In the first chapter of this book I introduced the terms meto (indigenous/ familiar) and kase (foreign) and explained how in Oecussi these concepts are used to make sense of life. McWilliam (2007b), Richmond (2011, p 117) and Traube (2007) have noted how the advent of independence in Timor-Leste has facilitated the renewal of ritual practice as an organizing principle of public life, and spurred the emergence of new and distinctly Timorese ways of being modern. Building on their work I set out to show how experience in Oecussi is understood, not through a firm identification with either category, but in the work of ‘crossing’ between them, with outward-looking (kase) lifeworlds animated and made meaningful by ritually mediated engagement with a meto realm associated with all that is indigenous, invisible, and upland.

The understanding of kase and meto as co-present in daily life and decisive in its course, can be traced to resettlement of the rural population in periurban settlements that started in the 1970s. Before that time the terms were relatively simple categorical markers – kase folk could be reliably distinguished by wearing trousers, meto people always wore village woven beti (sarong). Now, even for those who remain in the hills, foreign ways (not to mention trousers) have become common, and the utility of kase and meto for describing two contrasting and sometimes oppositional modes of being (e.g. our grandfathers fought the kase) have been reduced.