The dead as memory workers

Abstract

This article examines how Timor-Leste’s dead are memory workers. Drawing on ethnographic research, it probes how the restless spirits of those who died during the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999) are activating practices of searching for and recovering their bodies among their families and communities that allow them to be ‘gathered in’ and cared for in new geographic and socio-political spaces. These practices enable the re-membering of communities of the living and the dead in the aftermath of the profoundly dismembering effects of the occupation while also allowing some of the silences of nation-and-state-building projects to be made partially present and negotiated. I suggest that while the dead are not memory activists in the sense that they push for a specific social or political agenda, they are memory workers in the way they work on the living, opening up reparative and political possibilities. The work of the dead troubles the distinctions between the active and the passive, the subject and object, and the human and the more-than-human that lie at the heart of dominant understandings of memory-work and memory activism, inviting new ways of thinking about agency and the unexpected avenues through which social and political change can sometimes take place.