Fiat speech, fiat infrastructure

Abstract

In 2011 the independent government of Timor‐Leste initiated a controversial oil and gas infrastructure project. To persuade Timorese citizens to embrace their vision of the future based on oil and gas, supporters of the project employed narrative strategies conventionally reserved for ritual authorities. Their scaling of ritual speech to the level of the nation hinged on establishing iconic links across different event‐worlds (chronotopes). “Fiat speech” was, like infrastructure, designed to bring named realities into being through anticipation. To analyze this process of prolepsis, the concept of “anticipatory transformation” allows us to understand how oil infrastructure became not just a symbol of modernity and development but an index thereof.