Citation

Tatsumi Fukutake S. Jpn. J. Cult. Anthropol. 2007; 72(1): 44-67.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper examines how the southern Tetum society in Timor responded to the extraordinary violence during the conflict in East Timor. It focuses on the disparity between the global humanitarian aid groups' and local society's understanding of the violence. In the turmoil following the referendum for independence in 1999, during a massacre, a teenage girl was kidnapped by a pro-Indonesian militiaman in Suai, the capital of Covalima district, East Timor. The media reported it and human rights activists reacted to it, describing the girl as a sexual slave of the militiaman. Although her family welcomed the activists' intervention, her family members and the locals viewed the relationship between the girl and militiaman as a form of marriage. I consider this discrepancy as being caused by different understandings of "reconciliation," and would like to argue that based on the local perspective of this kidnapping, the case should be termed "marriage by capture." When the theory of evolutionism was popular in the 19th century, "marriage by capture" was one of the central issues in the discussion of marriage systems. In many ethnographic accounts, anthropologists tried to explain the reasons behind ceremonial marriage capture. For example, J. F. McLennan claimed that ceremonial marriage capture was a symbol of a previous stage of society, when tribes were exogamous but hostile to each other. However, his argument of marriage by capture as the origin of exogamy was completely rejected by other scholars such as Arnold van Gennep. Since the popularity of the evolutionary theory declined, the argument of marriage by capture itself was dismissed as passe. While current anthropological works do not focus much on marriage by capture, sexual violence during ethnic or nationalist conflict has begun to capture feminists' and human rights activists' attention. the feminists' condemnation of sexual violence during conflict was triggered after the mass rape in the so-called ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. However, anthropological works on the abduction of women during the conflicts between India and Pakistan during the partition of Punjab in 1947, as well as the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, indicate that humanitarian aid and human-rights movements deprived the victims of their self-determination rights. According to them, in many cased, although the abducted women claimed that they "got married" to the men and wanted to stay with them, women's state repatriation projects and NGO reports of human rights disregarded the victims' assertions and assumed that all marriages between different religious and ethnic groups were forced ones. In East Timor, during the 1999 turmoil, it was reported that quite a few women and children were abducted by militia and became victims of sexual harassment and rape. Above all, the case of the abducted teenage girl is well known among human rights activists in East Timor and abroad. The reports and articles in NGO publications expressed the status of the girl as "a sexual slave" of the militia, when, in fact, the girl herself denied the kidnapping and claimed that she wanted to live with the man. This case has similarities with the cases during the conflicts in Punjab and Rwanda. In the kidnapping case, media coverage and NGO reports have stressed the violence and criminality by using the terms "rape" and "sexual slave" although the girl herself wanted to live with the abductor. What is the cultural and social context of that case? Recently, in southern Tetum society, where the kidnapping took place, there has been a serious increase in elopement, i.e., run-away marriages. According to the elders, in the past, couples used to marry late. Nowadays, since many teenagers meet the opposite sex in school or at dance parties during various local ceremonies, they prefer to marry immediately. the parents dismiss this kind of marriage simply because it is too early. Teenagers, however, find that true love romance comes to perfection if it goes against their parents' wishes. In southern Tetum society, there are two mediators for marriage: one is lia adat, the elder who holds the customary law in society; the other, ai kalete, two mediators chosen from each party. Those mediators play an important role in both family-arranged and elopement marriages by deciding the amount of bride wealth, fixing the date of the ceremony, and conducting it. In that society, most families follow a matrilineal and matrilocal system. their marriage system, sabete saladi, does not require bride wealth. However, once many patrilineal descent groups immigrated to the southern Tetum area from mountainous areas after the invasion of the Indonesian military, marriage between different descent groups, where the payment of bride wealth is necessary, increased. Consequently, the importance of the roles of lia adat or ai kalete for mediation and negotiation between the two parties has increased. However, in the 1999 marriage by capture case, no lia adat or ai kalete acted as mediators. Instead, UN human rights officers and human rights activists played a central role in supporting the girl and her family. On one hand, the human rights activists who wished to rescue the abducted girl described and appealed to the foreign media that the girl was repeatedly raped and was now a "sexual slave;" on the other, her family and the locals perceived the relationship as that of a married couple and referred to the girl as the militiaman's "wife." Previous studies on sexual violence during ethnic conflict explained that this disparity between the victim and the abductor exemplifies the victim's deprivation of a voice. However, if the local society's understanding of the incident is considered, the gap between human rights activists' and the local people's understanding lies not in the epistemology of violence but in that of reconciliation. In actuality, the locals and human rights activists share a common understanding of the incident in that it involves extraordinary violence and grief. The disparity between the two perceptions, in fact, lies in how to ease the social tensions raised by the incident, i.e., in the process of reconciliation.

Language: ja