This volume, the editors write in their Introduction, ‘aims to shed light on the myriad ways in which the dead – especially those who died during the occupation – matter to the living’. In successfully realising that aim, the volume provides a thick ethnographic analysis of how death rituals have become a site of struggle in post-independence Timor-Leste, a contested terrain where participants from different social positions play out overlapping conceptions of the past and the future.

In both pre-and post-independence Timor-Leste societies, ritual treatment of the dead is a cosmological as well as a social concern. Mortuary ceremonies weave together two sets of obligations: those of the living to the dead, and those among the living; the latter include the obligations of house members to assist one another in honouring their dead relatives, and formal prestation obligations between allied groups established through marriages. At the mortuary ceremonies I attended in early 1970s Aileu, in what was then Portuguese Timor, Mambai described all material gifts offered in mortuary ceremonies, whether the animal sacrifices made to the spirits of the deceased or the livestock exchanged between marital allies, as ‘paying for the fatigue of the dead’ (seul maeta ni kolen). Kole, fatigue, tiredness, refers to states of exhaustion incurred in life-giving activities, and its repayment can have the sense of a ‘wage’ (Traube 2007). Paying the dead their wages took time. Death was not a momentary event but a lengthy process, structured by a series of ceremonies that began with the burial and concluded months, or more often years later, with ceremonies to ‘dispatch’ (toil) the dead to their final resting place. In the interval, people said, the dead linger near the living – as protective ancestors, if satisfied with the honours they have received, or raiding the gardens in the form of ‘wild’ spirits, if they feel neglected. Performing burial and post-burial ceremonies maintained the proper balance between the living and the dead at the same time as they organised the alliance relations among the living.

Dispatch ceremonies were the largest scale of any performance, as several men from one lineage house (or agnatically related houses) would usually band together to dispatch their dead relatives in one ceremony, to which each would summon his own wife-takers and wife-givers.