Lisa Palmer
Biographic Data
| ID | 1448701 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa Palmer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Palmer |
| SIGNATURE | PALMER L |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8804-3608 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1926 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Customary Governance in Post-Independence Timor-Leste: Spirit Ecologies of the House
This book examines the dynamics of a 'return to custom’ in post-independence Timor-Leste; a set of practices connecting ancestral house communities with the complex spirit ecologies upon which people's livelihoods and well-being depend. Drawing on detailed comparative studies, it considers the contribution of custom and its inter-generational legacies to the development of sustainable social and environmental policies of governance in Southeast A…
Breaking the language barrier in adaptation
Chapter 2. Fataluku Ritual Houses: Status, Relation, and Renewal
The connections between Indigenous Australians and Indonesians beyond the trepang trade
The long-standing connections between Indigenous Australians in northern Australia and Makassan Indonesians endure in culture and language
Lisan Matters: Carbon forestry, embodied care and Indigenous governance norms in Timor-Leste
First study on central role of Indigenous practices of kinship, ritual and everyday resource negotiations in carbon forestry. • Invisible political-economy work is embedded in embodied socio-ecological knowledges. • Reformulates ways of imagining carbon commodification and associated environmental governance. • Calls on proponents of carbon projects to address the political and cultural implications of Indigenous governance processes. • Identifie…
Reflections on sustaining Trade and Kinship Traditions between Makassans and Yolŋu
Green structural transformation
Economic Diversity In Contemporary Timor-Leste
Economic Diversity in Contemporary Timor-Leste analyses various economic dynamics in past and present Timor-Leste. Comprising 14 research chapters, the volume brings to the fore: 1) local, community-based economic values and arrangements; 2) community-based entanglements with a market-driven economy; 3) the colonial and postcolonial governance praxis through which a market-driven economy has permeated the country, and 4) the creative and place-ba…
Holding Tightly: Co-Mingling, Life-Flourishing and Filmic Ecologies
Firmly emplaced within a soundscape incorporating movement, prayer, music, human-made and environmental sounds, the film Holding Tightly (2021) closely observes the performance and practice of a series of healing encounters in the Baucau Municipality of Timor-Leste. The lakadou (tubed zither) played in consort with dance in the opening and closing scenes is used by ritual specialists to communicate with the dai (ancestral nature spirit), which wi…
Designing safer chemicals
Solving twin crises
Green energy financing
Clinical sustainability
The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste
In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being…
Divided Loyalties: Displacement, Belonging and Citizenship Among East Timorese in West Timor
In a remarkably insightful, original and sensitively written book, engaging area studies scholars of East Timor and Indonesia, Andrey Damaledo tackles a difficult, under-researched and little-known
Unity and Division: Caring for Humans and Non-humans in a Divided Land
The border bifurcating the island of Timor was arbitrarily created in the late nineteenth century by the Portuguese and the Dutch. It is a border that has divided and separated the people of the ancient kingdoms of Koba Lima ever since, constraining relationships with their ancestral sacred sites, lands and waters. Timor’s wild animals, plants and natural phenomena challenge this division. Their free co-existence and movement through the region r…
Social inclusion and exclusion of people with mental illness in Timor-Leste: A qualitative investigation with multiple stakeholders
These findings highlight the need to combat social exclusion of people with mental illness and their families by harnessing local Timorese sociocultural strengths. Such an approach could centre around people with mental illness and their families to: increase population mental health awareness; bolster rights-based and culturally-grounded mental health services; and promote inclusive and accessible services and systems across sectors
Are people-centred mental health services acceptable and feasible in Timor-Leste? A qualitative study
People-centred mental healthcare is an influential concept for health system strengthening and sustainable development that has been developed and promoted primarily in Western contexts. It characterizes service users, families and communities as active participants in health system development. However, we have limited understanding of how well people-centred mental healthcare aligns with the multiplicity of peoples, cultures, languages and cont…
Spirit Ecologies and Customary Governance in Post-conflict Timor-Leste
In post-conflict Timor-Leste, the concepts of spirit ecologies and intergenerational wellbeing direct our attention to the ways in which Timorese people derive strength from house-based family networks as well as protective and productive spiritual relations with living nature. These practices of exchange resonate with a comparative body of research that has described similar 'spiritscapes' elsewhere in Southeast Asia and their relevance for soci…
Meeting the leadership challenges for interdisciplinary environmental research
Urban agriculture growth in US cities
Environment, Nation, and “Race”
Drawing on geography's historical origins and its modern‐day criticism of society–nature relations, this entry teases out the dynamic intersection of the concepts of environment, nation, and “race.” It examines how they find expression in the literature on imperial conquest; in the political spaces of contestation surrounding indigeneity and colonialism and postcolonialism; in the emergence of different approaches to environmental management, inc…
Opening the paths to healing: Developing an integrated approach to health in Timor Leste
In Timor Leste, customary healing practices are deeply embedded in the inter-relationships between people, the ancestors and the environment. Meanwhile being ‘modern’ has long meant being both educated and Christian, ushering in ongoing shifts in moral worlds. These seemingly contradictory forms of sociality, relationality and subjectivity are, we argue, uniquely woven together through a deeply political meshwork of performative practices. Drawin…
Cultures of Carbon and the Logic of Care: The Possibilities for Carbon Enrichment and Its Cultural Signature
Climate change and the associated need to decarbonize pose not just risks to cultures but potential opportunities for cultural experimentation, renewal, and economic dynamism. An Australian case of carbon mitigation through carbon farming represents a discursive tool with which indigenous groups are seeking to leverage a very distinct conceptualization of payment for ecosystem services, one that values the labor and reciprocal relationships and l…
An East Timorese Domain: Luca from Central and Peripheral Perspectives
The East Timorese kingdom Luca is described as the hegemon of the eastern parts of Timor in some nineteenth-century works. This is gainsaid by other data, which point to the existence of a multitude of petty kingdoms. This article scrutinizes Luca’s claim to power from a number of angles, utilizing European records and contemporary anthropological fieldwork. First, we analyse the claims of the centre as reflected in colonial and indigenous narrat…
Nation building and resource management: The politics of ‘nature’ in Timor Leste
Bushwalking in Kakadu: A Study of Cultural Borderlands
This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non-Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non-Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non-A…
Interpreting `nature: The politics of engaging with Kakadu as an Aboriginal place
Beginning with a general contextual analysis of the cultural politics of `nature' in Australia's Kakadu National Park and culminating in an analysis of the ways in which two interpretative centres contribute to the discursive production of the Park, this article is concerned with how differently constructed notions of `nature' converge and conflict in the production of place. It examines the tensions and interplay between settler Australian under…
Hamatak halirin: The cosmological and socio-ecological roles of water in Koba Lima, Timor
The cosmological and socio-ecological roles of water, in particular spring water, have not been the subject of sustained analysis in the anthropological literatures of the eastern archipelago. Taking as our starting point the central role of water in the origin narratives and ritual practices of Koba Lima, a coalition of five ancient kingdoms located across the division of East Timor and Indonesian West Timor, we explore the profound cosmological…
Nature’, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities
In the postcolonial context of Australia there has been a belated legal recognition of sui generis Indigenous rights and interests over much of the continent. However, the pervasive environmental discourse guiding resource management practices remains firmly based on ‘commonsense’ settler understandings of ‘nature’ as an external domain to be managed and/or preserved. In order to understand how this could be otherwise, this paper examines ideas a…
Spirit Ecologies and Customary Governance in Post-conflict Timor-Leste
In post-conflict Timor-Leste, the concepts of spirit ecologies and intergenerational wellbeing direct our attention to the ways in which Timorese people derive strength from house-based family networks as well as protective and productive spiritual relations with living nature. These practices of exchange resonate with a comparative body of research that has described similar 'spiritscapes' elsewhere in Southeast Asia and their relevance for soci…
Cultures of Carbon and the Logic of Care: The Possibilities for Carbon Enrichment and Its Cultural Signature
Climate change and the associated need to decarbonize pose not just risks to cultures but potential opportunities for cultural experimentation, renewal, and economic dynamism. An Australian case of carbon mitigation through carbon farming represents a discursive tool with which indigenous groups are seeking to leverage a very distinct conceptualization of payment for ecosystem services, one that values the labor and reciprocal relationships and l…
Land access and livelihoods in post-conflict Timor-Leste: No magic bullets
In Timor-Leste, customary institutions contribute to sustainable and equitable rural development and the establishment of improved access to and management of land, water and other natural resources. Drawing on multi-sited empirical research, we argue that the recognition and valorization of custom and common property management is a prerequisite for sustainable and equitable land tenure reform in Timor-Leste. In a four-community study of the rel…
The Modern Origins of Traditional Agriculture: Colonial Policy, Swidden Development, and Environmental Degradation in Eastern Timor
The origin of swidden systems is typically portrayed as a pre-colonial, pre-nationalist, and pre-developmentalist tradition, subsequently interrupted and eroded by colonial exploitation and post-colonial technoscience in favour of market agriculture. A recent counter-position to this 'anteriority model' presents swidden systems as reactionary 'refuge agriculture' in search of remote locations to circumvent state accountability (Scott 2009). A thi…
Fishing Lifestyles: ‘Territorians’, Traditional Owners and the Management of Recreational Fishing in Kakadu National Park
The relationships between traditional Aboriginal land owners and other Park users in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory are characterised by competing agendas and competing ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the environment. Similarly, the management of recreational fishing in the Park is permeated by the tensions and opposition of contested ideas and perspectives from non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners.…
Negotiating the Ritual and Social Order through Spectacle: The (Re)Production of Macassan/Yol▒u Histories
Broadly framed in terms of performance theories by Turner and Beeman, this paper weaves together the historical, mythical, ritual and performative aspects of a 1997 encounter in Sulawesi between Yolŋu (an Aboriginal people of northern Australia) and Macassans (people from southern Sulawesi, Indonesia). The focus of the paper is an indigenous opera called Trepang, which is based on the centuries‐long history of trading relations and family connect…
Opening the paths to healing: Developing an integrated approach to health in Timor Leste
In Timor Leste, customary healing practices are deeply embedded in the inter-relationships between people, the ancestors and the environment. Meanwhile being ‘modern’ has long meant being both educated and Christian, ushering in ongoing shifts in moral worlds. These seemingly contradictory forms of sociality, relationality and subjectivity are, we argue, uniquely woven together through a deeply political meshwork of performative practices. Drawin…
Are people-centred mental health services acceptable and feasible in Timor-Leste? A qualitative study
People-centred mental healthcare is an influential concept for health system strengthening and sustainable development that has been developed and promoted primarily in Western contexts. It characterizes service users, families and communities as active participants in health system development. However, we have limited understanding of how well people-centred mental healthcare aligns with the multiplicity of peoples, cultures, languages and cont…
Economic Diversity In Contemporary Timor-Leste
Economic Diversity in Contemporary Timor-Leste analyses various economic dynamics in past and present Timor-Leste. Comprising 14 research chapters, the volume brings to the fore: 1) local, community-based economic values and arrangements; 2) community-based entanglements with a market-driven economy; 3) the colonial and postcolonial governance praxis through which a market-driven economy has permeated the country, and 4) the creative and place-ba…
Holding Tightly: Co-Mingling, Life-Flourishing and Filmic Ecologies
Firmly emplaced within a soundscape incorporating movement, prayer, music, human-made and environmental sounds, the film Holding Tightly (2021) closely observes the performance and practice of a series of healing encounters in the Baucau Municipality of Timor-Leste. The lakadou (tubed zither) played in consort with dance in the opening and closing scenes is used by ritual specialists to communicate with the dai (ancestral nature spirit), which wi…
Urban agriculture growth in US cities
An East Timorese Domain: Luca from Central and Peripheral Perspectives
The East Timorese kingdom Luca is described as the hegemon of the eastern parts of Timor in some nineteenth-century works. This is gainsaid by other data, which point to the existence of a multitude of petty kingdoms. This article scrutinizes Luca’s claim to power from a number of angles, utilizing European records and contemporary anthropological fieldwork. First, we analyse the claims of the centre as reflected in colonial and indigenous narrat…
Terrestrial Oscillations and Climatic Variations
Fishing Lifestyles: ‘Territorians’, Traditional Owners and the Management of Recreational Fishing in Kakadu National Park
The relationships between traditional Aboriginal land owners and other Park users in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory are characterised by competing agendas and competing ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the environment. Similarly, the management of recreational fishing in the Park is permeated by the tensions and opposition of contested ideas and perspectives from non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners.…
Listening positions
Bushwalking in Kakadu: A Study of Cultural Borderlands
This paper examines the relationship between the contested domains of Aboriginal traditional owners and non-Aboriginal Park users, specifically bushwalkers, in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. It argues that Kakadu remains a cultural borderland where a negotiated relationship between local Aboriginal traditional owners and non-Aboriginal Park users is struggling to emerge. It finds that the rhetoric of Aboriginal/non-A…
The ‘Spirit’ of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law
Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applic…
Nature’, Place and the Recognition of Indigenous Polities
In the postcolonial context of Australia there has been a belated legal recognition of sui generis Indigenous rights and interests over much of the continent. However, the pervasive environmental discourse guiding resource management practices remains firmly based on ‘commonsense’ settler understandings of ‘nature’ as an external domain to be managed and/or preserved. In order to understand how this could be otherwise, this paper examines ideas a…
Nation building and resource management: The politics of ‘nature’ in Timor Leste
Interpreting `nature: The politics of engaging with Kakadu as an Aboriginal place
Beginning with a general contextual analysis of the cultural politics of `nature' in Australia's Kakadu National Park and culminating in an analysis of the ways in which two interpretative centres contribute to the discursive production of the Park, this article is concerned with how differently constructed notions of `nature' converge and conflict in the production of place. It examines the tensions and interplay between settler Australian under…
Negotiating the Ritual and Social Order through Spectacle: The (Re)Production of Macassan/Yol▒u Histories
Broadly framed in terms of performance theories by Turner and Beeman, this paper weaves together the historical, mythical, ritual and performative aspects of a 1997 encounter in Sulawesi between Yolŋu (an Aboriginal people of northern Australia) and Macassans (people from southern Sulawesi, Indonesia). The focus of the paper is an indigenous opera called Trepang, which is based on the centuries‐long history of trading relations and family connect…
Enlivening development: Water management in post-conflict Baucau city, Timor-Leste
This paper explores how the state and others involved in the ‘development enterprise’ in Timor-Leste are (mis)recognizing the potential of the existing environmental governance and exchange capacities of local customary institutions and practices in relation to water supply and management. Examining the problematic of water supply in a particular place-based instance – more specifically, the intermesh of the customary, state and market sectors – …
Hamatak halirin: The cosmological and socio-ecological roles of water in Koba Lima, Timor
The cosmological and socio-ecological roles of water, in particular spring water, have not been the subject of sustained analysis in the anthropological literatures of the eastern archipelago. Taking as our starting point the central role of water in the origin narratives and ritual practices of Koba Lima, a coalition of five ancient kingdoms located across the division of East Timor and Indonesian West Timor, we explore the profound cosmological…
Land access and livelihoods in post-conflict Timor-Leste: No magic bullets
In Timor-Leste, customary institutions contribute to sustainable and equitable rural development and the establishment of improved access to and management of land, water and other natural resources. Drawing on multi-sited empirical research, we argue that the recognition and valorization of custom and common property management is a prerequisite for sustainable and equitable land tenure reform in Timor-Leste. In a four-community study of the rel…
Land access and livelihoods in post-conflict Timor-Leste: No magic bullets
In Timor-Leste, customary institutions contribute to sustainable and equitable rural development and the establishment of improved access to and management of land, water and other natural resources. Drawing on multi-sited empirical research, we argue that the recognition and valorization of custom and common property management is a prerequisite for sustainable and equitable land tenure reform in Timor-Leste. In a four-community study of the rel…
The Modern Origins of Traditional Agriculture: Colonial Policy, Swidden Development, and Environmental Degradation in Eastern Timor
The origin of swidden systems is typically portrayed as a pre-colonial, pre-nationalist, and pre-developmentalist tradition, subsequently interrupted and eroded by colonial exploitation and post-colonial technoscience in favour of market agriculture. A recent counter-position to this 'anteriority model' presents swidden systems as reactionary 'refuge agriculture' in search of remote locations to circumvent state accountability (Scott 2009). A thi…
Environment, Nation, and “Race”
Drawing on geography's historical origins and its modern‐day criticism of society–nature relations, this entry teases out the dynamic intersection of the concepts of environment, nation, and “race.” It examines how they find expression in the literature on imperial conquest; in the political spaces of contestation surrounding indigeneity and colonialism and postcolonialism; in the emergence of different approaches to environmental management, inc…
Opening the paths to healing: Developing an integrated approach to health in Timor Leste
In Timor Leste, customary healing practices are deeply embedded in the inter-relationships between people, the ancestors and the environment. Meanwhile being ‘modern’ has long meant being both educated and Christian, ushering in ongoing shifts in moral worlds. These seemingly contradictory forms of sociality, relationality and subjectivity are, we argue, uniquely woven together through a deeply political meshwork of performative practices. Drawin…
Cultures of Carbon and the Logic of Care: The Possibilities for Carbon Enrichment and Its Cultural Signature
Climate change and the associated need to decarbonize pose not just risks to cultures but potential opportunities for cultural experimentation, renewal, and economic dynamism. An Australian case of carbon mitigation through carbon farming represents a discursive tool with which indigenous groups are seeking to leverage a very distinct conceptualization of payment for ecosystem services, one that values the labor and reciprocal relationships and l…
An East Timorese Domain: Luca from Central and Peripheral Perspectives
The East Timorese kingdom Luca is described as the hegemon of the eastern parts of Timor in some nineteenth-century works. This is gainsaid by other data, which point to the existence of a multitude of petty kingdoms. This article scrutinizes Luca’s claim to power from a number of angles, utilizing European records and contemporary anthropological fieldwork. First, we analyse the claims of the centre as reflected in colonial and indigenous narrat…
Meeting the leadership challenges for interdisciplinary environmental research
Urban agriculture growth in US cities
Unity and Division: Caring for Humans and Non-humans in a Divided Land
The border bifurcating the island of Timor was arbitrarily created in the late nineteenth century by the Portuguese and the Dutch. It is a border that has divided and separated the people of the ancient kingdoms of Koba Lima ever since, constraining relationships with their ancestral sacred sites, lands and waters. Timor’s wild animals, plants and natural phenomena challenge this division. Their free co-existence and movement through the region r…
Social inclusion and exclusion of people with mental illness in Timor-Leste: A qualitative investigation with multiple stakeholders
These findings highlight the need to combat social exclusion of people with mental illness and their families by harnessing local Timorese sociocultural strengths. Such an approach could centre around people with mental illness and their families to: increase population mental health awareness; bolster rights-based and culturally-grounded mental health services; and promote inclusive and accessible services and systems across sectors
Are people-centred mental health services acceptable and feasible in Timor-Leste? A qualitative study
People-centred mental healthcare is an influential concept for health system strengthening and sustainable development that has been developed and promoted primarily in Western contexts. It characterizes service users, families and communities as active participants in health system development. However, we have limited understanding of how well people-centred mental healthcare aligns with the multiplicity of peoples, cultures, languages and cont…
Spirit Ecologies and Customary Governance in Post-conflict Timor-Leste
In post-conflict Timor-Leste, the concepts of spirit ecologies and intergenerational wellbeing direct our attention to the ways in which Timorese people derive strength from house-based family networks as well as protective and productive spiritual relations with living nature. These practices of exchange resonate with a comparative body of research that has described similar 'spiritscapes' elsewhere in Southeast Asia and their relevance for soci…
The cosmopolitics of flow and healing in north‐central Timor‐Leste
In north central Timor‐Leste, multi‐sensory ecological engagement is deeply entangled with conceptualisations of and approaches to people’s wellbeing. How people understand human health and wellbeing is closely related to how they understand nature or more particularly human/nature relations and distinctions across multiple timescales. Working through complex cosmopolitics and activated through cross‐temporal more‐than‐human ‘mutualities of being…
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Geography (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Law (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (10 works) · Economics (10 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (8 works) · Political economy (8 works)