTITY IN POST-COLONIAL EAST TIMOR.

Abstract

This thesis is about how the ordinary people of East Timor use culture and memory to deal with traumatic conditions that their newborn country faces.

My thesis aims to investigate how oral history and social memory are used by the East Timorese in maintaining a sense of identity despite prolonged periods of uncertainty and violence.

I then investigate the stories and rituals which the East Timorese use in countering their continued sense of helplessness. As an independent country that is still suffering from collective post-traumatic stress, the East Timorese are marginalised. By highlighting East Timorese forms of memory- and history-making, I reveal a layered indigenous process of identity-formation which seeks to draw the East Timorese away from socio-political liminality and return them to a central position of control and power.

This `narrative-making¿ provides a platform for the East Timorese to re-invent and re-interpret current uncertainties so that they can be positioned in a time-tested milieu that helps make sense of it. Drawing from studies in cultural flux, social memory and identity formation, my thesis allows a closer look at how the East Timorese use their troubled past to cope with an equally worrisome present.