Part 1

• Making Infrastructures, Unmaking the Community: Tourism Development, Envy and Inequality in Atauro, Timor-Leste Kelly Silva Universidade de Brasília

  The article examines the disruptive effects of tourism infrastructure development on Atauro Island, Timor-Leste. It analyses how the introduction of homestays has generated new forms of inequality and elicited diverse moral responses within a community largely affiliated with the Evangelical Assembly of God. While some residents frame accruing material benefits as the outcome of industriousness and divine blessing, others articulate resentment through narratives of envy and accusations of witchcraft. I argue that these refrains of envy and witchcraft operate not merely as personalised hostility but as moral commentaries that articulate local anxieties about emerging disparities unfamiliar to many island residents. The paper situates these dynamics within broader debates on moral economies of tourism, the role of Pentecostal and evangelical logics in shaping aspirations and distributive claims, and anthropologies of witchcraft as diagnostic discourse. Methodologically, the study combines participant observation, interviews and analysis of religious discourse to trace how economic change is interpreted and contested through vernacular moral vocabularies. The findings reveal that evangelical claims to equality and prosperity coexist uneasily with market-induced differentiation, producing ambivalent ethical repertoires that both legitimate and problematise new livelihoods. By attending to the intersection of religion, envy and witchcraft in a small island tourist economy, the article contributes to discussions on how ‘crucial upgrades’ in the form of rapid development can reconfigures sociality, moral reasoning and claims to the good life in contemporary Timor-Leste. It thus offers ethnographic insight into how faith and market forces shape emergent social hierarchies across Atauro.

• Fragmented Solidarities: Contesting Community Survival in Indonesia’s Nickel Frontier Irfan Asgani University of Cambridge

  The Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), established in 2015, has transformed the Bahodopi region into a major nickel industrial frontier linked to the global EV supply chain. Promoted as a catalyst for regional development, the project has attracted a surge of domestic migrants and profoundly reshaped community life, as environmental degradation and industrial expansion disrupt traditional livelihoods. This article examines how communities experience and respond to the socio-environmental disruptions induced by rapid industrialisation over the past decade. Livelihood displacement, intensified labour competition, and rising living costs have heightened survival pressures, pushing households to adapt to the emerging industrial economy. While these adaptive strategies reflect certain forms of local resilience, they also deepen dependence on the industry and reduce the autonomy of local livelihoods. Under these conditions, survival becomes a contested terrain through which affected groups negotiate livelihoods, grievances, and collective claims. CSOs and trade unions play important roles in mediating these grievances, articulating claims of injustice, and occasionally fostering solidarities among affected groups. However, these arenas remain contested, as competing interests and identities fragment communities and reinforce existing social divisions, producing uneven and ambivalent solidarities that both enable and constrain the emergence of broader collective consciousness.

• The social reproduction of life along Timor-Leste’s south coast Berta Antonieta Tilman Pereira Central European University Judith Bovensiepen Austrian Academy of Sciences

  This paper applies Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) to analyse the social consequences of oil-led development in Timor-Leste’s Tasi Mane project. SRT reconceptualises capitalism as dependent on the often-unpaid labour that sustains and regenerates life, including care work, subsistence production, and community support. Rather than separating production from reproduction, it highlights how accumulation processes reshape households, gender relations, and the everyday labour required to maintain the workforce.
  The first part of the paper focuses on how the south coast is being materially and symbolically prepared for large-scale oil infrastructure. It identifies three key transformations: the reorganisation of land through expropriation and compensation schemes; the restructuring of labour via training programmes, remittances, and veteran pensions; and the reconfiguration of the ritual economy through its incorporation into state and corporate governance. The second part outlines directions for future research, proposing an empirical agenda to trace how social reproduction is being transformed as the project unfolds. It asks how household labour, care practices, and subsistence farming are shifting, and how these changes—particularly their gendered dimensions—can be systematically documented and analysed.

• Catalyst or Constraint? A Critical Analysis of E-Commerce Acceptance and Policy in Indonesia Massageng Widagdhaprasana Universitas Gadjah Mada Viddy Ranawijaya University of Erfurt

  Over the past decade, the Indonesian government has promoted the digital economy as a central development strategy, positioning e-commerce platforms as key instruments for integrating Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) into national and global markets. These initiatives are framed as pathways to economic inclusion, productivity growth, and improved livelihoods. However, the rapid expansion of platform-based commerce has also generated tensions at the grassroots level. In 2023, traditional market traders across several Indonesian cities protested against major e-commerce platforms, accusing them of enabling unfair competition, price manipulation, and predatory practices that threaten local livelihoods. This paper examines how state-led digital development policies reshape social and economic relations among small-scale traders and MSMEs. Drawing on media coverage and policy documents, the study analyses the competing narratives and conflicts surrounding the digitalisation of small businesses. The analysis is informed by the theoretical lenses of solutionism, neo-Luddism, and technological determinism, which help explain how digital platforms are simultaneously framed as inevitable drivers of progress and contested sources of economic disruption. The findings show that grassroots responses to digitalisation are not uniformly resistant or supportive. Rather, MSMEs and traditional traders articulate ambivalent positions that reflect both aspirations for digital opportunity and concerns over market concentration and algorithmic power. These tensions reveal how development initiatives centred on digital platforms can simultaneously promise inclusion while reproducing new forms of economic vulnerability. By situating Indonesia’s e-commerce expansion within broader debates on development and technological change, the paper highlights how conflicts between small traders, digital platforms, and the state shape the social outcomes of digital development policies in Southeast Asia.

Part 2

• Economic Transformations in the aldeia of Faulara 2009–2023: A Longitudinal Analysis Alberto Fidalgo Castro Complutense University of Madrid

  This longitudinal study examines profound economic transformations in Faulara, a rural village in Timor-Leste, between 2009 and 2023. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2009 and 2013 and follow-up research in 2023, it traces how households have increasingly reoriented livelihoods toward monetization and an expanding economy of consumption.
  The presentation foregrounds the growing significance of market access and provisioning, through which the availability of goods has widened everyday consumption horizons and recalibrated local aspirations and spending priorities. Yet these shifts have not displaced older infrastructures of value. Ritual exchange networks remain central, operating as community-based circuits of saving, credit, and redistribution that allow families to mobilize cash and goods for major life-cycle events, while sustaining forms of social security in a context where formal institutions remain limited.
  Finally, it analyzes the place of migrant remittances as both material and moral practice. Remittances become visible in landmarks of improvement—most notably the construction of higher-quality housing—and, though less common in the hamlet itself, they increasingly function as a moral horizon through which life improvement is imagined and evaluated. For many, this horizon takes shape precisely as prospects for advancement are narrowed by the social, economic, and cultural constraints of rural life.

• The Nexus of Unfulfilled Development Promises: Case Study of Ciharapan Hydropower Plant in Indonesia Putu Agung Nara Indra Prima Satya University of Amsterdam

  The construction of the mega hydropower plant in Ciharapan hamlet [pseudonym] in West Java province, Indonesia, brought hopes and promises of welfare to the once-remote rural local communities in the surrounding area. Yet, the prolonged construction process, without any significant economic contribution to the communities, transformed their hopes into grievances against the project. Furthermore, the presence of Chinese companies and workers as the primary actors in the construction process triggers tensions among locals who feel excluded from the project. This led to the central question of this research: “How does the interplay between the economic grievances and dissatisfaction with the Chinese companies form the racial tensions between the locals and the Chinese companies and workers?’’ By applying the concept of racialization, this research seeks to uncover the nexus between the false promises of economic welfare and the racial tensions among local workers and residents in the Ciharapan hamlet. This research employed participant observation for 6 months with local people, including workers, small-shop owners, translators, manual laborers, farmers, and so forth. This research examined the challenges of development amid a changing socio-economic landscape in the project-affected area. The racial tensions stemmed from multiple factors, such as cultural gaps, the lack of job opportunities for locals, discrimination between local and Chinese workers inside the workplace, discrimination in salaries and benefits, and so forth. In addition, the tensions were also fueled by the widely circulated prejudices against the Chinese and Chinese-Indonesians from Indonesian history (especially the 1965 Communist Purges and the 1998 Riots).

• Not All Women Benefit Alike: How Vietnam’s Tea Economy Changed Women’s Paths to Independence Yunxi Wu Kagawa University

  How should we understand rural women’s changing livelihoods when a development-oriented transnational agricultural project arrives? Conventional explanations often sort women into fixed social categories—majority or minority, land-rich or land-poor, homemaker or wage worker—and use these differences to explain unequal outcomes. Based on ethnographic research in Vietnam’s Central Highlands, this paper argues that such categories matter as starting conditions, but they do not sufficiently explain who is able to improve their situation once a new field of opportunity opens. The paper examines Taiwanese oolong tea production in Vietnam, a transnational agricultural investment that brought wage labor, harvest work, processing jobs, trading opportunities, and small-business niches into rural society. Before the tea industry’s arrival, women were already unevenly positioned by ethnicity, property access, household labor division, mobility, and social ties. Yet after entering the tea economy, outcomes did not simply follow those earlier structures. Some women from originally disadvantaged positions moved from marginal farming into roles such as traders, suppliers, or small entrepreneurs, gaining greater income autonomy and room for independent action. Others from similar backgrounds remained in low-return labor or failed to move beyond insecure participation. Likewise, women from originally better-positioned groups did not necessarily advance further. I argue that the key lies in the capacity of individual women to recombine labor, mobility, kinship, local knowledge, and market access into workable strategies within this new opportunity field. More broadly, the paper shows that the effects of transnational agricultural investment cannot be read directly from women’s original social categories alone, because new opportunity fields also change how existing resources can be mobilized and converted into livelihood advancement.

• Between the luhu and the market: tais and its regimes of value in Timor-Leste Renata Nogueira da Silva Universidade de Brasília

  This paper analyzes the patrimonialization of tais, a textile considered traditional and central to Timorese social life, from both an ethnographic and institutional perspective. The Timorese case offers a privileged entry point to examine the impacts and contradictions of development policies in Southeast Asia. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2025 and data from the UNESCO candidacy process, I argue that tais is a relational artifact. Its trajectory reveals that regimes of value do not succeed one another in a linear fashion: they accumulate and coexist, with saliences that vary according to context. The inscription of tais on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding in 2021 produced new forms of classification and certification that added a patrimonial regime without eliminating the previous ones, ritual, economic and social.

  Mobilizing the concepts of objectification, the social life of things, and salience, I follow tais from its collective production, shaped by embodied learning, through its role in ritual exchange systems, to its contemporary insertion in market and heritage circuits. The agency of female weavers is central here: it is they who navigate these saliences on a daily basis, managing tais simultaneously as a ritual good, a commodity, and heritage. I discuss how this process generates complex and uneven impacts on local communities. The Timorese case contributes to regional debates on how international cultural policies simultaneously empower and constrain these communities, particularly women, in negotiating global frameworks without relinquishing local social orders.

Part 3

• Development Policy and the Production of (Hybrid) Space in Borobudur, Indonesia Bagus F. Apriadi University of Liverpool

  While development policies are often framed as paths to prosperity, opportunity, and improved quality of life, they can also reshape everyday life, especially in tourism destinations. In this paper, I examine how tourism development in Borobudur, Indonesia, transforms residents’ daily lives through what I call the production of hybrid space: a spatiotemporal condition in which heritage preservation, tourism development, and local everyday life are organized through competing, only partly aligned logics. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in three villages in the Borobudur area—Borobudur, Mendut, and Wanurejo—I explore how residents live amid the coexisting pressures of heritage governance and tourism development. Heritage preservation seeks to protect the area through controlled development, while tourism policies promote mobility, investment, and destination growth. Rather than treating these as separate domains, I argue that their interaction produces a hybrid space in which residents must continually adjust how they move, work, wait, access places, and organize their routines. These effects are not constant, but intensify with changing tourism rhythms, making seasonality central to how development is experienced on the ground. I show that the consequences of development extend beyond visible economic change or physical transformation. Temporal disruption also appears in everyday life through altered work schedules, disrupted mobility, uneven access, changing patterns of waiting, and the need to negotiate between tourism demands and ordinary routines. In this way, I shift attention from development policy as planned intervention to development policy as lived condition. This paper contributes to critical discussions of development in Southeast Asia in two ways. First, it shows how tourism development produces uneven outcomes through the spatiotemporal management of everyday life. Second, it proposes hybrid space as a way to understand how multiple development agendas are encountered, negotiated, and normalized by residents who remain in place.

• Cutting Trees, Clearing Homes: Infrastructure Development, Displacement, and the Erasure of Memory in Timor-Leste. Therese Nguyen Thi Phuong Tam Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e

  Development in Timor-Leste is commonly presented as a necessary path toward modernization, economic growth, and improved living conditions. Since independence, state-led infrastructure and mega-projects have become powerful symbols of national progress, especially in urban centres and strategic development areas. Roads, public buildings, and other large-scale projects are often justified as essential to the country’s future. However, these projects can also produce significant social costs for the communities in whose name development is carried out.
  This presentation examines the social consequences of road expansion, public construction, urban redevelopment, and other infrastructure projects that require the clearing of settlements and landscapes. In many cases, development has involved cutting down old trees, demolishing houses, and removing places that hold historical, ritual, and emotional meaning for local people. These interventions do not simply alter the physical environment. They can erase memories, weaken people’s attachment to place, and disrupt livelihoods, kinship networks, and everyday forms of social support.
  Many affected families describe compensation as delayed, inadequate, or poorly matched to their losses. Relocation plans often fail to take account of existing livelihoods, kinship relations, and access to services. The displacement of households also creates additional burdens for women, who frequently assume greater responsibility for rebuilding domestic life, maintaining family care, and securing water, food, and income in unfamiliar environments. At the same time, older people and persons with disabilities are placed at greater risk because relocation frequently reduces their access to social support, mobility, and healthcare.
  Combining ethnographic accounts of displaced households with a political-economic analysis of state-led infrastructure development, the paper argues that these harms are not accidental. Rather, they emerge from development models that privilege investment, visibility, and elite interests over social continuity, community participation, and historical memory.

• Relationality and Interiority: Regimes of Subjectivation and the Grounding of Individualism in Timor-Leste Daniel Schroeter Simião Universidade de Brasília Miguel Santos Filho Universidade de Brasília

  This paper presents an ethnography of regimes of subjectivation in Timor-Leste, focusing on the tensions involved in the grounding of individualist ideology in its coexistence with relational forms of personhood. It assumes that different moral regimes of person-making coexist and compete in the country—particularly those linked to kultura and to the governance of domestic violence—and analyzes how these regimes produce both relational persons, constituted through networks of reciprocity, hierarchy, and dependence, and individualized, self-reflexive subjects oriented toward individual rights through development policies and economic empowerment programs.
  The first part examines rural contexts, where ritual practices and domestic dynamics highlight the centrality of notions such as “wealth in persons” and “rights over persons,” structuring relational subjectivities grounded in precedence. The second part explores the implementation of empowerment programs and awareness initiatives, which seek to legitimize reflexive interiority and promote a self-entrepreneurial subject aligned with neoliberal political-economic rationalities.
  From this comparison, the paper argues that individualism does not emerge as a linear replacement of prior forms of subjectivation, but as a situated process marked by frictions, translations, and partial appropriations. In urban contexts, individualism tends to be articulated through pedagogical and institutional dispositifs that encourage subjective autonomization, whereas in rural contexts its incorporation is constrained by relational obligations and moral regimes that value hierarchy and interdependence. Still, both settings reveal zones of interpenetration, in which subjects navigate contradictory expectations, evidencing the coexistence and competition of distinct regimes vying for adherence.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Borobudur
• Chinese project
• Chinese workers
• E-commerce
• MSME
• Timor-Leste
• Vietnam
• collective consciousness
• conflicts
• contested survival
• cross-sector solidarity
• development
• digital development
• digital platform
• digitalisation
• energy transition
• envy
• everyday life
• extractive frontiers
• feminine agency
• hybrid space
• individualism
• inequality
• livelihood transformation
• moral regimes;
• neoliberalism
• patrimonialization
• personhood
• racial tensions
• regimes of value
• relationality
• rural women
• salience
• seasonality
• social change
• subjectivation
• tais
• tourism development
• transnational agricultural investment