Hunting and harvesting the commons: On the cultural politics of custom

This chapter addresses questions of cohabitation and power in Timor-Leste by exploring an issue of long-standing interest around complex and often contested questions of resource use, entitlement and authority. Foraging activities across Timor-Leste can also take the form of ritualised harvesting when households act in a collective way to gather up the bounteous living 'fruits of the land'. In Timor-Leste, the living commons of existing broadacre forests, open rangelands, freshwater streams and coastal waters, has long been the subject of jurisdictional claims; usually complexly differentiated and geographically bounded as ancestral resource domains for multiple emplaced customary communities. The chapter focuses on the Fataluku ethnography to highlight the variable role of hunting in particular and its significance in Fataluku culture variously as a source of food and livelihood. Across the settled landscape of Lautem there are very often small numbers of households in any community that pursue hunting as a primary occupation.