The Politics of Loss and Restoration

Abstract

This chapter engages with the after-effects of the Bobometo village massacre in Oecussi on the lives of surviving family members and the social and cultural world in which they live. Focusing on the dead and their ongoing relations with the living, it explores the multiple ‘lives’ and potencies of the ‘bad’ and political dead and their interplay. Based on cross-border ethnographic research, this chapter explores how these dynamics shape new forms of relatedness between the living and the dead, the local and the state, and within family networks now separated across the borderlands. It discusses what acts of remembrance for the conflict dead can tell us about the politics of loss and restoration in the aftermath of massive violence and bad death.