Suspended between life and death
The fascinating culture of Tana Toraja
After leaving Sulawesi’s extraordinary Lake Matano in mid-August, I headed west again to the coastal town of Palopo on the northwestern side of the Gulf of Bone. My wife Holly flew in the following morning, and after picking her up from the airport we began the long climb into the mountains looming over the west of town, headed for Tana Toraja. The drive is not for the faint-of-heart: winding, narrow roads with massive buses and trucks grinding up and down, and fog engulfing the pass at the top. At least the views were spectacular, and the murkiness added to the sense that we were journeying to a mysterious place, long locked off from the outside world.
Tana Toraja was one of the last places in Indonesia to be reached by Dutch missionaries and explorers — it wasn’t until the early 20th century that they made headway into the mountainous, forested interior in this part of Sulawesi. What they found there was a culture seemingly frozen in time, still observing the pre-Islamic religious practices of their Austronesian forebears. And what fascinating practices they are.
The Torajans are renowned for their unique approach to death, especially the graves hewn into the cliff faces of the region — but this is only the end result of a far more complex set of beliefs and rituals. When someone dies in Tana Toraja, they are considered to be in a suspended state of illness — makula in the Torajan language — until they are buried. During this time, which can last for a year or longer, the family makes plans for the extraordinary funeral. During this time the family members scattered around the world (there is an enormous Torajan diaspora throughout Indonesia and beyond) are told about the death, and they make plans to travel home for the multi-day ceremony.
Torajan funerals are quite expensive, involving the sacrifice of many buffalo — the most iconic animal in the Torajan culture. Some of the rarest, those with white fur and blue eyes, can cost $40,000 or more, although most are the far more common black buffalo that you see in every rice paddy throughout the region. The expense of obtaining the buffalo helps to explain the long period of suspended makula, as the family scrimps and saves for the funeral. Relatives will contribute as well, in addition to making the (often long) trip home for the funeral.
The funeral itself is a cross between a family reunion, a somber remembrance of the departed individual, and a tourist spectacle. Drawing on both traditional ceremonies, as well as the Torajans’ recently-adopted religion of Christianity (Muslim traders in Indonesia tended to stick to the coast historically, as did Islam itself in most of eastern Indonesia). We were lucky to be invited to a funeral during our visit — most are held in July and August, after the rice harvest season, and the Torajans are happy to have visitors attend the gatherings — and on the second morning we were there we found ourselves seated under a temporary awning with a raised seating area, surrounded by extended family members.
The deceased was an important man in the local community, having held the post of superintendent of the school district for many years, as well as serving on many local boards. The entire village turned out for the multi-day event, as did dozens of family members from around Indonesia. I won’t go into the intricacies of the day we were there, but after the formal convocation by a priest to open the ceremony, lunch was served, and then the coffin — wrapped in brightly-colored fabric — was loaded onto a massive carved and painted wooden litter, which was carried around the entire village by a team of young men. Following this, there was a slaughter of buffalo — the first of many. Due to his family members’ intermarriage into Muslim families in Makassar and Java, a halal butcher was chosen.
After seeing the first creature slaughtered, Holly and I excused ourselves (I won’t show the rest of the photographs in the sequence following the one above, which were very bloody). The ceremony would continue for another two days, and ultimately the man’s body would be buried in a Christian grave, marking a break in tradition — far more common these days — from the traditional cliff burials his ancestors would have had.
Toraja’s unique funeral practices have brought anthropologists (and later tourists) to the region since the first roads were built in the 1970s. In his popular chronicle of visiting Tana Toraja in the 1980s, anthropologist Nigel Barley documented1 the motley crew of French and Japanese tourists and European anthropologists visiting the region in those early days. Now there is an airport in the region with scheduled flights to Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi, and thousands of young backpackers take overnight buses to the regional capital of Rantepao every year. Most come to snap pictures of the famous cliff burials, unique in Indonesia.
The unique burial tradition found here has spurred debate for a century, with some asserting that it was due to a recent migration of a faraway population to the region. Consistent with this, other cultures in Asia have hanging coffin burials as well. For instance, the Bo people of southern China — a now-extinct group that lived in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces centuries ago — practiced hanging coffin burials that would look completely at home in Tana Toraja. Similarly, the Kankanaey people of western Luzon in the Philippines also use hanging coffin burials. Finally, there is a hanging coffin in the Danum Valley of Borneo, in present-day Sabah, Malaysia.
This hypothesis would be supported if the Torajans were genetically distinct from the rest of the population of South Sulawesi, such as the Buginese, but such fine-grained genetic studies of the region have not yet been carried out. We do, however, have a proxy in the form of the languages spoken there, which have been analyzed extensively. All of the languages in South Sulawesi fall into a single group, the South Sulawesi branch of the Austronesian language family. The South Sulawesi languages form a monophyletic group — in other words, they all descend from a common ancestor. The Torajan languages were early offshoots of the same migration that brought the other languages — and peoples — of South Sulawesi to the island.
When did this migration occur? Here we might have a clue as to the enigmatic distribution of cliff burials in Southeast Asia. A detailed linguistic study of the entire Austronesian language family using methods borrowed from evolutionary genetics has provided a timeline for the settlement of the disparate branches of the family across Southeast Asia and the Pacific. There is a massive explosion of diversification around 4,000 years ago (Pulse 1 in the figure below) that led to the settlement of the Philippines, Indonesia and Melanesia, including South Sulawesi.
The linguistic data show (combining the two trees) that it was early in this initial Austronesian settlement of South Sulawesi that the Torajan and Buginese languages diverged, suggesting they have been diverging for nearly 4,000 years. It is possible that the cliff burial practices in Tana Toraja and the Philippines are a cultural artefact retained from an ancient Austronesian population that was involved in the early settlement of these regions dating back more than 4,000 years. The practice was lost in other Austronesian-speaking groups in the region. Especially as wooden coffins degrade rapidly in the tropical heat and humidity and only the ones in the past two millennia have survived, we don’t know the extent of the practice prior to this time. Like a vestigial trait in anatomy (tail, anyone?), coffin burials might reveal details about the ancestral practices of the Proto-Austronesian peoples.
Consistent with this hypothesis, the Bo people of Sichuan and Yunnan are thought to have spoken Kra languages — a branch of the Kra-Dai languages (a family that includes present-day Thai and Lao) that shows significant affinities to the Austronesian family. In fact, the similarities are so numerous and deep-seated in the languages that some scholars have advocated for the Kra-Dai languages to be subsumed into Austronesian entirely, sharing an ancestral homeland in southern China before moving eastward into the island of Taiwan (which has the greatest diversity of Austronesian languages) and south/westward into present-day northern Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. This would certainly be consistent with a scenario where at least some of the ancestors of both groups practiced hanging cliff burials.
Whatever the ultimate origin of the Torajan cliff burial practices — uniquely found in regions of Southeast Asia sharing a common cultural history so it seems rather unlikely that each group developed them independently — the ancestors of the Torajans likely arrived in Sulawesi around 3,500 years ago. Their own origin story is that they voyaged by boat up the mighty Sadang River from the Makassar Strait, ultimately arriving in the fertile mountain valley they now call home. They point to the shape of their houses, known as tongkonan — characterized by deeply curved roofs that resemble oceangoing boats — as evidence of this maritime past.
Today, over 100,000 tourists a year make the long trek to Tana Toraja, but as Nigel Barley reminds us in his portrait of the region four decades ago, within living memory it was a little-known, mysterious place. Social changes of the past 50 years have thrust it into the tourism limelight, and with it the complexities of life in the 21st century. It was unknown enough when Barley visited that he was able to get funding to bring several Torajan craftsmen to London to build a tongkonan-like rice barn on-site at the Museum of Mankind (now subsumed into the British Museum) as a sort of ‘living exhibit’. Certainly sounds morally dubious when described in that way, but Barley acknowledges the tension inherent in such a venture in a wonderful passage in the final chapter of the book:
To enter into an agreement such as this, with people from a culture very unlike our own, was fraught with problems of a moral kind. It is a moral space, indeed, from which all exits are shut off in advance.
Ethnographic exhibitions involving people are not new. In the nineteenth century they were common. One offered as its chief attraction the chance of seeing a savage Filipino eat a dead dog.
Participants can have had little knowledge of what lay in store for them and were treated like wild animals in a zoo. At the end of the exhibition, they were sometimes simply thrown out to fend for themselves.
The world has changed since then but power relations are still very unequal. It is hard to protect people in a world they do not understand without being accused of paternalism, or leave them scope for initiative without being accused of neglect. To treat them as one would Englishmen is cultural imperialism, to insist upon their difference from us smacks of racism. To ask members of another culture to 'perform' seems demeaning, while to ask our own artists to do so is not. It was clear, however, that the Torajans did not feel humiliated but honoured. They were not dressing up in tribal costume to do something just for tourists.
As far as the carvers were concerned, this was another contract for another rice-barn. They returned to their own culture with increased status and wealth. Johannis's parents had been firm.
'We would not let him go if we did not know you and trust you. He wants to go. It will be good for him.'
It is good to be able to organize an exhibition that does not simply take from a Third World country but fosters a skill under threat. In a sense, the best tribute was that Johannis, a thoroughly modern Torajan, started carving. In a sense it seemed as if it was through coming to London that he had fully become a Torajan. It was, however, with mixed feelings that I listened as he explained to me that now he had enough money to go to university, he would have to write a thesis. He had decided, having watched me work, that he would turn his grandfather into his thesis. He was well on the way to making that divide between traditional and modern life that characterizes the former as 'custom' - a party hat, or in this case an academic cap, to be lightly put on and off at will.
Tana Toraja, with its unique funerary practices and deep, rich history, highlights one of the inherent contradictions in cultural tourism more broadly: to what extent does visiting such a culture help to bring on its disappearance? I certainly don’t have all of the answers, but I hope that the tourists snapping photos of cliff burials and tongkonans and wincing at the ceremonial slaughter of buffalo are aware of their own impact on the very thing that brought them to such a remote and fascinating place.
Thoughtful, informative and very interesting piece, Spencer.