Introduction: Changing relations and landholding practicesThis chapter explores how rural residential and agricultural land claims in Timor-Leste's Oecusse (Ambeno) enclave are established, maintained and transferred through various means including warfare, agricultural use, allocation by customary leaders and government programs, and migration. Settlement narratives illuminate some basic principles of claim making and explain how local customary leaders and early settlers preserve their favourable positions in relation to land control. This account analyses how landownership is linked to agricultural land use and village (suco) membership; the conditions in which both landowners and non-landowners acquire, borrow and use land; and how landownership and authority are transformed through agricultural change. This discussion also demonstrates how state land-titling policies that do not account for the causes and widespread incidence of land borrowing could inadvertently misidentify landowners, and might formally deprive a significant portion of the rural population of agricultural land access.Recent property scholarship focuses on the human-relational aspects of ownership and use of land alongside other forms of claims to physical, cultural and intellectual property. There has been much attention to how definitions of ownership reflect or exclude the relational and identity factors at the core of many land claims (Hann 1998;Kalinoe and Leach 2004;Peluso 2003;Roseman 1998;Shamir 1996;Strathern 1998Strathern , 1999Tsing 2003;Weiner 1999;Zerner 2003b). Different actors usually have different forms and evidence of claim; rural people, urban people, migrants, the state, those with natural resource-intensive livelihoods, and others with property interests have distinct expectations about what types and expressions of resource claims are appropriate or valid (Zerner 2003a).The stunning complexity of customary land and forest regulation-in which ownership norms can be specific to each resource, lineage or location-is Land and Life in Timor-Leste: Ethnographic essays 188 understandable when we consider that the bases of claims and the possibilities of ownership are embedded in social relationships and the identity of the would-be owner(s). Customary ownership norms are no longer viewed as a static 'tradition' (Hutchinson 1996), and specificity, mutability and responsiveness to social transformation are understood as intrinsic qualities in land use and tenure. Studying disembodied stated rights and practices is inadequate for understanding decision making regarding land if positions of relative power and relationships define the outcomes. Where 'claims rest on demonstrable relationships ' (Strathern 2004:9), customary ownership is tailored to each case-better visualised as a constellation of practices or cases than as a single, coherent system. As 'ownership is a function of relations between persons with reference to things, and not between people and things' (Leach 2004a:43), this chapter examines how ownership is narrate...