The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north-central Timor-Leste

Abstract

In north central Timor-Leste, multi-sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross-temporal more-than-human ‘mutualities of being’, kinship networks are attuned to relational flows between ‘bodies’ and things. Rather than concentrating on the disjunctions created by the differences in the natures of beings or their ritual separation, this paper examines how relational flows be..