Tana Toraja II

I started writing this post a few days ago, had to leave it in order to get on a 20 hour train ride from Penang to Bangkok. Upon revisiting what I had saved, I decided I was quite unsatisfied with my writing. The wonders of doing all this online is my ability to revise, rewrite etc. So I present to you in a far different format what I tried more eloquently (read: poetically which never fares well) to put forth a few days prior.

Trevor and I went trekking in north-western Tana Toraja. We saw plenty of beautiful things. Stayed with a wonderful family in a tiny village (they had just purchased a buffalo), did an absurd amount of walking. I leave the rest to your imagination or the pictures I can now provide. The place was quite special to me, but I think much of that was merely the experience of it and to try and recapture it by putting it to writing is akin to what my Buddhism professor Paul E. Mueller-Ortega referred to as "pulling the rug out from underneath the monk". Ponder that for a while.

The final thing of significance we did while sojourning in Toraja was visit a funeral ceremony. Now to fully appreciate these things I would venture a guess that you need a lot of gifts to give the family, and a ton of patience. They last for upwards of a week and whole days are nothing more than a roll call of the extended families that have traveled back to Toraja in order to be recognized in the ceremony. We attended one of these afforementioned days. It was steamy and getting bright after a brief, but torrential downpour. We were able to mill about in the enormously large and I would say opulant grounds that would most certainly turn the color of an abattoir nigh the week was out. But for today it remained a parade ground for the almost uncountable amount of relatives there to show their respect to the tau tau (effigy) of the deceased (a doctor I surmised after hearing a litany of people's names proceeded by Dr.). Buffalo, some costing upwards of 75 million ruppiah were paraded into the grounds. People dressed in all manner of colorful and a more western black mourning colors were rampant.

Now, here I would like to pause to digress in order for me to wonder what this ceremony is really about. Yes, it is a sacred (take note Eliade fans) and certainly an integral part of the fabric of Torajan culture. But at this point it is also a livelihood, through tourism, for the people of the region. As I noted in my writing from the event I am not at all surprised that such a delicate balance between preservation of culture and cultural pornography or the like is quite difficult. The event had its own viewing section for tourists (we did not sit there and a lucky thing too to be described later), if you pay enough to your guide or foist enough gifts on the family you will even be invited to join the ceremony if ever so briefly. Surely in a symbolic sense the ritual remains deeply meaningful, but I think that much of this is overshadowed by spectacle (I suppose some debt to DuBoard here, but not sure what). It is a mass of flash photography and general lack of participation or sincere knowledge of the ceremony itself. I daresay most people were there in the hopes of seeing some animals being killed (the Lonely Planet Indonesia description would make you think you were entering a Wes Craven film). I myself was ambivalent to the idea of witnessing mass slaughter. 40 water buffalo, 100+ giant pigs, a small dear and a golden calf looking thing. I think I was glad it turned out to be merely a day of paying respects.

But as I mentioned earlier we did not sit with the other tourists (not out of any snobbery or the like, but we were stuck on the other side when the ceremony started). Instead we smoked cloves and watched family after family parade up to the pavilion containing the tau tau. Why this was fortunate is that we did actually witness a slaughter, but one with a less spiritual purpose. Many of the pigs were going to be killed that day to feed the vast amounts of people (the meat, offal etc. is scooped into bamboo pipes to be smoked; called pa'piong). At one point we turned around to see that one of the pigs had died en route to wherever they were being kept. The men acted quickly, disemboweling the now dead pig and scooping all the viable parts into foraged bamboo tubes. We followed them down the the river backing up to the village where several fires we already going. Someone else had just killed a pig and was in the process of unceremoniously dumping the entire carcass onto the fire to burn the fur off. What a lovely smell. Cloves, as well as palm wine passed around helped ease the stench. A third group of people came down with a live pig. A boy much younger than me was handed what looked to be a dull and well worn knife. However, I was much mistaken in how easily a blade can enter flesh, and with a simple prick the knife went in to find the heart. The pig bled out quite quickly, but not without splatter and a fair bit of screaming (a totally inhuman sound if I have ever heard. No horror movie does such violent utterences true justice). The process was then repeated.

I do not recount this story to prove that somehow I received the authentic experience of a Torajan funeral, or even Torajan life in general. Such slaughter is no doubt mundane in such surroundings and life in general is mundane and in the case of the Torajans frought with poverty. In fact I am not quite sure at all why. Perhaps to muse over the notions of lost culture or what contact with outside people's means to such fragile communities. A forum given by the Harvard anthropoligist Wade Davis I attended springs to mind as does Baudrillard's musings about the cave paintings of Lascaux and his subsequent arguments about anthropology and the western desire to museumize things. An Adorno quote would be apropos

"The German word museal [museumlike] has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which are in the process of dying. They owe their preservation more to historical respect than to the needs of the present. Museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are the family sepulchres of works of art"

Anyway, all musings and the like aside (who's even reading this anyway? a question for another place I suppose) what follows is my overall impression of Indonesia.

The people were extremely welcoming. Friendly. Bali, where tourism is much more pronounced there were obviously more touts etc. but still the people were helpful and kind. Lombok more shaded to the latter and in Makassar people just seemed to be excited to say "hello" (many times the only word of English they knew. Bahasa Indoesia isn't too hard to learn and people loved me butchering the words I knew.). The food was pretty good. I would say I wasn't blown away by it, but it was cheap, filling and generally delcious if a bit uniform. One thing I could complain about all day long is how absurd fees are. I don't mean in a monetary sense, because the ruppiah is anything but a vibrant currency, but honestly having to pay just to enter a bus station that we already have tickets for seems taking it a bit too far. The weather was nice. The water, especially near Lombok was stunning. Shit, I'd go back to Indonesia is what I am trying to get at. I encourage all who may read this to do the same.