David Hicks
Unachieved Syncretism:
The Local-Level Political System
in Portuguese Timor, 1966-1967
Abstract, — The thesis of this essay is that Toynbee’s characterization of the
intelligentsia as ‘hated and despised’ by other members of its own culture, while at the
same time being regarded with contempt by the representatives of the alien culture which
is being imposed upon of the intelligentsia’s own culture, needs qualifying. This assertion
is based upon ethnographic evidence from the period 1966-1967 collected among people
living in the Viqueque region of eastern Timor, which was at that time a colony of Portu
gal. To establish this thesis a detailed facsimile of the local political organization is
provided, a description which also serves to provide the argument with its empirical
substance. The facsimile drawn additionally provides a point of departure for the com
parative study of the Luso-Timorese political organization, which evolved over the last
400 years, and the Indonesian-Timorese political syncretism presently being forged.
[Indonesia, Timor, Intelligentsia, Political History, Political Organization, Political Syn
cretism]
The intelligentsia, according to Arnold Toynbee (1947: 394), is a
category of person ‘bom to be unhappy’. Acting as mediators between two
cultures, its members suffer the ‘congenital unhappiness of the hybrid who is
an outcaste from both the families that have combined to beget him’ (ibid.).
Hated and despised by their own people, yet regarded with contempt by
David Hicks is presently Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook. At the University of Oxford he was for two years the Alan Coltart
Scholar in Anthropology before carrying out 19 months’ fieldwork in eastern Timor,
Indonesia. He obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of London
(1971) and from the University of Oxford (1972). In 1976 he was a Directeur d’études
associé à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales at the University of Paris. He has
been a recipient of an award from the American Philosophical Society as well as from the
London-Cornell Project for South and Southeast Asian Studies. — Publications: “Tetum
Ghosts and Kin: Fieldwork in an Indonesian Community” (1976); “Structural Analysis in
Anthropology: Case Studies from Indonesia and Brasil” (1978); and nearly two dozen
assays in social anthropology. Address: Dept, of Anthropology, State Univ. of New York
at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, N.Y. 11794.
Anthropos 78.1983
2