Learning from Ritual: Covid-19 Public Health Measures and Messaging in Timor-Leste
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I reflect on the significance of ritual activity directed towards COVID-19 in Timor-Leste. What, if anything, it tells us about East Timorese beliefs and attitudes regarding infectious disease and why understanding the cultural dimensions of infectious disease is critical to public health responses. Timor-Leste recorded its first COVID-19 case on March 21st, 2020. Over the course of the following weeks elders held ritual ceremonies across the country to mobilise the ancestors and ask for their assistance to keep COVID-19 at bay. These ceremonies circulated widely on social media within Timor-Leste and among the East Timorese diaspora. In parallel to this initial flourishing of ritual activity the government swiftly enacted legislation to declare a state of emergency, closing international borders and establishing quarantine centres across the country. In many ways the health authorities’ response to COVID-19 has been exemplary, with low case numbers and 0 deaths throughout 2020. However, since February 2021 COVID-19 cases have increased exponentially, exposing social cleavages based on education, language and socio-economic position. With limited resources, the health authorities, and in particular the Centre for Integrated Crisis Management, have focused on prevention, contact tracing and testing, adhering to WHO guidelines and emphasising ‘best practices. Yet, the response has been criticized for being top-down and heavy handed. For example, certain public health measures, such as mandatory testing and burial protocols, have been poorly communicated to the broader community. The use of bio-medical language and introduction of new terms and concepts has been excessively didactic and lacks local contextualization. For the majority of the population of Timor-Leste, especially those living in rural areas, lived experiences of illness and disease are interpreted primarily through and by customary beliefs and practices. The rituals directed towards COVID-19 demonstrate a clear understanding of the nature of infection, contamination, disease, models of causality and fears around infection. They also reveal local capacities to contain epidemics and the ability to learn with the bio-medical response. The levels of participation observed in COVID-19 rituals online and local support for these initiatives expressed on social media suggests at the very least that health authorities should engage with local communities in a two-way dialogue to discuss beliefs and existing prevention strategies that can assist and support public health objectives and measures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".