Lisa Palmer

Reconceptualizing ecosystem services Possibilities for cultivating and valuing the ethics and practices of care

This paper responds to a recent call for geographers to engage with the ecosystem services concept which is an increasingly dominant global model for environmental policy and management. We focus on its economic exchange mechanism, payment for environmental services (PES), and reject the conventional notion of it as either an economic or an environmental strategy. Rather than treating a disaggregated nature as the ‘fixed stock’ of ecosystem services, we value instead actual human and non-human interrelations and practices and focus on how we might reconfigure the socio-cultural relations between people and nature as the valued stock.

'Nature', place and the recognition of indigenous polities

Abstract In the postcolonial context of Australia there has been a belated legal recognition of sui generis Indigenous rights and interests over much of the continent. However, the pervasive environmental discourse guiding resource management practices remains firmly based on ‘commonsense’ settler understandings of ‘nature’ as an external domain to be managed and/or preserved. In order to understand how this could be otherwise, this paper examines ideas about political landscape formation and the implications of the changing role of the nation-state and civil society in relation to the recognition of Indigenous political subjectivities. Taking the situation faced by Indigenous peoples in two settler societies as our vantage point, I argue here that we need to move away from assimilative environmental governance arrangements and politicise the concept of ‘nature’. This will open up spaces for the recognition and active participation of Indigenous polities in the realm of natural resource management. The paper concludes by contrasting the situation faced by Indigenous landowners in Australias Kakadu National Park with the overtly political negotiations occurring in two northern regions of Canada. In the latter, in a process similar to what Tully calls ‘daily subconstitutional politics’, it is through the recognition of Indigenous polities in environmental governance issues that Indigenous peoples are starting to refashion their stake in the governing ideas and institutions of the broader regional, provincial and national polity.

Bushwalking in Kakadu: a study of cultural borderlands

This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern ...This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non‐Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non‐Aboriginal co‐existence, which pervades the Park, is infused by the legacy of a colonial settler state, which has presumed access to territory, marginalized Indigenous people and obviated their social and cultural landscape in favour of an expansionist aesthetic of wilderness preservation and appreciation. This paper finds that the activities of bushwalkers and the concerns that these activities generate in the local Aboriginal domain produce a novel space where place is contested and transformed, a space of negotiation and resistance where peoples cherished values both compete with and influence one another.

Hamatak halirin The cosmological and socio-ecological roles of water in Koba Lima, Timor

The cosmological and socio-ecological roles of water, in particular spring water, have not been the subject of sustained analysis in the anthropological literatures of the eastern archipelago. Taking as our starting point the central role of water in the origin narratives and ritual practices of Koba Lima, a coalition of five ancient kingdoms located across the division of East Timor and Indonesian West Timor, we explore the profound cosmological meanings and many layered understandings of life and death associated with water. We argue that in this nuanced socio-ecological world, water is the blood and milk of the mother transformed into life itself through father fire. It is through these transformative capacities connected to water that the boundaries separating the visible and invisible worlds can be permeated, enabling the living access to matak malirin or good health and productive life force. The paper is both a contribution to the literature on archipelagic socio-cosmic dualisms and a unique ethnography which presents new material on the significance of water in this region.

The modern origins of traditional agriculture: Colonial policy, swidden development, and environmental degradation in eastern Timor

The origin of swidden systems is typically portrayed as a pre-colonial, pre-nationalist, and pre-developmentalist tradition, subsequently interrupted and eroded by colonial exploitation and post-colonial technoscience in favour of market agriculture. A recent counter-position to this ‘anteriority model’ presents swidden systems as reactionary ‘refuge agriculture’ in search of remote locations to circumvent state accountability (Scott 2009). A third model traces swidden agricultural processes as a ‘dual economy’ of both subsistence and commodity production. This article examines these approaches through a study of maize and rice in eastern (Portuguese) Timor, where a particular type of environmentally damaging swidden system and colonialism have been shown to be co-emergent. Accommodating new archival data and adding detail to the established position on Timor’s agricultural history, it is proposed that the early twentieth century was an important phase in the extension and dominance of maize in Portuguese Timor; and while far-reaching modification to rice cultivation is generally associated with the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, it is shown that the early twentieth century was also a major developmental period for this grain. It is further suggested that dynamics of agricultural change have differed across the colonial divide between Portuguese and Dutch Timor. The article calls for more comparative research on the divided island of Timor.

Opening the paths to healing: developing an integrated approach to health in Timor Leste

Abstract In Timor Leste, customary healing practices are deeply embedded in the inter-relationships between people, the ancestors and the environment. Meanwhile being ‘modern’ has long meant being both educated and Christian, ushering in ongoing shifts in moral worlds. These seemingly contradictory forms of sociality, relationality and subjectivity are, we argue, uniquely woven together through a deeply political meshwork of performative practices. Drawing on the experience of our collaborative research into mental health systems in Timor-Leste, we ask what this means for attempts to engage with diverse approaches to healing through an integrated approach to the nation’s public health programmes and policies.

Subterranean waters and the ‘curation’ of underground histories in Timor Leste

This paper examines the historical dynamism of Timorese indigenous waterscapes in order to understand the ways in which local peoples ‘curate’ their regional histories. In the Baucau-Viqueque region of Timor Leste understandings of and interactions with subterranean waters, and the springs from where it emerges, are deeply embedded in the foundational organizing principles of local social, political and economic life. By taking up the idea of springs as an historical “archive” and drawing on regional oral narratives associated with water, migration, rice and irrigation, this paper argues that this localized meshwork (Ingold 2011) of water history functions to encode, communicate, mediate and negotiate historical contingencies and moral values as well as the ongoing possibilities of socio-political futures. In this landscape, springs form the knots that hold together these narrative histories, while their dynamic role as focal points for ritual activities reflects, keeps strong and enables new trans-generational and trans-spatial connections.

An East Timorese Domain Luca from Central and Peripheral Perspectives

The East Timorese kingdom Luca is described as the hegemon of the eastern parts of Timor in some nineteenth-century works. This is gainsaid by other data, which point to the existence of a multitud ...