torajan_funerals.htm

If you're a buffalo you'd be well advised to steer clear of the Tanatoraja region of Sulawesi when a local passes away: you may find yourself getting a little itchy scratchy around the backside. For a visitor, however, the people who live around the mountain town of Rantapao are at their most welcoming - and local culture at its most interesting - when a tomate, or funeral, is taking place.

Torajan funerals last anywhere from a day to a week, depending on the wealth and status of the departed. Because funerals are time consuming affairs - and can involve thousands of people - they usually occur during the dry season (July to September) when the villagers aren't busy with their crops. The period of tomate is packed with celebrations and meals; the Toraja cheerfully refer to this time as 'party season'.

The Toraja are Christian, but their funeral practices are a far cry from the sombre church ceremonies of the west. When a Torajan dies, the body is preserved and kept in the house - often taking part, in a somewhat diminished role, in family conversations and meals - while the family makes arrangements for the funeral. Sometimes this preparation takes several months. An invitation to visit the home of the deceased prior to the funeral is a great honour. If you accept, you should thank the deceased on arrival and ask permission before leaving. If literally communing with the dead isn't your cup of tuak, polite refusal won't cause offence.

The funeral celebration itself takes place in a large open area surrounded by bamboo pavilions erected for spectators. The corpse 'presides' over the event from a high-roofed tower, and the atmosphere is reminiscent of a country fair.

Since the Toraja believe that the deceased ride to the afterworld (Puya) carried by the souls of buffalo, animal sacrifices are central to the ceremony. The more buffalo killed, the easier the ride. The bloodshed is accompanied by singing, dancing, drinking and eating - since this is the one time of the year when fresh meat is in plentiful supply.

Pride of place in the funeral entertainment usually goes to the buffalo fights - chaotic affairs involving mighty beasts locking horns and careening out of control among crowds of delirious spectators. Buffaloes not keen to fight are jollied up a little by having chillies inserted in their rectums - this tends to irritate even the most pacific bovine.

After all the excitement dies down, the body of the deceased is finally 'buried', either in a small cave, a hollow tree, or a bamboo lattice coffin hanging from a cliff.

TUAK AND BEMO

( EXPERIENCES OF MARK MOXON - TRAVEL WRITER )

TORAJAN FUNERAL

Many more sights made the rest of the day a fascinating glimpse into the Torajan way of life. Every half an hour the people from another village would arrive, bearing gifts of pigs and buffalo, cigarettes and food, parading themselves and their gifts round the arena, stepping lightly round headless carcasses and piles of excrement. A woman clad in a bright yellow dress guided the villagers, men first and then women, in a line round the edge of the arena, making sure that the details of every gift were noted down in a little book, so that every gift would be reciprocated at the next funeral; in this way a vague balance of payments is kept between villages, helping to prevent too much of an imbalance.

And then there's the tuak, or palm wine, served in long, green tubes of bamboo, and tasting rather like a fruity cider. If there's one justification that living in the tropics is as close to heaven as you can get in this life, it's the existence of palm wine. Certain palms naturally produce a sweet, sticky liquid, and if this is tapped in the morning, it slowly ferments during the day to produce a truly delightful alcoholic drink that's perfectly in tune with the way serious drunks like to drink. For tuak starts off in the morning almost free of alcohol, and is as easy to drink as lemonade, but as the day progresses the alcoholic content increases, the taste becomes more intense, and by the end of the day it's gone red, and it'll blow your mind. Drinking tuak all day not only rots your brain, it gets stronger just when you need more alcohol to give you the same effect: it's nature and man's self-destructive tendencies in perfect balance.

Leaving the funeral

But surely the strangest experience, the icing on the cake, came on the way home after a day of celebrating, a day full of shocks and surprises. As the bemo rattled its way back towards Rantepao, the driver slammed on the anchors, swerved, Rose and Cora gasping in the front passenger seat. A kitten had run out across the road, and as the bemo backed up I saw a little girl cradling a tiny tabby kitten, its paws limp and lifeless as its head lolled unnaturally to the side, its neck broken. In the West there would have been tears, a difficult time for the parents and a tearful ritual burial in an old shoe box. But in Tana Toraja death has less of a sting, and there was no reaction at all. Instead the bemo driver found a stick and started digging a shallow grave, right there on the roadside.

'If we don't bury the cat, then this bemo will have a crash sometime in the next two weeks,' explained one of the locals, jammed into the back of the bus alongside me. Apparently cats have a special meaning in Toraja, and as the driver finished off his work, everyone seemed to consider that that was the end of it: the child whose pet it was didn't bat an eyelid as we shot off, leaving rubber and black exhaust as the only sign that anything had happened. I'd read about Buddhist attitudes to death and I'd seen Christian funerals, but I'd never seen people react so calmly to loss of life before, and that wasn't just when it came to cats.

I sometimes wonder if life would be easier if we didn't fear death so much. It happens to us all: acceptance would be a wonderful thing if it weren't so difficult. But then the image of a water buffalo with mad, rolling eyes comes back, and I can't help but suppress a shiver. Perhaps it's just too late for me to learn to accept death so calmly?

Take from Mark Moxon Experiences travel ( Travel writer )