In early years of this century, as Timor-Leste acceded Independence, different branches of social sciences renewed their interest on this country, much influenced by the urge for political intervention, sponsored by the World Bank, UNDP, development agencies or Human Rights NGO's, and not fully integrated into international academic debates (Gunn 2007, Hicks forthcoming). Earlier ethnographic research on Timor-Leste was not very prolific, but produced major contributions to current Anthropology (Traube, 1986, Hicks, 2004). In the last decade 2 main perspectives have dominated the academic debate both in studies on land possession and representations of power. One, large scale approaches centered on mapping forms of land registration and treating the category of ';traditional' as universal, without any specifically anthropological thickness (Fitzpatrick 2002). Two,deep ethnographic analysis, which is patent for the Fataluku in McWilliam (2001, 2006), without a comprehensive comparative approach. Approaches on power and democracy in Timor-Leste has also developed 2 lines of analysis: one favoring macro/institutional studies (Feijo, forthcoming), the other one focusing rather on grassroots communities ('aldeias' and 'sukus') - e.g., Hohe, 2002; Trindade in Mears 2008; Feijó;, 2009; Cummins 2010; Cummins & Leach in Leach & Kingsbury, forthcoming) . It is relevant to mention that the country is undergoing a public debate on the "municipal" level, which is understood to be an original contribution to the configuration of the governance system (Farram 2010; Leach & Kingsbury forthcoming). Our research proposes to develop an analytical field located in the merger of both approaches. We will engage with literature that show how territorial rights are encapsulated in a code of autochthonous common law, in the Portuguese colonial legacy, and in the post-colonial practices under Indonesian domination, but we do not take a legislative or governmental perspective on the issue - such as Gonzalez Devant (2008), who argues argue that the 2006 crisis in Timor-Leste resonates a clash between these different systems. Even if it is not possible to export directly to the Timorese situation our previous experience and reflections on the demarcation of indigenous land in Brazil, undertaken by the Principal Investigator, our approach to questions of land tenure and political power among the Fataluku will find sustainable comparisons in the wake of what was recently done for the demarcation of indigenous land among the Tupinambá; de Olivença (Viegas 2009a, 2009b, 2010) - namely analytical tools referring to comparisons and categories of intermediation (Viegas 2009a, 2010). We will elaborate further thoughts about comparisons on the basis of 'comparing the incommensurabe' (Viegas 2009a: 152; Viveiros de Castro & Goldman 2006: 186), arguing against obsessive evaluation of similarities of scale and type of objects being compared, and in favour of considering that 'one of the things that anthropology demonstrates is that commensurability is an internal, not an external, process' (cf. Viegas 2009a: 152). In Timor-Leste approaches to land tenure have assumed contours centered on population dislocation caused by the colonial power and later forced by the Indonesian military (cf. Fitzpatrick 2002: 177; Bovensiepen 2009: 324). Bovensiepen argues that claims to land ownership are based on ancestral connections and lulik power (translated as spiritual power), following the debates also known in other parts of Southeast Asia, and in the aboriginal context in Australia (Bovensiepen 2009: 326, 330). Bovensiepen and McWilliam (2001, 2006, developing excellent ethnographic analyses, have not considered a less representational analysis of landscape. Their own material, however, reveals ideas of land as 'life-giving' and the fact that land-spirit may literally mean 'owners of the land' (Bovensiepen 2009: 326, 327) may shed new light to an analysis of the value of the land. Leach's (2004) argument about the status of the land among the Papuan Reite is an important comparative lead to follow. Leach has sustained ethnographically the land as a nexus of social life, and that 'kinship is not about descent through genealogy, but is an account of the relations between land and people' (Leach 2004: 31, 115; 2009: 181). We propose to follow such lines of comparison that may bring new insights on personhood, kinship and non-topographical languages of belonging to territory (Viegas forthcoming) in which a dialogue between Melanesia and the study of lowland South America people is most useful. The forms assumed by the 'modern' State-in-the-making to deal with questions of territoriality, in a wide sense of a multilayered administration of the national space, and in a narrower sense intimately connected to rights over land and land use, are yet to be defined. In the process of formalization, the powers and competences attributed to grassroots and intermediary instances of public administration - a debate which is occupying center place in Timorese politics (Ximenes in Farram 2010) - can be envisaged as a key to ascertain the capacity of the political elite to engage in interlocution within the framework of a social process that pertains to the wider consolidation of national identity. Timorese national identity finds its roots in Portuguese colonial rule times and was accelerated under Indonesian occupation (Feijó; 2008). It is thus a centripetal force against the centrifugal forces of various strata of the population, with diversified social and cultural composition, (as mirrored in the title of a book by L.F.R.Thomaz: Babel Lorosae) which are at play on the regional and local levels (Kingsbury in Leach & Kingsbury, forthcoming). Our focus on one of these groups - the Fataluku - will therefore be contextualized in the mosaic of Timorese diversity.