Geopolitical Crocodiles – Oily Animations on the Timorese South Coast

Speaker: Alex Cullen, University of Cambridge
Series: Political Ecology Group Seminar Series

This paper discusses the contested ecological entanglements of ancestral identity, rising crocodile attacks and oil extractivity through a political ecology and ontology of the recently revived Timorese South Coast Supply Base project. Since the restitution of independence in 2002, populations of crocodiles have sharply risen, with migration from concentrated sites on the south coast to the more densely populated settlements of the north coast. Concurrent encroachment into their habitats has led to increasing numbers of attacks and deaths. Yet, crocodiles are traditionally revered as potent ancestral beings capable of interventionist punishment and redress across cosmological worlds for which the rise and frequency of attacks have troubled interspecies customary relations. The result has been cultural speculation that invasive Australian salt-water crocodiles were to blame for deaths, with such claims emanating most concerningly from the south coast communities where crocodiles-human ancestral relations are most potent and customarily vital. However, these are the most at risk from the development of the enormous South coast Tasi Mane oil and gas supply base project which has become even greater cause celebre for the state after revelations of Australia spying on Timor during oil and gas treaty negotiations. Oil is thus brought to attention as animating agent of encounter whereby slipperiness across and through cosmopolitical worlds also ruptures and reshapes geo-political potencies. Through interviews, site visits, participatory engagement and observation, the paper presents an argument for a more-than-human geopolitics to articulate competing concerns surrounding growing patterns of human-crocodile conflict in Timor Leste, and how such discussions link to emergent cosmopolitical ecologies of invasiveness, identity and land.