What question did this study set out to answer?

The central aim is to explore how the memories of the dead influence Timorese efforts in post-conflict recovery.

March 25, 2026Southeast Asian studies0 citationsOpen Access

Lia Kent. The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2024.

Key Points

The central aim is to explore how the memories of the dead influence Timorese efforts in post-conflict recovery.
Analysis of memory work types such as commemoration and exhumation.
Examination of cultural beliefs regarding the dead.
Exploration of the dialectical relationship between the living and the deceased.
Over 100,000 Timorese died during the Indonesian occupation, impacting collective memory.
The dead are seen as participants in memory work, influencing recovery processes.
Memory work is continuously disrupted by the agency of the deceased.

Abstract

In The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory, and State Formation in Timor-Leste, Lia Kent discusses how various Timorese actors, including families, NGOs, veterans' groups, activists, and state agents, have been responding to the massive "bad" (violent or untimely) death that occurred during the Indonesian occupation of 1975-99 by engaging in various types of "memory work."This includes commemoration, memorialization, monument building, exhumation, reburial, and care for the dead.A central argument of this book is that we must take the dead seriously as active participants in this work-and thus in processes of post-conflict recovery and repair in Timor-Leste more generally.Just as the Timorese who survived the occupation have been "working with their memories of the dead" as they seek to rebuild their lives, the dead have been "working on the living" as the living encounter human remains, the restless and unhappy spirits of those whose bodies have not yet been recovered, and the charged and dangerous land scapes within which these remains and/or restless spirits reside (p.5).Notably, there is a dialectical relationship at play here: the dead, through their "material and spectral legacies," both animate and are animated by the memory work of the living (p. 7).The Unruly Dead examines this dialectical relationship.It emphasizes how memory work that attempts to exclude, contain, control, or otherwise employ the dead for various instrumen tal purposes is continuously disrupted by the experienced agency of the "unruly" deceased.Relevant context here includes the combination of the scale and manner of bad death in Timor-Leste, as well as long-standing cultural beliefs in Timor-Leste about the dead.Regarding the former, the scale was enormous: well over 100,000 Timorese out of a pre-invasion population of approximately 650,000 died during the occupation.Due, among other things, to the fact that many Timorese died isolated deaths in remote, rural areas in the early years of the occupation as a result of starvation and disease, the location of many bodies is still unknown. 1)

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