Unsettled and unsettling tourism landscapes of Timor‐Leste

This special issue explores how tourism in Timor-Leste operates as a dynamic arena for negotiating the nation's post-independence identity, development priorities, and nation-building processes. The papers in this collection illuminate the ways in which Timorese communities and stakeholders navigate competing visions of the nation's future, balancing tradition and modernity, while contending with the enduring legacies of conflict and colonisation. Moving beyond conventional framings of tourism as an economic driver, this issue foregrounds tourism's sociocultural and political dimensions. Tourism emerges here as a critical medium through which national, cultural, and historical identities are actively shaped, contested, and reimagined. The issue builds on discussions from the panel, Unsettled and Unsettling Tourism Landscapes of Timor-Leste, presented at the 2022 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives and anthropological approaches (see Leite & Graburn, 2009; Nogués-Pedregal, 2019; Salazar & Graburn, 2014), the contributors explore tourism as a multifaceted field where local dynamics are interpreted and adapted, offering critical insights into the complex processes of cultural preservation, identity negotiation, and development in a post-conflict, post-colonial context. By adopting this broad lens, the issue offers an innovative framework for understanding tourism's role in Timor-Leste's post-independence era. Timor-Leste's paths to independence and economic self-sufficiency have been long and hard-fought, with the latter struggle still ongoing. Colonised by Portugal to varying degrees over a span of more than 450 years, ‘Portuguese Timor’ remained on the margins of the colonial empire, with limited governance and infrastructure development well into the mid-20th century (Clarence-Smith, 1985). In the late 19th century, colonial administration and economic exploitation intensified as Portugal sought to solidify its authority amid competition with the Dutch (Pélissier, 1996). As Portugal faced a wave of decolonisation following the Carnation Revolution in April 1974, the Timorese declared independence in 1975. This was followed almost immediately by a 24-year occupation by Indonesia, characterised by violence, repression, and significant socioeconomic upheaval (CAVR, 2005). In 1999, a UN-sponsored referendum led to a vote for independence, prompting violent reprisals. Full international recognition followed in 2002, initiating a period of post-conflict rebuilding that continues to influence the nation's economic and social strategies. The post-conflict years that followed independence required substantial rebuilding, with an economy heavily dependent on oil and gas revenues. Today, however, declining petroleum reserves highlight the urgent need for economic diversification. Currently, nearly 80% of Timor-Leste's state budget is funded by its Petroleum Fund, raising concerns over a potential ‘fiscal cliff’ as revenue falls short of growing public expenditure (Lao Hamutuk, 2023; Neves et al., 2023; Scheiner, 2021). This situation is further complicated by reliance on imports, high unemployment rates, and significant poverty levels, with 48.3% of the population experiencing multidimensional poverty (World Food Program, 2023). The Government has responded by prioritising tourism, agriculture, and manufacturing as key areas for growth. Tourism, in particular, has been positioned as a potential economic lifeline for the country, with an emphasis on Timor-Leste's rich natural and cultural assets, including coral reefs and mountainous terrain, as well as a plethora of historical sites (Edyvane et al., 2012; Marx, 2016; Tourism Policy, 2017; Currie, 2016, 2020). Guided by the National Tourism Policy: Growing Tourism to 2030, Timor-Leste's Government envisions tourism as a cornerstone of Timor's economy, with an explicit aim to attract 200,000 international visitors and generate $150 million annually by 2030 (Tourism Policy, 2017). Yet Timor's tourism sector has been hindered by a lack of human resource capacity, infrastructural constraints, limited international connectivity, and lingering perceptions tied to past instability (Currie, 2016; World Bank, 2021; Mendonça et al., 2023). Beyond this, there are contested visions of what tourism should look like. Drawing on familiar examples from neighbouring Indonesia, some imagine a modernist landscape of high-rise beachside resorts replete with golf courses and infinity pools, while others look to eco-friendly sustainable models of tourism that capitalise on the idea of ‘undiscovered’ landscapes and ‘pristine’ seascapes (Currie, 2016; Currie & Turner, 2014). These disparate visions not only highlight different economic priorities, they also expose broader social and political divides, including generational and ideological rifts over questions of national identity and development. Tourism in Timor-Leste thus becomes a focal point for debates on identity, inequality, and representation. Despite the tensions and high expectations surrounding tourism in the country, to date the sector has received limited scholarly attention, with most research on tourism in Timor-Leste confined to fields like tourism studies, economics, and business management (see Berno et al., 2022; Dutra et al., 2016; Tolkach et al., 2012, among others). This research, which tends to emphasise tourism's economic impacts, market potential, and development prospects, leaves substantial gaps in understanding tourism's complex effects on identity, local agency, and power relations within host communities. This special issue aims to fill in these gaps by using anthropological and interdisciplinary frameworks to explore how Timor-Leste's tourism landscapes serve not merely as potential sites of economic development, but as sites of negotiation, where various actors, including local communities, government, and international stakeholders, engage in contested visions of development, cultural preservation, and national identity. In light of the global shifts in tourism brought about by the pandemic, this collection provides a timely exploration of tourism's possibilities and tensions, examining how this evolving industry holds both promise and complexity within an uncertain global future. The special issue brings together contributions from four anthropologists and one political scientist, all of whom interrogate questions of tourism in Timor-Leste through the lenses of their particular long-term research projects in Timor-Leste, projects which span the topics of culture, tradition, gender, identity, nation-building, globalisation, human rights, and memory. Contributors include both early-career and more established scholars. The papers represent a range of diverse perspectives. While four of them focus on tourism in Timor-Leste's post-independence era, one focuses on tourism—albeit as a vehicle for activism—during the Indonesian occupation. Reflecting the reality of Timor's Dili-centric post-independence economic development, a reality largely reflected in tourism development, three of the papers focus on tourism in Dili, while two papers focus on tourism in Atauro, a main ‘ecotourist’ destination outside of Dili. All of the papers in this special issue focus on the phenomenon of international—as opposed to domestic—tourism. Yet the authors approach international tourism from the different primary vantage points of ‘guests’ and ‘hosts’ (see Smith, 1989). Finally, the authors employ a range of methods in their analysis, including ethnography, auto-ethnography, and discourse analysis. Despite this diversity of perspectives and methods, common themes run throughout the papers—themes central to anthropological studies of tourism more generally, particularly in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts (Leite & Graburn, 2009; Salazar, 2013). These themes include tradition, authenticity, and identity; gender and labour; and human rights (and memory and history). The theme of globalisation also runs throughout the papers, as do related questions of transformation, and social and cultural change. Together, these themes contribute to a novel perspective that positions tourism as a multifaceted site of negotiation, where cultural heritage, historical memory, and social relations are continuously redefined. This approach emphasises the interplay between local agency and external pressures, highlighting how tourism serves as a platform for both resistance and adaptation in shaping national narratives and community identities. What happens when elements of ‘traditional culture’—including objects, practices, and knowledge—are marketed or sold to tourists or other foreigners? How do tourists' expectations, and, in particular, their demands for ‘authenticity’, affect the ways in which communities present their traditions or practices and to what end? What kinds of transformations take place as local communities appeal to particular international markets? Three of the five papers directly grapple with these themes. In Tusinski's ‘Cosmopolitan gastro-aesthetics and the new tastes of Timor’, the resource or product being marketed and sold to foreigners is alternately described as ‘traditional Timorese food’, ‘Timorese cuisine’, or ‘local food’ (ai haan local). Tusinki maps the process, beginning around 2011–2012, with the departure of the United Nations Integrated Mission in East Timor (UNMIT), by which Timorese foods became marked as local. Specifically, Tusinski argues that Timorese cuisine ‘emerg[ed] from friction between revitalised and objectified notions of “traditional culture” and mass-mediated global trends, tastes, and “gastro-aesthetics,” including a valorisation of food that is ‘local, zero-waste, [and] healthy’ (this issue). An end result of the presentation of an ‘authentic’ Timorese cuisine to international consumers has been the transformation of Timorese food and meanings associated with food. Tusisnki notes: ‘as existing associations and experiential qualities of food are emphasised, erased, and/or eliminated, the efficacies of food as a social substance’ are altered (this issue). Put differently, the process of constructing local food has worked ‘to unsettle foodways qualitative characteristics and their medical, moral, and cosmological meanings’ (this issue). Questions of national identity come into play here. As Tusinski points out in his paper—and as other scholars of Timor have discussed—as the Timorese people have sought to construct a national identity in the post-independence era, after 450 years of Portuguese colonisation and 24 years of Indonesian occupation, some have turned to efforts at ‘cultural revitalisation and revival’ (Barnes, 2011; Bovensiepen, 2015; McWilliam, 2005, 2011; Silva, 2013; Trindade, 2011; Tusinski, 2019). This turn to cultural revival has included the marketing of culture and its material emblems to foreign tourists (see, for example, Bravo-valenzuela e Silva, 2023; Silva et al., 2020). The construction and marketing of traditional Timorese cuisine—even as that cuisine has been heavily shaped and configured by global forces—thus fits within a larger trend in post-independence Timor-Leste, both reflecting and reinforcing the conflation of a Timorese national identity with cultural identity or traditional culture. Yet the theme of national identity is present in another way in Tusinski's paper. Tusinski argues that the marketing of local food for touristic consumption is a significant source of national pride and belonging for the younger generation of Timorese which has primarily been involved in such efforts. Tusinski explains: ‘With cultural politics dominated by resistance heroes and the Indonesian-educated “new generation”, this movement marks a youthful contribution to Timor-Leste's viability through entrepreneurialism’ (this issue). In Silva's ‘Domesticity and gender performances in the making of homestays in Atauro, Timor-Leste’, the element of traditional culture being produced, marketed, and sold is an experience as opposed to an object, although the experience is tied to a material object. Specifically, through the provision of homestays or guesthouses in the village of Usubemassu in Atauro, villagers are involved in selling the experience of living in a local ‘traditional’ house (this issue). More broadly, what is being marketed through homestays is the experience of traditional family life, or even ‘local life … as it is in fact lived by the local people who dwell there’ (this issue). Questions of authenticity are key here, as Silva explicitly notes tourists' desire to experience life in an ‘authentic home’ (this issue), and villagers likewise present their homes to tourists ‘as an absolutely authentic sample—typical of the region’ (this issue). Yet again, what is presented as authentic is a construction, as traditional homes and home life are adapted and changed to meet the real and imagined needs, desires, and expectations of foreigners, particularly those from the Global North. In terms of the houses used for homestays, Blue Ventures—the NGO working with the Timorese Government to promote ecotourism in Atauro—not only chose specific houses that already had certain elements desired by tourists such as bathrooms and rooms with doors, but then demanded further changes to the structure of these houses to make them suitable for guesthouse purposes, such as the construction and/or renovation of rooms and the acquisition of furniture and other appliances. Yet changes that have taken place to appeal to the desires and standards of tourists, changes which Silva notes can be conceived of as part of a larger ‘civilising process’, have gone beyond the physical structures of houses to involve the very organisation of the domestic space, as well as their residents' conduct within this space (this issue). These include changes in food preparation, assembly, and presentation, as well as changes in the treatment of non-human animals. Finally, in Oliviera's paper, ‘Sanan rai wisdom in Atauro's tourism transformation’, the product being marketed and sold is a form of ‘traditional art’ or ‘traditional craft’—specifically it is a form of ‘traditional pottery’ called sanan rai, which is said to have emerged over 3200 years ago. Yet again, questions of authenticity are salient here, as the craft is essentially being brought back from ‘extinction’ in the village of Arlo in Atauro for the purposes of tourism, and with a specific goal of meeting tourists' ‘desires and quality expectations’ (this issue). Questions of identity are also present in this paper. On a community level, Oliveira notes how sanan rai must be viewed not only as a commodity, but also as a symbol of ‘living memory’, which works to ‘[foster] connection and cultural continuity within the community of Arlo’ (this issue). On a national level, sanan rai has been promoted by the Timorese state as a tangible symbol of national heritage, with its preservation posed as a national imperative. 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