Tracing Troubled Times

Objects of value from Sumba and Timor have moved along trade routes for centuries, traveling far from their places of origin.Rooted in local histories, beliefs, and personal displays, such possessions often have left stories in their absence, many tinged with resentments after secretive trade or theft.Worldwide demand for what I will shorthandedly (and not unproblematically) term "arts"2 accelerated tremendously in the last decades of the twentieth century, following both a boom in international tourism in Indonesia and a flourishing global commerce in "ethnic arts"-drawing in goods from many non-Westem societies into a largely Euro-American market.Although my work has been mostly in Indonesian areas, in 2000 it expanded to East Timor.In the wake of rampant destruction of this region in 1999, following a popular referendum for independence from Indonesia, East Timor remains largely in ruins.After this referendum, violence swept all of Timor Island, producing many trajectories for East Timor arts, spilling across the island and beyond.In recent years of tumult, objects of this small nation have been burnt, stolen, or sold out of necessity, and many now join the art shop inventories of Indonesian urban centers.This article offers a brief picture of the movement of objects through turbulent times and touches upon the historical nature of violence in the eastern Indonesian archipelago-often a compelling factor for international collectors seeking objects from the region.Based upon ethnographic research carried out between 1998 and 2001 and building upon earlier work, what follows is part of a larger project that investigates ethnographically the folklore about lost objects, in order to gain knowledge into local 2 I do not use the term "art" here in a strictly Western evaluative sense, underpinned by historical institutions (museums, university departments, art critics) and a certain public consensus.Rather, I consider "art" as taking on definition through a "system of action" (as discussed by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Concept [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], p. 6) producing objects that carry a "particular type of social potential" (Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed.Arjun Appadurai [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], p. 6).Such objects bear specific values and meanings in the social contexts of their creation and in fluctuating realities that follow and stimulate ongoing commentary among their owners.As Christopher Steiner recently noted, in movements through time and space, objects potentially shift categories and slide along slippery lines dividing art from artifact from commodity.See Christopher Steiner, "Rights of Passage: On the Liminal Identity of Art in the Border Zone," in The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture, ed.Fred R. Myers (Santa Fe, AZ: School of American Research, 2001), p. 224.Steiner's use of "bordercrossing" (a concept discussed by many in recent literature) both conceptually and geographically resonates with my study of the movements of Indonesian and, perhaps most saliently, East Timor arts.Indeed, such arts take on a sort of "border fetishism," (Patricia Spyer, ed., Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces [New York and London: Routledge, 1998]), oscillating between domains geographical, political, and ideological.Moreover, as Margaret Wiener discusses in her work on Bali, objects (both natural and manufactured) can be crucial intersections between visible and invisible realities

Tracing · Value (mathematics · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Peacebuilding and International Security