The Death Cultists of Toraja and the Western Tourists who Come to Gawk at Them

The Toraja are an ethnic group on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, living in a district they call Tana Toraja. There are about 350,000 Toraja people, and not so long ago they lived as rice farmers in their remote land, bothered only by the occasional missionary, anthropologist, or tax collector. Then they were discovered:

In 1972 only 650 foreigners visited the Toraja highlands; by 1985 more than 15,000 foreigners and almost 80,000 domestic tourists the region annually, and in 1987 a total of 179,948 tourists traveled to Tana Toraja.

This flood of visitors has led to ongoing conflict between the leaders of Toraja villages and the Indonesian state, which regards the tourist draw of Toraja Tana as a cash cow to be milked and cares not a fig about their semi-Christianized pagan customs. Several villages have tried to completely close themselves off to outsiders. Other Toraja, of course, have tried to cash in, opening stalls and restaurants, managing hotels, and so on.

What makes these conflicts especially intense is that what really draws people to Tana Toraja is their fascinating relationship with the dead. The Toraja believe, like many people, that death is a long, drawn-out process that has to be managed correctly at every stage. They also seem to have been for a long time fairly peaceful, with no wars or fortresses to soak up their surplus wealth. Instead, they stage extremely elaborate funerals. These involve huge crowds of participants, fed on great slaughters of cattle and pigs. You can imagine that the Toraja were at first perplexed and then annoyed when legions of tourists started showing up at their funerals with cameras.

The main event, the big party just before the corpse disappears, goes on all day and involves lots of great customs like spinning the coffin around so the ghost won't find its way back to trouble its family.

The body is not buried in the ground, but placed on a high platform or in a tomb on a cliff. Those are not corpses but life-sized dolls, which represent the noble corpses interned in the cliff. In the 1980s the government of Indonesia declared 18 of these cliffs to be official "tourist objects." This helped to protect them from development but was nonetheless offensive to some Toraja, for reasons you can imagine.

One detail about Toraja funeral rituals that has lately been all over the internet is the "walking dead." Toraja funerals are expensive, and it sometimes happens that a family lacks the cash for sort of funeral their status demands. So they stash the corpse in a  room at the back of the house until they have raised the necessary funds. The corpse then emerges from hiding and "walks" to the funeral, by way of indicating that it is not angry about the delay. There are Toraja folktales about holy men who could really animate the corpse and make it walk on its own. Mostly they are manipulated, sort of like big puppets. But in our zombie-crazed era, the phrase "walking dead" alongside pictures of standing corpses has been enough to launch a thousand blog posts.

I loved this detail about traditional Toraja culture:

When the first celestial ancestors came to earth centuries ago, the gods gave them 7,777 traditional rules of conduct to take to earth.

And you thought bureaucracy was a recent invention.

My reaction to reading about strange cultures is to hope that they go on as they are, without being ruined by tourists. I have no desire to go see them for myself. I like being able to read about them, so I am happy for a handful of anthropologists to drop in. But the herd migration toward anything different and interesting is quite foreign to me. There's something cool and primitive, let's go spoil it. Sort of like moving out to the country and then becoming an anti-growth activist, or embarking on an exciting career of encouraging other women to stay home with their children. Ah, well, we are a strange species.