Archiving sound materials from East Timor: community involvement in a brand new country

John Bowden

Department of Linguistics

Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies

The Australian National University

This paper draws on recent experiences working in East Timor where I have been involved in a collaborative documentation programme focussing on the Waimaha language from the eastern part of the country. The research project is being undertaken with the support of the VolkswagenStiftung funded DoBeS (Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen) ‘Endangered Languages Documentation’ Programme, and as such must fulfil the requirements of the programme in terms of archiving, metadata, dissemination of materials, etc.

All of our research plans must also be formally approved by the recently inaugurated East Timorese Instituto Nacional de Linguística (National Institute of Linguistics) and of course, community participation requires at least informal approval from the speakers of Waimaha. Finally, as linguistic researchers, the academic leaders of the documentation project also have their own agendas to pursue.

It is not surprising that careful juggling can be required at times if the interests of all the stakeholders in this research, each with their different agendas, are to be satisfied. Further complications are introduced into the equation by the fact that East Timorese civil authorities are in the process of setting up entirely new institutions to administer not just research, but everything else in the new country, and all of this has to be done in an environment where the problems of economic and infrastructural underdevelopment were compounded horrendously by the devastation wreaked by Indonesian military sponsored militias during the Indonesian withdrawal from East Timor.

In this paper I canvass some of the problems we have encountered so far in our East Timorese work and look at the kinds of solutions that we have been able to find in satisfying all the stakeholders involved.