The 500-year Timorese funu

As recent history reveals, the Timorese have not easily acquiesced to domin ance by outsiders, now or in the past. This article Sets down the broad con tours of that past, investigates how that past has been reclaimed, and offe rs a reflection on the style of the Timorese resistance or war, loosely lab eled funu in Timor's Tetum language. By setting down the boundary dividing colonial spheres of influence on Timer, the two concerned colonial powers, Holland and Portugal, unleashed a terrible hubris. This article argues that Timer under the Portuguese stood out in the Southeast Asian context, not s o much in the level of violence used to neutralize rebellion, as in the lon gevity of rebellion, and even the inter-generational character of its rebel lions down to modern times. From a Westernizing perspective, or at least a perspective that engages the colonial incorporation of Timer as a dependent tributary within a broader modern world-system, this article describes sev eral discrete stages in Timorese history, albeit within a 500-year framewor k. But, it also asks, can the 500-year history thesis as defended by Waller stein be sustained against the argument developed by Frank and Gills that m uch of the periphery was home to world-systems of its own long before the C olumbian revolution, stretching back at least 5,000 years? Attempts to recl aim this history, this article shows, have been, and are bound to be, cruci al to the making of an East Timorese identity.