The Famous Funerals of Tana Toraja
Did I have A Stranger’s Funeral + Animal Sacrifice on my 2022 bingo card? Nope. And yet here we are.
I’m sitting on a covered platform, nibbling Toraja “churros” (rice flour mixed with palm syrup, deep fried) and listening to pigs squealing over the constant murmur of a hundreds-of-people crowd and an MC announcing something I cannot understand. I smell cigarette smoke and dust and a hint of blood and the herby savory scent of a simmering vat of truly the freshest buffalo meat.
Tourists visit Tana Toraja, in the middle of Sulawesi (Indonesian island #6 for us), to experience the culture. Toraja are famous for their funerals: multi-thousand-dollar affairs that include a lot of animal sacrifice (we’re talking 10+ water buffalo and so so many pigs) over up to seven days of celebrations, depending on the caste of the deceased. Everyone is invited: your family, your friends, your family and friends’ villages, and any tourists who want to stop by (they say we bring good luck!). We came with a guide who is friends with one of the bereaved, mostly to ensure we don’t make any major faux pas.
Fair warning, things are about to get dark (I promise no gory pictures!), but keep in mind that the vibe is very celebratory — all the kids have balloons!
For Toraja, “death is a gradual — and social — process.” Events take place in the village square, where temporary structures have been built to host the guests and a high platform holds the body of the deceased (in this case, two people, a husband and wife) in elaborately carved and painted coffins overlooking the festivities. Toraja believe that the person is still with them until the burial — between death and the funeral the body stays in its own bed in the home (embalmed with palm oil) and food/drinks/cigarettes are regularly offered (anything the person would have wanted in life).
When we arrived, around 9am, a huge water buffalo had just been killed in the square and was being hacked apart by men with machetes and meat cleavers (just to be clear, the animal was very much dead before being butchered). Two little boys with Spiderman balloons sashayed through the scene, completely indifferent to the nearby buffalo head on a pile of blood-soaked banana leaves and sporadically screaming pigs all around. Does it all sound horrific to you? I don’t like blood either. Just remember that “normal” is different everywhere. Toraja only slaughter buffalo for funerals, and distribute the meat amongst the mourners, so in some ways this is standard meat-eating culture behavior, just with more ceremony. Plus, if it makes you feel better, these buffalo and pigs have probably lived better lives than >99% of livestock in the US, and will probably ultimately experience more humane deaths. (I’m not a vegetarian, and I do think it’s important for all meat-eaters to understand that their meat comes from living animals that were killed.)
From our assigned platform (like a table number at a wedding), we watch each village arrive en black-clad mass and parade around the square. Then they present their “donations”—pigs and sometimes water buffalo led by rope or carried on bamboo poles—to honor the deceased. With much fanfare, the MC announces the type and value of each animal, who it is from, and who it is being donated to (sometimes to specific family members, sometimes to “all the children”) as a government representative spray-paints the animals’ sides and takes notes for tax purposes. Less important attendees—i.e., us—give money or cigarettes directly to the family (no big fanfare for that).
The buffalo are then led away to await the big sacrifice day tomorrow — all of the water buffalo will be killed in the square and the meat distributed to the attendees. The pigs are also carried away, trussed with bamboo and rope and very clearly not having a nice time. They are killed with less fanfare and more continuously to feed the funeral guests; pigs are not important enough to sacrifice in the main square. We opted not to go watch.
We timed our visit to Tana Toraja to coincide with “funeral season,” July-August. The whole family has to attend, so when a person dies they wait—sometimes years—until money can be saved up and a funeral can be planned. Arranging one of these is colossal. Family comes from far and wide in the month before to help get it all together; we saw the stores of rice to feed all the extra mouths, the piles of cups and plates rented for the occasion, and of course all the wooden structures built to hold the guests. Here’s a fun fact — Tana Toraja is the world’s most expensive place to die. Sacrificial buffalo cost thousands of dollars each, with the most expensive albino buffalo priced up to 1.5 billion IDR; that’s $102,165 USD! For a regular person’s funeral, 6-10 buffalo must be sacrificed, and for a wealthy person, the number is 25-100 (Toraja society is highly caste-based, so all these rules are prescribed). Buffalo lead the dead to puya, aka The South, aka The Land of Souls, so the more buffalo sacrificed at your funeral, the faster you get to the afterlife (everyone goes to the same place; there’s no concept of judgment or heaven or hell). After the funeral, the horns of the sacrificed buffalo decorate the family home (tongkanen) to honor the deceased.
Like I said, the funeral is a party and it is bad luck to cry. The sad part happens on the last day at the burial; that is when the spirit leaves for puya. Mourners from other families may attend the burial as they believe that the newly-deceased spirit will bring their tears to their own family members in the South; the long-dead will be happy to know that people are still remembering them. (Interestingly, Toraja are mostly Christian and usually have a Christian burial. The potential tension between belief systems does not appear to be an issue.)
Smiling women in black keep bringing me super-sweet coffee and plates of cake — I haven’t been this caffeinated since having a job and it is not helping with the low-key queasiness the whole animal sacrifice experience is giving me. But once the donations are all told lunch is served, and it would be rude to say no. We eat some of that simmering buffalo with rice — I don’t particularly want to, but also I feel an obligation to the animal to not waste its sacrifice.
After a few hours our guide informs us that the day’s “events” are basically finished and people will just continue to hang out. We stayed in Tana Toraja a week and saw a few other funerals, truck-loads of mourners all in black, and a lot of water buffalo as we trekked around the countryside. It was definitely a unique experience!
The funeral is only one part of the death experience. To learn more I recommend this very comprehensive blog post, this NYT photo essay, this article on tau tau (effigies of the dead), and this article about the cost of Toraja funerals.
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Just finished: Firekeeper’s Daughter (Angeline Boulley)
Currently reading: The Island of Missing Trees (Elif Shafak)
Up next: Gods of Jade and Shadow (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)
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