Making Kin and Population: Counting Life in the Wake of Abandonment in Timor-Leste

Abstract

Maubisse, a central mountain town in Timor-Leste, has the highest fertility rate in the country, yet people there describe the land as ‘empty’ and the population as ‘reduced’ due to decades of conflict. As people rebuild houses and family relations, they talk about replenishing life and ‘fixing’ families by having more children. This local perspective contradicts development discourses that favour lowering fertility to achieve sustainable ‘development’. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork I explore how reproduction in Timor-Leste is now being conceived in the wake of abandonment by previous colonial regimes and new development narratives; whereas people in Maubisse count ancestral lineages connecting kin and landscape, showing how reproduction is ‘distributed’ beyond individual bodies. Whilst critical of practices of counting and calculating reproduction, I argue that pursuing reproductive justice still requires considering how people count themselves.