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From the antrophological point of view, the island arouses the upmost scientific interest such is the heterogeneity of it's people.
For centuries the East Timorese had been farmers, living in scattered hamlets and eating what they grew. Only a few coastal East Timorese were fishermen. Trading and shop keeping had for generations been in the hands of the Chinese. East Timor is extremely mountainous, so the majority of East Timorese had always lived in isolation, far from towns and foreign influences, tied to their fields and animistic practices. In spite of centuries of Catholic missionary work by the Portuguese, in 1975 animists still numbered as much as 72 % of the population. The local Timorese kings still played an important part in their lives and allegiances, whilst interference from Portuguese administrators and military was almost non-existent.
In the period between World War 2 and the 1975 Indonesian invasion, a number of East Timorese managed to gain an education in the colony's few schools. Some were mestizos, of Timorese and Portuguese parentage, others were Timorese from traditional ruling families, but the majority were native Timorese who gained their education through the Catholic minor seminary. The emergence of this small educated elite in the 1960s and 1970s ensured that, when the Portuguese left East Timor in 1975, these people with schooling, and nationalist aspirations, became the territory's leaders.
Politically, socially and ethnologically Timorese differ amongst themselves in groups. There is the division in independent sucos (kingdoms), the distinction between the Atoni tribes of the Servian kingdom, in West Timor, and the Belos of the Portuguese territory, groups such as the Firacos, ethnic designation adopted by the Timorese in between Baucau and Luca, or the Caladi which are the inhabitants of the central crest , Malays and non-Malays, so many "sucos" and more than twenty languages and dialects, the contribution of the exogamy, of parties irreconcilable. In conclusion, that is the expression of a relative absence of bio-ethnic unity of the populations.
The history of a People and their Culture voted to banishment from their motherland, the eastern half of an island, former Portuguese colony is the much unknown. Timor lies in South East Asia enclosed in world's largest archipelago. That is Indonesia, which gave it's name to the Republic constituted after the dutch withdrawl. Since the beginning, Indonesian governments have experienced resistance coming from independist movements of various islands which claim ethnical and cultural diveristy from the predominant Javanese type. Nonetheless they were continuously silenced thus unable to internationalize the situation to a stage that would force foreign intervention. When it became inevitable, in that single exception of the western half of New Guinea, the autodetermination of the papuans in favour of an integration in Indonesia was observed as an Indonesian orchestrated act, and remembered until today as the darkest episode in the history of UN.
Indonesia couldn't either afford the regional instability that the prospect of a small nation rising in between the empire would arouse .This solitary piece of territory and it's inhabitants had to be sacrificed for a hugger cause.
Portugal which's vast colonial possessions had once made the country great, with times had become responsible for it's retardment. The drawling of the situation was put to an end with a successful coup d'etat, in April '74, which engaged a national revolution ceasing dictatorship and commited to decolonization. Meanwhile, if East Timor, due to distance and expense, was already the most forgotten colony, less attention it was given towards the definition of it's future as the longed changes in the metropolis didn't avoid internal deviations and contradictions. It brought instability to the government of the country and the urgence to lay the basis of democracy.
Реферат опубликован: 4/09/2009