Tana Toraja, Land of the Boat-Shaped House
In Central Sulawesi, high in the mountains, is Tana Toraja, the remote enclave of the Torajan culture. Probably originating in Indochina, these people arrived here hundreds of years ago and started building their houses in the shape of boats, ostensibly to remind them of the boats that brought them there, though such a reminder seems bizarre so far from the ocean. Others say the shape of the houses is reminiscent of the horns of buffalo, a very important animal to the Torajan people. Tana Toraja is difficult to reach. From Makassar, one of the main entry ports of Sulawesi, we took a winding ten-hour bus ride, an old man puking matter-of-factly next to us the whole time. There is a plane you can catch to the small local airport, but its schedule is “once a week, so long as the plane is running.”
But when we arrived in Rantepao, the main town in Tana Toraja, the guide we hired was waiting to greet us, and at the adorable family-run guesthouse where we’d be spending the week, we had a welcome drink of some local fruit reminiscent of strawberry. We took a quick liking to this place, enough so to ignore the fact that dinner took two hours to prepare. Who cares? It was delicious.
First thing the next day we saw the most important ritual in Torajan life, a funeral. Unlike a Western funeral, these are large, public affairs where everybody from the surrounding village shows up throughout the day, bearing trussed-up pigs as gifts. There were only two of us, so our gift to the hosts was a case of cigarettes, a traditional gift of friendship for men. Women are generally given betelnut.
In temporary but well-built bamboo huts circling the yard, the villagers sat eating cakes and drinking tea while in the center a team of men butchered a pile of buffalo carcasses. This same yard, now slick with mud and blood, would be cleaned off by evening for the ritual dances.
Meanwhile the pigs continued to arrive squealing and strapped to bamboo poles, carried first by motorbike or scooter and then on the shoulders of young men. They were brought to the back yard, behind the kitchen where neighbor women in blue ran the massive operation of keeping everyone fed. Out back the pigs are slaughtered and put on a wood fire to singe off the hair before they are butchered. A special butcher mixes the meat with blood and spices in tubes of green bamboo, which will be cooked in the fire and served to guests. Our guidebook advises, tongue-in-cheek, not to slip in blood at a funeral, but it is in fact very good advice. The ground was so slippery it would have been very easy to misstep and tumble into a pile of organs.
The purpose of all this gore is to provide the deceased with transport to paradise. The more animals sacrified – and buffalo are worth more than pigs – the faster the spirit will travel to paradise. The spirits of the animals are literally considered as transport for the spirit of the person.
This transport is so important that a family will often wait to hold the funeral until they can afford enough buffalo for a proper send-off. At the equivalent of two thousand USD per head, it can take several years to save enough. In the interim, the body is kept in the family home and treated as a real person. The family brings it food and drink at mealtimes, talks to it, and will provide comforts the deceased enjoyed during life, such as turning on the television or bringing cigarettes. Indeed, the deceased is not really considered to be deceased until his or her journey to the afterlife is begun by the funeral ceremony. Modernity has added one important thing to this tradition: formaldehyde. According to Gibson, in the old times people felt the smell of decay was a pleasant reminder of the dead person for whose funeral they were scrimping and saving. But bodies are now routinely embalmed, which I have no doubt is a big improvement. It does, however, mean that newer graves must be built larger. More on that later.
The smoke and guts got to us after a while, and we certainly weren’t anxious to stick around for lunch, so we moved on. Speaking of lunch, you may wonder where all the leftovers go. At upper class funerals, more than twenty-four buffalo may be sacrificed, and all that meat can’t be eaten at the funeral. Some of it goes to pay the butchers, the announcers, and other people who help make the funeral happen. The rest is donated to charities for the poor, who in turn sell it to shops where it is bought by the public.
Our next stop was a cave grave, where the dead are taken after a funeral. These are generally carved, one per family into a rock face by hand with iron tools, though naturally occuring caves are also used. Until the introduction of formaldehyde, these were small affairs, maybe a meter square, as only bones remained to inter after the body decomposed at home. Now, though, a whole body must be buried, and newer caves are dug two meters square. It doesn’t sound like much until you realize this octuples the amount of stone to be removed!
Accompanying these caves, high on the cliff face, are tau-tau - effigies of the dead. These are afforded only to upper-class people, and only if they sacrifice at least twenty-four buffalo. They are carved from wood and depicted with both hands out. One hand symbolizes the offerings the deceased receive, not just at the funeral but periodically afterwards. The other symbolizes the blessings the deceased is able to bring its relatives in return. It is for these requests to erstwhile relatives that these practices are known as aluk todolo - literally “religion of ancestors.”
All these practices apply only to people who have reached a certain age. Babies who die before they grow teeth are not given the elaborate funeral. Instead they are quietly taken away, within an hour of death, by a family member to a special tree. A hole is carved in the trunk of the tree and the baby is placed, inside. The hole is then covered with a woven door, which will eventually fall off as the tree grows. By that time the hole will have closed up and the tree will hold the baby in its metaphorical womb, placed upside-down as it was in its mother’s womb. The tree, as it grows, helps the baby’s spirit to grow as it wasn’t able to in life, until it can reach paradise. Like the cliff faces, one tree can hold many graves. The one we visited had about seven visible at various heights, and Gibson pointed out several scars in the tree where older graves had healed over.
Our final visit of the day was to a traditional village composed of tongkonan, the traditional boat-shaped houses I described earlier. These are wooden houses built on stilts, with massive swooping bamboo roofs that rise at front and back as they stretch beyond the house proper. A row of houses is built facing a row of rice barns, which have the same roof but are smaller and lack stairs. Instead, a bamboo ladder is lifted when needed to retriece or store rice. This, along with the very smooth stilt legs, affords some protection from mice for the three hundred kilos or more of rice stored in these structures.
Since lifting machinery is generally unavailable in these villages, houses and barns are first built using tongue-and-groove techniques on the ground, then disassembled and rebuilt piece-by-piece atop the stilts. Elaborate but repetitive carvings are made on all external panels in the traditional colors of red, yellow, black and white. These are made from ash, clay, and limestone mixed with water. The roof is lashed together from alternating layers of bamboo chopped in half, and is quite waterproof even after it is colonized by a community of ferns and the occasional orchid, which form a green mat across the top of the roof. All these elements are so ritualized and common across all tongkonan that it can be hard to tell them apart!
On our second day we did a little walking and visited some hanging graves. These are graves built into the walls of a natural cave, where platforms are built to hold the small tongkonan-shaped coffins used to carry remains from the funeral. These coffins are not maintained, but are left to decompose. This happens at a faster rate than the composition of the bones themselves, so frequently a coffin will break or fall, spilling its bones. The family will tidy things up and put the bones back in order, but the remains (and the tau-tau, which is maintained periodically) can only be touched once a year during a ritual held after harvest. So for the remainder of the year the bones sit scattered. Then there are some piles which no longer have a coffin, and are arrayed neatly on the ground. Walking through this dripping limestone chamber, being stared at by skulls, Roxane and I felt as if we were in an Indiana Jones movie.
This feeling was enhanced by our next stop, to see a group of standing stones erected in a group. Like almost everything in Tana Toraja, these are part of funeral rituals – a stone is erected each time a funeral is held in a village. One of the stones has been dated to be four hundred years old.
Back in Rantepao, we walked into town for dinner at a small restaurant. Dark fell while we ate, and on the walk back we discovered that Rantepao has no streetlights! We walked on a narrow sidewalk in the dark, with a gaping ditch on our right. I was watching carefully to make sure I didn’t step into it, when I walked straight into a two-foot hole in the sidewalk in front of me! I was surprisingly unscathed, but poor Roxane, walking behind me, saw me vanish abruptly from view. Once she helped me out and we established I was fine, we both collapsed in a fit of giggles. I was very lucky the ditch wasn’t running with foul water at the time, as most of them are.
on August 8, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Permalink
[...] ways it was a relief, a literal breath of fresh air after Indonesia. There is no risk in Seoul of stepping off the sidewalk into an open sewer, and the air does not swell with dioxins every day at five when people burn their trash. It is a [...]