Engaging Processes of Sense-Making and Negotiation in Contemporary Timor-Leste

The articles in this special issue build on past ethnographic inquiries and focus on political and social change since Timor-Leste independence. One of the things we have found particularly exciting about researching post-independent Timor-Leste has been to carry out fieldwork in a context where not just researchers, but also our informants, are caught up in processes of sense-making of determining what kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is becoming. The reality of ethnographic research in such a context is far different from, as Ferguson (1999, 208) has it, the archetypal image of the anthropologist dropped into the middle of a cultural homogenous village community where the researcher acquires from local informants a degree of cultural fluency. Rather, while we as researchers have tried to learn about Timor-Leste, our informants, as citizens of a new nation, have been absorbed in a parallel process of learning, deliberating and at times contesting what kind of place Timor-Leste as an independent nation is, and should become in the future (see Kammen 2009). In other words, making sense of independent Timor- Leste has, over the past decade, been a project that preoccupies Timorese citizens as much as the foreign researcher. This issue addresses some of these processes of sense-making and negotiation; and highlights the ambiguities and paradoxes, while stressing the heterogeneity and unpredictability of contemporary Timor-Leste

Strongly extreme points and approximation properties

We show that if $x$ is a strongly extreme point of a bounded closed convex subset of a Banach space and the identity has a geometrically and topologically good enough local approximation at $x$, then $x$ is already a denting point. It turns out that such an approximation of the identity exists at any strongly extreme point of the unit ball of a Banach space with the unconditional compact approximation property. We also prove that every Banach space with a Schauder basis can be equivalently renormed to satisfy the sufficient conditions mentioned. In contrast to the above results we also construct a non-symmetric norm on $c_0$ for which all points on the unit sphere are strongly extreme, but none of these points are denting.Comment: 14 page