The Co-presence of Ancestors and Their Reburials among the Fataluku (Timor-Leste)

The centrality in Timorese life of the presence of ancestors and deceased relatives has long been noted in the ethnographic literature. In monographs based on fieldwork carried out in the 1960s and early 1970s, David Hicks and Elizabeth Traube argued that mortuary ceremonies occupy a central role in the life of both Tetum- and Mambaispeaking people.Shepard Forman, who spent long periods in the 1970s among the Makassae, starts his article on the “Spirits of the Makassae” testifying that, when he began his fieldwork, he obsessively collected genealogies of living people, “yet the dead were all around us, buried in prominent gravesites at the ancestral hearths and invoked as the spirit causes of most contretemps.” Forman also underlines that his field assistant often teased him “with allusions to the link between spirits and his living kinsmen.”