| Summary: | This thesis analyses the East Timorese heritage-making process, from an anthropological perspective. The aim of this thesis is to examine the tensions and ambivalences towards heritage, both at an institutional level and in everyday cultural practices, by focusing on the grey areas and intersections between the normative discursive practices developed by governmental apparatuses and local ways of conceiving heritage, particularly in the Venilale area, in the Baukau region. The research is based on 15-month of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between the sub-region of Venilale, the region and town of Baukau and the capital city of the country, Dili. The analytical tools offered by the theoretical framework of the Critical Heritage Studies are central in this analysis, which reconfigures heritage as a set of active practices and discursive processes developed by different actors, among which governmental institutions, policymakers and local customary representative. Local understandings regarding the transmission of valuable goods and resources allow to overcome the dichotomic tensions between natural and cultural and tangible and intangible cultural heritage, underlying the Western perspective on heritage.
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