Unachieved Syncretism
19
Our case study will be provided by that suku 2 in which I carried out
fieldwork in 1966-1967 3 . This was Caraubalo (‘the suku of the eight buf
faloes’) 4 , and in the account which follows I shall provide as comprehensive
a facsimile of its internal character as possible. But first we must know some
thing of its geographical placing, historical background, and administrative
setting.
1. Historical Background
What once was Portuguese Timor occupied the northeastern half of the
island of Timor, which is the largest of the Lesser Sunda Islands and is skewed
in a northeast-southwest direction (Fig. 1). The Portuguese part consisted of
two principal territories which, together with the islands of Atauro and Jaco,
amounted to 18,989 km. 2 . The first was a small enclave, Oe-Cussi, located
on the north coast of western Timor. The second, much larger, took up the
entire eastern half of the island. The frontier between Portuguese Timor and
Indonesian Timor (14,933 km. 2 ) was formed by an imaginary line drawn be
tween the estuary of the River Biku, on the north coast, and the River
Talas estuary, on the south coast. In its middle portion the frontier looped
2 The term suku is ubiquitous in the East Indies, where its referents denote varied
types of social grouping, ranging from ‘tribe’ to ‘clan’. In some parts of eastern Timor,
and probably in most sukus inhabited by Tetum speakers, the term fukun also applies
to the socio-political unit denoted by this term. Suku and fuku(n) are not synonyms,
however. Fukun also includes the referent ‘node’, as on a length of bamboo, and con
veys the notion of connection between two things otherwise separate; it may be associated
with the Tetum term matan (Hicks 1978&: 299), cf. Barnes (1974: 229-233) for the
Kedang of the nearby island of Lembata. Both fukun and matan convey the idea of
transition, spiritual influence, growth, and the general movement of life (Barnes 1977;
Hicks 1972c): for the Tetum they are sources of life. Another difference between suku
and fukun is that the latter is more often used in Tetum ritual language. The former’s
use in this special form of utterance is restricted to couplets where it is paired with fukun.
Finally, the leader of a suku is always termed chefe de suku; never chefe de fukun.
3 A grant from the London Committee of the London-Cornell Project for East
and South East Asian Studies, which was supported jointly by the Carnegie Foundation
of New York and the Nuffield Foundation, enabled me to undertake the fieldwork upon
which the present essay is based, and I owe a weighty debt of gratitude to the Committee,
as I do to the Trustees of the Frederick Soddy Trust which also provided funds. I ad
ditionally wish to thank the American Philosophical Society for providing me with a
grant which enabled me to write this essay.
4 To what extent Caraubalo suku was typical of the hundreds of suku existing in
Portuguese Timor in 1966-1967 I cannot say, but it was representative enough of the
concelho (‘district’) in which it was located (Viqueque), and I know no reason why it
should not have been typical of the entire colony, or ‘overseas province’, as it was termed
by the Portuguese Government in those days. Certainly, however, some variation in the
mode of transmission of administrative offices might be expected in regions where
matrilineal descent is more influential than patrilineal, e.g., in the sukus to the far west of
Caraubalo.