UC Santa Cruz

Edge Effects: Salt Making Worlds of Timor is an ethnographic study of shifting livelihoods and land use patterns in Kupang Bay. Under pressures from the Indonesian state to produce commercial grade salt, and in the context of declining ocean fish populations, salt farming has come to predominate livelihood aspirations of coastal residents, even as they recognize that it creates ecologies that contribute to the denigration of lifeways in the region. This dissertation argues that people in Oetua respond to conditions of scarcity and coercive state governance in three interrelated ways. First, by constructing dichotomies that draw comparisons between “then” and “now.” Through dichotomies, they weave a story about the present and its challenges. Second, is the practice of using the state’s tools in subversive and unexpected ways. Through tactical engagement with juridical forms and government actors, people undermine the state and advance their own agendas, but not without a great deal of work organizing across difference, and not without consequences. Third, is that by making use of liminal spaces, residents in Kupang Bay are able to hold on to alternative socialities and maintain meaningful attachments to place and one another, despite encroachments and displacements by economic nationalist projects.