On the Influence of Customary Law “Tara Bandu” in Community Based Forest Management at the Mountains of Timor-Leste
Publisher: Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e
Author(s): Jose P. Pasquilho and Xisto Martins
Date: 2021
Topics: Governance, Land, Renewable Resources
Countries: Timor-Leste
Tara bandu is a traditional ceremony in Timor-Leste that enshrines a customary law with state recognition, which generally applies to the spatial scale of the smallest administrative division of the territory (suco) and several years of timespan, addressing natural resources management with a focus on forests, and also relations among people. Though there is evidence related to the concepts of adat/lisan (tradition) and pemali (taboo) in Southeast Asia and Austranesia suggesting that precursors of tara bandu should exist before the Portuguese arrival in the early XVI century, there was a subsequent diachronic process of hybridization of static iconic devices and other traditional practices with the vocalized Portuguese colonial bandos, evolving to a choreographic ritual with several dimensions: from the sacrificial animist performance addressed to the ancestor’s spirits and a supernatural (lulik) environment, to Catholic rites and signing written documents. Contemporaneously, tara bandu is a salient event anchoring communities in defining participatory land use plans, including agreements on property boundaries, rules of engagement and also interdictions and sanctions. Tara bandu is mentioned nowadays as an example and case-study of bottom-up device(s) for environmental peacebuilding processes considered a recent research field. In this paper, we provide a review on the subject, including final remarks that address present and future challenges.