Afterword

Glimpses of Alternatives—the Uma Lulik of East Timor

David Hicks

Abstract: A ritual artifact found throughout East Timor in the Southeast

Asian Archipelago is a sacred house, ritual house, or cult house, known
locally as the uma lulik. This artifact illuminates certain of the different
perspectives on the term ‘belief’ offered by a number of contributors to
this issue. By identifying four categories of Timorese ‘believer’ and ‘non-
believer’, the present article attempts to support recent findings in the
field of material culture that suggest artifacts may not be passive recipi-
ents of values invested in them by their creators. Instead, they might
be more usefully regarded as objects engaged in continuous, dialectic
interconnections with the human beings whom they serve.

Keywords: belief, East Timor, faith, material artifacts, nation-state,

reflexivity, Timor-Leste, uma lulik

The editors of the present collection announce that although they do not antici-
pate laying the concept of belief finally to rest, “the task of examining and
questioning” many of the uses of the term continues to be important. On bal-
ance, as I think a reading of these articles indicates, the more skeptical note in
this announcement strikes the more resounding chord, although one contribu-
tor, Andrew Buckser, draws upon the notion of belief as a way of explaining
the changing place of the Jewish community in Copenhagen with an assurance
that would suggest that any obituary of the word is premature. Certainly,
therefore, a reappraisal of this term’s usefulness is timely. In this essay I shall
reflect upon a number of observations made by my fellow contributors to this
issue in light of my own ethnographic work in East Timor, more particularly as
they relate to a material artifact that embodies not only a multivocal and even
opposing set of connotations but also substantiates a cautionary observation
that recurs throughout this collection. I refer to the proposition that before we

Social Analysis, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2008, 166–180 © Berghahn Journals
doi:10.3167/sa.2008.520110
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 167

conclude that any given ritual ‘expresses’ or ‘represents’ any particular ‘belief’,
we need to make quite certain that such is, in fact, the case. As Jon and Hildi
Mitchell suggest, a performative action—or, as we might put it, ritual action—
may even be thought of as constituting the ‘belief’ itself: “We argue that the
reverence with which these Catholic communicants act does not demonstrate
an inner orientation to the host in Communion—a ‘belief in’ its capacity for
salvation—but actively constitutes it. Their performance of deference is defer-
ence, not a representation of it. They are not ‘acting out’ belief, but performing
it.” To this observation I would add ‘ritual object’, by which I mean a material
artifact that is implicated in the meaning of a ritual.
The specific object of my inquiry is a certain ritual artifact—the uma lulik
(sacred house, ritual house, or cult house)1—found throughout East Timor, half
an island situated at the far eastern end of the Southeast Asian Archipelago. The
uma lulik is a material structure that sheds light on some of the different perspec-
tives on the term ‘belief’ argued for in this anthology by, among others, Buckser,
the Mitchells, and the editors. In identifying four relatively isolable categories of
Timorese ‘believer’ and ‘non-believer’, I also attempt to substantiate recent work
in the field of material culture, the findings of which suggest that artifacts may not
be quite such passive recipients of values invested in them by their creators as, I
imagine, most anthropologists think, but may in fact be apprehended as objects
engaged in continuous dialectic relationships with the human beings they serve.
One proponent of this perspective is Marcel Vellinga (2004) whose Consti-
tuting Unity and Difference: Vernacular Architecture in a Minangkabau Village
is about the mutual influence of the values of the Minangkabau, a population
residing on the island of Sumatra in western Indonesia, and their houses.
Vellinga’s focal argument (ibid.: 6) is that “societies do not form entities that
exist apart from and prior to their expression or reflection in material culture,
but are created in a process in which people give meaning to and are in turn
affected by their material surroundings. Therefore, material culture is not so
much a passive reflection of society, but is instead actively, and indeed fun-
damentally, involved in its constitution.” Developing this intriguing proposi-
tion, Vellinga examines the way that the Minangkabau house functions as
an active agency in the constitution of social groups, thereby influencing the
way that people self-identify and identify others. The process through which
this is accomplished may also be observed in contemporary East Timor, for
whose population symbols of national integration are scant. The weakness
of a sense of national unity is among those factors that are threatening the
very integrity of this new nation-state. By contrast, local communities enjoy a
sense of solidarity that has enriched their respective cultures ever since their
ancestors established them. A well-remarked characteristic of societies in the
archipelago is that the term by which their language denotes the dwelling place
also denotes the social group associated with it. Vellinga is witness to this fea-
ture among the Minangkabau, and his emphasis upon the integrated character
of the relationship between society and its material artifact leads him to lay
greater emphasis upon the material artifact itself rather than upon the social
unit owning it, which he refers to as a ‘social house’. His argument—that the
168 | David Hicks

house needs to be viewed not as a passive recipient of socio-cultural values

but as an interactive agent with the social group involved with it—is intriguing
enough to deserve testing in the context of the ethnography of other societies in
the archipelago, and the present study intends to do so for one such society.
In commencing his discussion of Zande witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard (1937:
21), in what I think is generally considered the first exemplary ethnographic
study of ‘belief’ by an ethnographer, forthrightly declares that “Azande believe
that some people are witches and can injure them in virtue of an inherent qual-
ity.” Thereafter, this initial reliance on the concept ‘belief’ carries his narrative
through more than 550 pages as the author describes how Zande notions in
witchcraft are one constituent of a fairly coherent intellectual system incorpo-
rating related notions about witch doctors, oracles, and magic. Unlike his later
analysis of Nuer ‘belief’ in kwoth,2 Evans-Pritchard does not attempt to assess
the suitability of applying the term ‘belief’ to the Azande notions of witchcraft,
oracles, and magic. However, he does consider what he takes to be the psycho-
logical accompaniments of witchcraft accusations, initiation into the practice
of witch doctor, and attitudes toward the different categories of oracle. He also
looks at the singular position of the prince’s deputy who, of all individuals in a
local community, finds himself placed in an advantaged position to know that
of two poison oracles one has done what poison oracles ‘cannot’ do—namely,
inevitably contradict one another. Questions of belief, skepticism, and doubt
therefore have something of a pedigree in the history of social anthropology
and, as the present anthology demonstrates, continue to stimulate the assess-
ment and re-examination of ethnographic data.
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer provides us with an opportunity for reflect-
ing upon the implications attending our conventional usages of the categories
‘belief’ and ‘faith’. One point of interest I find in her discussion of shamanism
in Siberia lies in the manner in which she conceives faith as constituting a prag-
matic response to psychological need. After having remarked that “strong faith
and its accompanying rituals are supposed to [emphasis added] salve” spiritual
uncertainty, she goes on to characterize spirituality as having “failed to deliver
[emphasis added] hoped-for individual calm and national-cultural confidence.”
This conception of faith, besides privileging its pragmatic character, assumes
a high degree of self-awareness and even self-contrivance on the part of the
faithful individual. Here I would argue in counterpoint that one essential com-
ponent of that psychological disposition we designate by the term ‘faith’ is its
very lack of self-conscious contrivance by those who appear to display it and
who might accordingly be said to possess it. An individual can no more create
faith in respect of some object than, by an act of volition, consciously choose to
fall in love. As with faith, so with belief. As part of his recent demolition of the
various arguments for ‘believing’—or at least declaring such a belief—in the
existence of God, Richard Dawkins (2006: 130) dismisses Pascal’s celebrated
Wager in the following terms: “Believing is not something you can decide to do
as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of
will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed,
and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 169

them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don’t. Pascal’s Wager
could only ever be an argument for feigning [italics in original] belief in God.
And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient
kind or he’d see through the deception.” Rodney Needham (1972: 86), too,
makes the same point when he remarks: “But at least it is sure that no readily
discriminable act of the will can be assumed as a criterion of belief.”
The absence of volition is a defining component of anything we might care
to label ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. One may, of course, wish to marshal one’s thoughts,
harness one’s emotions, or arrange one’s disposition, in a deliberate attempt to
acquire this quality. But faith and belief are their own agencies. They cannot be
conjured up and are more often than not sufficiently possessed of their own inde-
pendence so as to resist the vicissitudes of life that from time to time threaten
to undermine them. One recalls Tylor’s list of reasons why believers in the effi-
cacy of magic hold on to their convictions regardless of daily experiences that
betray them and, to a non-believer, would provide justification for refutation.3
When, therefore, we learn that Balzer’s Sakha friend began (in childhood) with a
“strong faith,” then apparently lost it as a consequence of the Soviet school sys-
tem, then had it “cautiously revived,” then found it “seriously harmed” when he
experienced unpleasant occurrences of pretty much the sort that are an unavoid-
able part of life, one wonders whether the term ‘faith’ is not, after all, inapt in
this case. Whatever the conceptual problems associated with the term ‘belief’, I
would suggest that its use is more appropriate in such a context as this than the
word ‘faith’, which was so clearly lacking in the Sakha friend.
The interplay between faith, which I take to be more inclined to the emo-
tional or sentimental aspect of experience, and belief, which appeals rather
more to the intellect, is well brought out in Omri Elisha’s evocation of Luther
and Calvin: “[W]e cannot will ourselves to be totally faithful” (cf. Balzer, this
issue). The specific contents of belief serve that state of being in which Christ
‘dwells’ within a faithful believer. In this light it would be interesting to know
more about what Elisha means by the way in which “[f]aith requires a con-
scious decision on the part of the believer” and how he thinks believers are
able to control the degree to which they allow Christ to dwell within them.
The implication here would seem to be at odds with the general thrust of his
argument, which I take as assigning faith hegemony over the intellect. Is he
perhaps referring to a willingness on the part of a religious adherent to suspend
his or her critical judgment? Or perhaps the believer opening himself or herself
to emotional suggestions emanating from fellow believers who have already
undergone a renewal of belief? (One is reminded here of Durkheim’s recourse
to collective psychology in postulating the origins of religion.) Or perhaps the
capacity of a believer to organize his or her attitudes and behavior so as to
most effectively encourage the onset of a renewal?
Elisha’ essay goes to the root of a preoccupation of our nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century ancestors, namely, the nature and origins of religion. In inquiring
into the nature of religion and seeking to elicit its origins, the earlier generations
of English anthropologists—Tylor, Frazer, Marret, Lang, Malinowski—inclined
toward the premise that religious beliefs derive their origins from one of two
170 | David Hicks

sources, which they seem to have considered irreconcilable. These were the
intellect and the emotions, which Evans-Pritchard would later respectively label
the ‘intellectual theory’ and the ‘emotional theory’. Beliefs were considered to be
induced by either thought or feeling, and in their estimation of what constituted
or led to religion, the adherents of these theories regarded each as self-contained.
As a way of seeking new understanding of religion, therefore, any attempt to
reconcile both approaches and search for common ground between belief and
feeling was implicitly dismissed. So when a third theory entered the spotlight, it
was hardly surprising that its inspiration emerged not from its proponents—Rob-
ertson Smith and Durkheim—discovering an alternative way of interpreting
belief in the realm of individual consciousness, but by finding it located in a third
source, society. This, of course, is Evans-Prichard’s ‘sociological theory’. Draw-
ing on material from biblical discussions involving his evangelical informants,
Elisha, while casting the distinction between the intellectual and the emotional
aspects of religious convictions into relief, nevertheless detects common com-
ponents in each and is thus enabled to detect possibilities for a convergence, or
perhaps an overlap, of the intellectual and the emotional—an area that lies at
least partly, so it would seem, in the domain of ‘faith’. Members of the group he
was involved with did indeed contend that their goal was to internalize a deeper
‘heart knowledge’ of God’s purpose for their individual and collective lives
rather than simply accumulating cognitive knowledge of the Word of God. But at
the same time, he adds, they were also willing—even eager, it would seem—to
engage in detailed hermeneutical analysis of the Scriptures. The lessons to be
drawn from his data, accordingly, are that by including within itself elements of
both belief and emotion, the notion of ‘faith’ can ‘mediate’, as it were, between
them. Regarded in this light, his article suggests another way of apprehending
things religious—including, of course, the category ‘belief’ itself.
As a neophyte fieldworker, I began my research with the intention of investi-
gating local ‘religion’ among the Tetum-speaking peoples of Viqueque sub-district
in what was then known as Portuguese Timor.4 Accordingly, I began questioning
members of the community as to their beliefs regarding gods, spirits, ghosts,
life after death, and other stock topics appropriate to my interests. I had read
reports by observers of Timorese ethnography of ‘beliefs’ in mate bein (ancestral
ghosts), klamar mate (dead souls), karau klamar (buffalo souls), rai na’in (lords
of the earth), and maromak (god). These ‘beliefs’ were duly confirmed, with the
result that I was able to satisfy myself that the local villagers did in fact ‘believe’
in these notions. However, beyond replying to questions in such a way as to
affirm that their collective representations allowed for these and other immate-
rial presences, I found that my informants could add little by way of exegetical
commentary beyond citing myths, legends, folk tales, and the like to justify the
distinctive properties that they attributed to these different spiritual entities.5
Incorporated in my expectations was the assumption that in the local cosmol-
ogy, “meanings,” as Galina Lindquist puts it, “are understood to be shared by
stemming from some existing doctrine, dogma, or canon, which, even if people
themselves are unable to formulate it, is sought after as a source of meaning by
the anthropologist.” But whereas my fieldwork began with the anticipation that
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 171

I would be able to discern a coherent set of ‘beliefs’ that the population as a

whole could acknowledge as their cosmology, it gradually became obvious that
nothing akin to a theology or set of dogmas existed. I discovered that individual
informants improvised answers in an ad hoc manner apparently with no obvious
concern that they might be purveying some heresy. Only later, after I had begun
to assimilate Needham’s doubts about the term ‘belief’ itself, did I begin to see
its limitations in the context of Timorese cultures, even though, as it happens,
a term does exist in the Tetum language that approximates the English word
‘belief’. This is the word fiar, which the Standard Tetum-English Dictionary (Hull
2002: 90) glosses as “to believe; faith; religion; tau fiar hela=to have faith in, to
trust.” However, I cannot recall having ever heard anyone use the term during
that first period of fieldwork; nor have I since.
Since participants in most rituals generally account for their behavior or the
significance of ritual artifacts in the simplest of terms—rather as though they
are merely following conventions unreflectively—one could cast their rituals
as mere performative dramas and the artifacts as conveying little meaning
to the actors. While I think such may be the case with some rituals and arti-
facts, there are others about which informants are able to offer more elaborate
exegesis. Furthermore, because one may correlate the various connotations
informants cite with attributes of personal sociology such as education, social
aspiration, and political ambition, these particular rituals and artifacts may
be apprehended as possessing the quality of multivocality. As a corollary, the
array of connotations with which informants variously credit them may be
seen as providing participants in ritual with the opportunity of reflecting about
the alternative connotations ascribed by others to the actions and objects that
engage their common interests. Whether individuals actually reflect upon these
alternative meanings is another matter, of course (see below), but at least they
have the possibility of encountering alternative ‘beliefs’ that might stimulate
reflection. In other words, they stimulate reflexivity, a notion that has gained
some currency in recent work in social anthropology as a tool for putting ritual,
‘belief’, and ‘faith’ under a fresh lens (see Gable 2002; Højbjerg 2002; House-
man 2002; Lewis 2002; Sangren 2007; Severi 2002; Whitehouse 2002). The
usefulness of this analytical concept in the context of Timorese collective repre-
sentations, I shall argue, is displayed to instructive effect in the most imposing
of all Timorese material artifacts, the uma lulik.
Even prior to the Indonesian invasion in 1975, individuals were aware that
there were alternatives to their own interpretation of life. The indigenous cos-
mology included a fertility ritual (Hicks 1996) and oral narratives involving the
motif of a fishing hook (Hicks 2007b) that afforded alternative views of the rela-
tionship between spirits and human beings. And there was, of course, the influ-
ence of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, in the 1960s none of my Timorese
informants—not even professed members of the Church—expressed doubts as
to the ‘existence’ (for want of a more convenient term) of the aforementioned
spirits or expressed what might be cast as ‘uncertainties’ about the efficacy of
ancestor-sanctioned rituals. Some people were less reliant upon certain rituals
than other ones, and some individuals made use of them more than others, but
172 | David Hicks

I discovered no one who questioned their validity. Avowed Catholics, while

respecting the missionary fathers, would yet seek counsel from their village
shamans (matan do’ok). They might attend Mass yet still give ritual offer-
ings to ‘lords of the earth’—nature spirits linked with specific localities in the
countryside (entities akin to Lindquist’s eeler)—without apparently feeling the
least concern about intellectual contradiction or about how priests might inter-
pret their conduct. Such attitudes somewhat resemble those of the Sukuma
as described by Koen Stroeken: “Rather than being ignored, the confrontation
[i.e., between different epistemological systems] seems to be overcome by
Sukuma pluralists in what could be called a disjunctive capacity—that of hav-
ing opposite views co-exist … Someone else’s disbelief presents no threat.”
Today, after having undergone decades of intense indoctrination in ‘mod-
ernization’ wrought successively by Indonesia, the United Nations, and sundry
international agencies, the array of alternatives has increased for the Timorese.
This expansion of options is exemplified in the uma lulik, whose ritually charged
construction is characterized differentially by individuals in accordance with
their different social backgrounds. One especially marked distinction in exegesis
is between villagers and educated residents of the capital, Dili. This difference is
directly related to the social changes that have transformed the capital, where the
influences of ‘modernization’ are particularly powerful. This is due partly to a
massive rise in the number of those receiving a secondary and university educa-
tion and partly to the huge influx into the country of foreigners, United Nations
and NGO personnel, and workers with such international agencies as USAID. One
consequence of these developments is that East Timor presently has a significant
population of educated persons who are employed as administrators, managers,
and teachers in a range of organizations that place Western values at a premium.
Some Timorese employees have thoroughly absorbed and are committed to enact-
ing these values, even though they are at variance with ancestral teachings. The
construction of uma lulik exemplifies these contrasts in values between the mod-
ern and the traditional and the nation’s capital and its hinterland.
East Timor has a variety of house architectures, whose varying styles are
a function of local topography and ethnic tradition (Cinatti and de Almeida
1987). Some houses are raised on piles, others squat flat upon the ground;
some are tall, others long; some are circular, others rectangular. Uma lulik,
however, although occasionally displaying some local idiosyncrasies, do not
exhibit the same degree of variation. Even in communities where houses have
floors that are constructed flush with the ground, such as in villages inhabited
by speakers of the Mambai language, piles elevate the uma lulik above the
ground, and access to their interior is secured by small bamboo ladders. All
are covered by thatched roofs, and windows are normally lacking, with the
result that the interior is very dark. The timber from which the building mate-
rial comes depends upon the species of trees that happen to grow locally. If
sufficient room exists within a cluster of family houses (knua)—the traditional
settlement arrangement throughout much of the country—uma lulik usually
occupy their own space and are set apart from other buildings. Inside there is
usually only a single room, which is bare of furniture but with several woven
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 173

mats covering the floor. Sacred houses sometimes have a loft, and all have
hearths (uma matan) similar to those found in family houses—a square tray
within which rest three rounded stones and between which flames are kindled.
Utensils for cooking, most conspicuously a large pot blackened by charcoal,
stand either on the triad of stones or in the tray, which seems always to be cov-
ered in ash, the consequence of countless ritual meals. And three or so husks
from the most recent first harvest of maize and rice are placed in the roof.
Heirlooms (sasan lulik)6 owned by the family or descent group that dedi-
cated the building to its ancestral ghosts lie on shelves or are affixed to the
higher sections of the walls. Most frequently occurring are masculine objects
that include ceremonial swords (surik), pectoral disks (belak), and half-moon
ornaments for the head (caibowki), and feminine objects that include neck-
laces (morteen), bracelets (keke), and cloth (tais). The provenance of those
artifacts more enriched than their companions with ritually or socially loaded
significance is often described in myths that explain the circumstances in which
they came into the possession of the ancestors and their living kin. Distinctive
esteem is lavished on artifacts that date back to the earlier days of Portuguese
colonization. A family’s devotion to Lusitanian values would be recognized by
the military authorities, who would confer on the head of the favored family a
military title, for example, lieutenant-colonel, or some such mark of approval,
enshrined in a document that would form a specially treasured item within the
cache of relics. If a family had managed to secure a Portuguese flag, or even a
fragment of one, this object, too, would be a prized relic of the past.
These sacred treasures and the house itself are watched over by a guardian,
usually an old woman (ferik), rather than an old man (katuas), because the
female sex is regarded as being closer to the world of the ancestors. This guard-
ian, who usually lives in a house adjacent to the uma lulik, is responsible for
cleaning the interior and otherwise making sure that the house is maintained in
a condition acceptable to the ancestral ghosts of the family or descent group to
whom it is dedicated. Although the guardian’s gender connotes the closer asso-
ciation females have with the unseen world, the display of masculine artifacts
does intimate that the building is of a dual gender character, suggesting that mas-
culine values and female values, although in opposition, also complement each
other. Further indication of this dualism is shown in the gender symbolism of
the doors and the interior. Some uma lulik have a pair of doors, one door (at the
eastern side of the building) used by males and one door (at the western side)
used by females, while within the interior each sex owns its own physical space.
Sometimes one finds a third door, which is for the use of more distant relatives.
In one Mambai uma lulik I entered, the rectangular frame enclosing the
hearth was placed off-center to the room, rather than near the back, and in
the half of the room nearest the male entrance. There was a smooth, darkened
post, roughly six inches in diameter, that appeared to form part of the house
structure, and, if I recall correctly, it was about halfway along the southern side
of the room. Standing perpendicular at its foot was a stone a little over a foot in
height and of a dark color. Conjoined, they constitute, so an informant told me,
a ‘cultural symbol’—I think of the culture of the Mambai-speaking peoples. He
174 | David Hicks

referred to the pillar as the hun (base, lower part, beginning, origins) and the
stone as the fatuk (stone), that is, the hun ho fatuk (the base and the stone).
On either side of this pillar, right at the top, were a small pair of buffalo’s
horns, a small pair of goat’s horns, and jaw bones belonging to about three or
four pigs, souvenirs of sacrifices offered to the ancestors at rituals carried out
earlier. Adjacent to the foot of the pillar were a number of round and woven
baskets, one with a cover and containing betel leaves, areca nuts, and lime for
betel-chewing. The others, evidently for the same purpose, were empty.
Uma lulik, however, is a term that refers to more than simply a material
artifact. The term also connotes a social abstraction—a descent group or fam-
ily—that is identified with it. The descent group might be of the highest order
found on Timor, what in social anthropology would usually be referred to as
a ‘clan’, or a segment of a clan. Whatever the sociological provenance associ-
ated with the group, however, these edifices are reliquaries for the heirlooms
of long-deceased ancestors. They are, furthermore, sites for ritual activity and
the center of spiritual devotion for those who identify themselves with them—a
convergence of ideas from the realms of kinship relationships and rituals, past
and present, that impart a moral valence to the artifact. The tendency to conjoin
material objects and social abstractions recurs in an alternative designation for
‘clan’, that is, ahi matan, in which ahi=fire; matan=eye, center, source. Galina
Lindquist, in her discussion of the family ovaa, describes a cult center that in
some ways resembles uma lulik, although on Timor these centers are substantial
buildings rather than shrines, and the spiritual entities involved are the ghosts
of the ancestors instead of spirits associated with certain locations, whose coun-
terparts on Timor would be the aforementioned ‘lords of the earth’.
In a manner somewhat similar to the ovaa, the uma lulik functions as an icon
of group identity. In its traditional form, its origins lie with the original ances-
tors who initially established themselves on the land on which their sacred
house was eventually built. Although possessed of a polysemic character in
which the cult of spirits plays only a part (albeit the major part), Catholic mis-
sionaries ignored its family and kinship connotations in favor of regarding these
buildings solely as embodiments of paganism and thus as impediments to their
attempts at proselytization. Therefore, after the Portuguese returned to Timor
in 1945 following the defeat of the Japanese army, the first order of the day as
the newly restored ministry began its work of religious conversion was to incite
families to obliterate the material symbols—uma lulik, shrines, altars, and so
on—of their pagan past. These were very much in evidence at that time, even
though missionary work had begun as early as the sixteenth century. However,
the island’s rugged terrain, combined with the colonial administration’s fitful
attention to building sustainable roads and solid bridges and its indifference
toward maintaining what it built, meant that by 1973, the number of Timorese
individuals who might be counted as Catholics was only 196,570 out of a total
population of 659,102 (Dunn 2003: 40).7 To what degree those reckoned in this
count could be regarded as committed Christians is a different matter. Never-
theless, some persons who had been converted were willing to demonstrate
publicly to the local clergy—as well as for the benefit of their fellows—their
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 175

newfound loyalty to the Church. The most flamboyant way they had of so
doing was by dismantling or burning their family’s uma lulik and destroying
their sacred heirlooms. As well as severing bonds with their ancestors, such
destruction by members of a family also eradicated their entire history and in
effect constituted a statement, not only that generations of the family’s fore-
bears were misguided in following the ways of the ancestors, but also that the
family concerned lacked any history that could be located in the world that the
ghostly ancestors once inhabited. Getting rid of the sacred houses also served
another purpose for the missionary priests. Although the building and its heir-
looms were tangible representations of lulik, a term that the priesthood even
today (incorrectly) translates as ‘indigenous pagan religion’, the annihilation
of the uma lulik also meant that the rituals carried out there would be either
abandoned or physically displaced to other, less visibly prominent locations
and so constitute less of an affront to the Church.
Elsewhere (Hicks 2004) I have given accounts of Tetum rituals, so elaborat-
ing upon them here would be redundant. But I do need to remark that ancestral
ghosts are looked upon as a source of fertility and life (cf. Lindquist, this issue).
Timorese gain access to these practical desirables through the agency of ancestors
with whom they maintain a mutually satisfying relationship that is defined and
accomplished by the performance of rituals whose locational locus classicus is the
uma lulik. As will be understood from what has already been noted, this building
is the center for human and spirit interaction, and the ancestral heirlooms provide
the index of the reciprocity that binds both parties together and constitutes the
ideal context for exchanging what Arthur Maurice Hocart (1954: 19) has referred
to as the “necessaries of life.” In this reciprocal system, ancestral ghosts receive
offerings of betel chew, palm wine, and pieces of chicken, while human beings
receive the gifts of fertility and life. These ritual houses were not only flagrant
representations of ‘pagan worship’ in the eyes of the missionary priests; they were
also places that gave shelter to traditional ritual practitioners whose activities
challenged the ritual hegemony that the clergy demanded as the Church’s due.
Local priests (dato lulik or makair lulik), shamans, and the old women who serve
as guardians of these buildings supplied an assortment of ritual practitioners that
threatened the ritual hegemony desired by the clergy. Given the contested nature
of the uma lulik, then, it was hardly surprising that in 1966–1967 all informants
with whom I raised the issue, even those with whom I had established a working
rapport, denied any knowledge of ritual houses in their area.
Forty years later, in the same village, a different tale was in the making. Some
villagers, celebrating their past, proudly showed me the skeleton structure of an
uma lulik they were in the process of constructing, while other villagers were pre-
occupied with commemorations more attuned to the future. Local women were
weaving cloth, preparing food, and assembling the paraphernalia for a feast that
was being held to signal the ordination into the Catholic priesthood of the first
local man to earn this distinction. No contradiction was apparently felt to mar the
anticipatory pleasure of attending both enterprises in a community of which some
members were avowed Catholics (a problematic identity, however), while others
followed the ways of the ancestors. The tolerance of plurality that Koen Stroeken
176 | David Hicks

discerned among the Sakuma for different epistemological systems also defined
the plurality I found in this village, where, as far as I was in a position to judge,
neither category of adherent seemed to be at all disquieted by what might appear
to an outsider to be a set of protocols in competition. Nevertheless, the parallel is
not entirely exact, for although Stroeken’s characterization of Sakuma response
to a plurality of epistemological possibilities as one of easygoing acceptance and
curiosity would apply in Timor, his remark, “No Sakuma I worked with showed
irritation when I claimed that ancestral spirits do not exist or that magic does not
work,” would surely not. Timorese peasants (even avowed Catholics) would see
such skeptical comments as these to be an attack upon their revered ancestors.
And Catholics, no matter how much they retained bonds with their ancestors,
would very much resent having their publicly declared commitment to the new
order treated so dismissively.
The construction I witnessed of this particular uma lulik is, however, merely
a local manifestation of a phenomenon currently occupying the attention of vil-
lagers in almost every district of East Timor. In part, it may be accounted for by
their experience during the 24 years (1975–1999) of the Indonesian occupation,
a time when their new masters continued the Catholic missionaries’ policy of
destroying ritual houses. The Indonesian administration’s purpose in doing so
was not quite the same as that of the clergy. Certainly, there was the determi-
nation to eradicate any form of ‘belief’ that did not fit into the government’s
official definition of religion. But because the houses were regarded as symbols
of Timorese culture, they were seen more as a threat to the government’s policy
of imposing a sense of Indonesian nationality upon the population. Since East
Timor gained independence on 20 May 2002 there has been a spectacular renais-
sance of traditional mores, and this resurgence of local cultures has included the
building or rebuilding of this most spectacular index of tradition. Some uma
lulik are built to fulfill the ritual needs of households, others in satisfaction of
the ritual needs of descent groups; but for both social units they serve as spiri-
tual centers as well as repositories for ancestral ghosts. Whatever their social
and spiritual purposes, though, they necessitate a massive transfer of human
energy and material resources from potential investments and activities that
many modern-minded Timorese and agency workers believe would be consider-
ably more useful for the needs of villagers and a new nation-state mired in pov-
erty than the erection of impractical edifices. Education and the improvement of
local roads are among two palpable alternatives they typically mention.
Indeed, the construction of uma lulik not only calls for the raw muscle of up
to 100 men and women for weeks on end, but also requires the attentions of
skilled craftsmen, who devise the building’s architectural form, as well as input
from local ritual specialists, whose duty it is to ensure that form and function
correspond to ancestral-sanctioned fiat. In erecting an uma lulik, traditionally
oriented families are acknowledging the authority that their ancestors command
and are making a public statement of their own special and distinctive history,
one that distinguishes them from other families in their neighborhood. In addi-
tion, the huge amount of labor involved in building such a massive edifice pro-
claims that the house and its diverse associations is one of the central driving
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 177

forces in their lives. In this way, the fruit of these labors defiantly reaffirms
the commitment of descent groups and families to a past when alternatives to
ancestral authority were few, in contrast to the present time when, with villag-
ers well aware of the skeptical attitudes of their more educated fellows toward
all things lulik and increasingly familiar with the diversity of values they learn
from their encounters with agents of NGOs, they have come to understand that
there exist alternatives to traditional ‘beliefs’ whose premises may differ radi-
cally from those bequeathed to them by their ancestors.
A certain similarity between the multivocal meaning the Timorese have
come to invest in their uma lulik and their various attributions of ‘belief’ and
‘non-belief’ seems evident among Trinidadians to whom Stephen Glazier attri-
butes a plurality of attitudes concerning the powers of the Orisa. In East Timor,
however, the agency for provoking a plurality of attitudes is the uma lulik,
which has assimilated, and continues to assimilate, four fairly isolable con-
notations that have turned it into a polysemic hub in which each connotation
has a distinct social constituency for which the artifact serves as both a source
of knowledge and an object of knowledge.

1. For non-literate residents of local peasant communities, the meaning

of the sacred house is ‘beyond belief’ in that they take the existential
reality of the ancestral ghosts for granted. The villagers strive mightily
to construct the artifact, maintain it in a condition that does justice to
the ancestors, safeguard its sacred contents, and perform the uma lulik
rituals without any apparent reflective musings about the alternative per-
spectives that are available—as they well know—for contemplation.
2. Some non-literate peasants and members of the educated class have appar-
ently, after some reflection, come to terms—although perhaps to different
degrees—with the possibility that the ghosts may, after all, be mere figments
of the imagination. My impression is that some non-literate individuals can-
not not make up their minds whether to declare ancestral ghosts a factor of
experience or to deny their existence, and that in their case ‘belief’ might
well be an appropriate term by which to describe their mental attitudes. One
frequently hears of a wife who has been trying to become pregnant for some
time, but to no avail. Consulting a local shaman, she is told that her ances-
tral ghosts or those of her husband are withholding their power to confer
fecundity because the couple’s human kin have failed to maintain their uma
lulik in a suitable condition or have neglected to perform the rituals of that
building. The woman persuades her relatives to respond to the ancestors’
displeasure, and in accordance with whether she conceives (sooner or later)
or fails to do so, the woman either expresses a ‘belief’ in the authority of the
ancestors or else judges them to have outlived their usefulness.
3. Ambitious, educated Timorese, or sometimes uneducated villagers, may find
it socially or politically advantageous to identify themselves with their local
uma lulik. These individuals, although lacking conviction about the reality of
the ghosts, will usually lend a hand or contribute food or money for the con-
struction of a family or community ritual house, and government officers or
178 | David Hicks

Timorese engaged as employees in agencies may find it expedient to ‘touch

base’ with their distant village kin by periodically visiting the uma lulik and
laying a claim on them. Even clergy may find reasons to become involved
in uma lulik—usually in a discreet role—on the grounds that bonding with
their kin in the local sacred context might sometimes be permitted to out-
weigh loyalty to their Church. A case in point comes from a Mambai hamlet
just outside Maubisse, in the district of Ainaro, where a priest regularly par-
ticipates in his community’s sacred house rituals, although I was told that he
diplomatically sheds his clerical garb as he joins fellow celebrants.
4. Certain educated elite who disparage the reconstruction of these houses
and have no use for the meanings they convey to their fellow Timorese
seem quite unreflective toward uma lulik, rather like those in the first cat-
egory. The difference, of course, is that their terms of reference are nega-
tive, since for them the uma lulik is an symbol of cultural backwardness
and a contributor to the economic wasteland that is East Timor today.

Regardless of its significance to particular categories of Timorese, once in

existence this multivocal artifact has shaped the values of those for whom it is
significant, whether as a glorious icon to be honored or a wasteful folly to be
condemned. Perhaps the most striking example of this is the contribution that
the uma lulik is making to modern Timorese collective representatives in the
proposal—emanating from the educated class, no less—that a national uma
lulik be constructed. Their rationale is that such a building would assist the
cause of national unity by serving as a symbol around which the population
might rally and thereby act as a counterweight to a variety of centrifugal social,
political, and economic forces that have raised doubts about the capacity of
East Timor to survive as a nation-state (cf. Hicks 2007a).8 That this material
artifact is seen by some of the Timorese educated class as a potential prop for
socio-political values essential for the viability of East Timor as a nation-state
lends substantial evidence in support of Vellinga’s (2004) thesis that, once
brought into play, material artifacts can reconstitute a society’s values.
Uma lulik, as we have seen, are material symbols of descent groups and
domestic units, and insofar as they stand for the distinctiveness of these social
groups, they may be apprehended as a force for disjunction in the wider society.
Yet we observe that in contemporary East Timor, this index of local disjunction
is being proposed as a conjoining force for Timorese of every local community,
an indication, I think, that Vellinga’s argument for the power of an artifact to
bring about (an anticipated) alteration in socio-political consciousness is cogent.
The thousands of such buildings presently being constructed all over the coun-
try attest to the force that uma lulik exert on instilling and expressing a sense of
local communal identity in a traditional society. If this initiative comes to pass
and furthers the conjunction of thousands of disparate communities scattered
around the country, it may extend or perhaps even transfer that sense of social
solidarity, now focused on the local community, to an abstraction of vastly
greater proportions and strengthen a feeling of coherence in the wider commu-
nity that is sorely needed if the nation-state of East Timor is to be viable.
 Afterword: Glimpses of Alternatives | 179

Acknowledgments

This essay is the product of six research visits made to East Timor, the most recent
being in 2007. My original research in 1966–1967 was funded by the London Com-
mittee of the London-Cornell Project for East and South East Asian Studies, which
was supported jointly by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Nuffield
Foundation. Subsequent field research was funded by the American Philosophical
Society and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.

David Hicks is Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University and Life Member
of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. He holds Doctor of Philosophy Degrees from
the University of Oxford and the University of London. His scholarly specializations are
in kinship, ritual, oral literature, politics, and Southeast Asia. He has carried out field
research in East Timor and in Flores. His books include Structural Analysis in Anthro-
pology (1978), A Maternal Religion (1984), Kinship and Religion in Eastern Indonesia
(1990), Ritual and Belief: Readings in the Anthropology of Religion (2002), and Tetum
Ghosts and Kin (2004). His papers have appeared in the American Anthropologist,
The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en
Volkenkunde, Oceania, and Sociologus, as well as in a number of anthologies.

Notes

1. Uma=building, house, descent group; lulik=sacred, set apart, prohibited. Another term
by which the building is denoted is uma lisan (lisan=ceremony, usage, custom).
2. “There is in any case, I think, no word in the Nuer language which could stand for ‘I
believe’” (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 9).
3. It might be of interest to readers to learn that, according to Evans-Pritchard, his field-
work among the Azande was inspired by a desire to test Edward Tylor’s well-known list
of reasons for why human beings continue to believe in magic even though it does not
work (personal communication, 1962).
4. Portuguese Timor is now referred to as East Timor or Timor-Leste.
5. Although not, if I recall correctly, specifically provided in response to a query regarding
spirits, souls, or ghosts, one Timorese (of the Makassai-speaking population) answered
a question I put to him by presenting me with a book—Gentio de Timor—in which the
author, Armando Pinto Correia (1935), a Portuguese former administrator, had compiled
summaries of indigenous myths and legends.
6. Sasan lulik= sacred things, objects, possessions, belongings.
7. Some discrepancy, it needs to be noted, occurs among the several estimates given for the
size of the Catholic population. The syncretic character of Catholicism should also be
kept in mind when attempts are made to evaluate the extent to which the missionaries
have succeeded in instilling Church creeds into those they have claimed for the fold.
8. I first heard about the proposal for a national uma lulik from a contributor to the panel
on East Timor at the meetings of the European Association for South-East Asian Studies
in Naples, Italy, on 13–14 September 2007. Subsequently, I learned that it is receiving
a rather wide circulation in Timorese circles as a way of countering the destabilizing
influence on national cohesion brought about by physical violence to which the new
nation-state is prone (Trindade and Castro 2007).
180 | David Hicks

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