This article examines the relations between juridical discourse and ritual practice in the bandos issued by the Portuguese colonial government in East Timor between the second-half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century. Bandos consisted of orders and instructions of command issued by the Portuguese governor in Dilly and ceremonially transmitted by colonial officers to the populations of the various Timorese kingdoms. Bandos were a principal tool of colonial governance with regards to indigenous matters. They were used by the Portuguese to arbitrate conflicts, punish transgressions and, generally, to institute realities in the Timorese world. However, this institution also came to acquire a singular expression in the indigenous cultures, such that the Timorese traditional authorities, the liurais, also used it to communicate their own instructions and commands. The essay conceptualizes bandos as colectives of justice and explores their colonial and indigenous variants. In thus considering the bandos as collectives - heterogeneous associations in which both linguistic and non-linguistic elements combine to produce power effects upon the populations - the article proposes a conceptual alternative to linguistic and literary perspectives in the analysis of colonial discourse.
Bandos; Colonial Discourse; Justice; Ritual; East Timor; History; XIXth-XXth Centuries
