Local Governance in Timor-Leste - Secretaria de Estado da Arte e ...

of barlake that lay in the alliance that was formed between families, which wasparticularly important in times of war (Schulte Nordholt, 1971: 388). Themisconceptions that surround the institution of barlake, and tendencies to conflate thepractice of bridewealth with ownership, are not limited to Timor-Leste. As Kitching(1980: 232-233) relates in his examination of bridewealth in Kenya, even as thedisruptive forces of colonisation and modernisation had had severe negative effects onthe power relationships between sexes, the institution as it existed in postcolonialsociety could not be considered the same as ownership.Nonetheless, the institution does have a material impact as it is regulated throughtraditional dispute resolution processes. The inherently conservative focus of lisantowards maintaining the family unit in such situations means that when such genderedviolence occurs, the lia-na'in often attempts to deal with the overall picture byestablishing whether in fact she has neglected her obligations—or whether the manhas misinterpreted his rights within lisan. The primary focus in resolving thesedisputes is to restore the family unit. However, despite the gendered impact of lisanand barlake in such cases, everyone I spoke to, including some highly articulateprofessional women, stated that these traditional institutions were important andneeded to be respected, but that barlake was at times misinterpreted. These responsesindicate the deeply embedded nature of barlake, which exists as a political andeconomic institution to fill many interrelated communal needs—establishingimportant mutual obligations within and between families mediated via uma lulik.The important role that barlake plays within communities needs to be respected andunderstood before any attempts to address the negative aspects can be successful.The strength of traditional institutions, including customary land tenure and barlake,makes the uma kain and to a lesser extent the aldeia, the 'natural' grouping within asuku. Because of the important relations between uma kain that are governed by amixture of traditional institutions and economic dependencies, the institutional layerof aldeia also commands a great sense of communalism. The smaller groups of umakain and by extension aldeia as the natural units for economic cooperation were alsonoted by Fox, who linked the tendency for "segmented, truncated and scattered clans"to the nature of the Timorese farming economy, where most people "are too close tobare subsistence to be able to take risks and have so far been unable to develop158