Converting Tetun

What is it about?

This is a study of European missionaries' linguistic manipulation of a Timorese language and their translation of Catholic religious texts into it. I argue that their linguistic studies primarily aimed at a construction of Christian/colonial space in Timor rather than scientific investigation of the Timorese language. It resulted in Europe centric mistranstation of Timorese cultural terms such as lulik. I further argue that such mistranslation impacted anthropologists' understandings of the Timorese people as the "object" of scholarly investigation. Finally, I summarized cultural and political legacies of the missionaries' religious and linguistic activities to contemporary East Timor.

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Why is it important?

This is a revised version of my conference paper for the Association for Asian Studies in 2017 which won the Pattana Kitiarsa prize for the best graduate paper on Southeast Asia. The awarding committee's commendation nicely explain the significance of this study; "Tsuchiya studies the writings of Portuguese missionaries in Timor during the late 19th century to investigate how the colonial religious mission attempted to map conceptual categories such as idolater and (Christian) God to the indigenous Tetun cosmology. This essay demonstrates the relevance and applicability of historical and sociolinguistic methods to contemporary Southeast Asian studies while also presenting focused and detailed information on a population within Southeast Asia that was, and to some extent remains, marginalized."

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