The business of death in Tana Toraja
Dying, in the Tana Toraja region of south Sulawesi, is what people live for. More specifically it’s the funeral service that’s the be all and end all – death in itself is merely the precursor to a series of elaborate rites and rituals that will transport the spirit of the deceased to an everlasting paradise, though only under strict conditions and with the requisite amount of animal sacrifice.
Sacrifice is indeed the watchword in Toraja. Animals aplenty must meet their own maker to facilitate the transition of the human soul, but so too the living must surrender their own wealth to bring this about. The business of death here is a huge enterprise and vast sums are spent to ensure the last send off is ostentatious and elaborate. Spending and spending big is the only way to speed the dead into the afterlife, and perhaps more importantly, to ensure they become a benevolent guardian spirit who will watch over their relatives and ensure their future health, wealth and fertility. Unsurprisingly, the honour and prestige of the deceased’s immediate family is simultaneously increased manyfold in the here and now.
The funeral Tongkanon complex, Tana Toraja
It’s complicated. We spent 3 full days exploring the ins and outs of the funeral tradition here and to be honest left with many more questions than answers. Trying to translate a whole host of arcane and opaque rules into our own western, rational way of thinking was an exercise in futility. Often we’d ask for explanations. Often answers were vague, contradictory or downright nonsensical. It’s what, ultimately, makes this place so fascinating.
On our first outing we went straight in at the deep end. Our guide, Peso, took us to the first day of the funeral of a 60 year old woman, the wife of a local mayor and therefore a large and prestigious event. The lady in question had already been dead for 4 years. The Torajans believe that the dead are never truly dead until their funeral has occurred. In the meantime, the dead are considered to be merely to maluka or ‘sick’, kept in the same house with the rest of the family and often talked to or offered food at dinner time. It’s not uncommon that funerals take years to prepare and fund. Four years is considered fairly typical and it’s not unknown for a corpse to remain undispatched for decades.
Whilst we waited for ceremonies to begin, we wandered around the family courtyard (the Tongkanon ‘complex’) dominated by 3 large houses, the traditional stilted dwellings of richer folks (referred to as ‘nobles’) and 6 rice barns, one of which hosted a coffin. All were fashioned with elaborate sweeping roof structures that are meant to resemble the horns of the buffalo and walls detailed with geometric motifs in black, red and ochre. Around the back, pigs were being butchered to supply funeral goers with lunch. We chatted to some of the women doing the cooking who offered us some raw pig as an appetiser.
Lunch (not quite ready yet)
Singing cowboys
Lunch (still not ready)
Back in the courtyard, two men appeared on horseback, whooping and hollering. An old man danced around holding a life-sized manekin made from red cloth. In the centre of the courtyard, a ring of 40 or so men slowly side-stepped and sang monotonous chants. All were wearing black cowboy hats and either black or white t-shirts sporting the face of the deceased in the top right corner. Another group was building a litter from bamboo, on which a chair for the widower was to be placed. A bamboo construct to carry the coffin had already been made.
Indonesia’s answer to Keith Harris
We sat on platforms under the rice barns and waited for things to happen. After an hour, a very industrious group of men retrieved the coffin, a beautiful red and gold affair, and placed it on the litter. A smaller, model version of a Tongkanon house was then built on top, complete with buffalo roof and many adornments that were enthusiastically hammered on with a multitude of nails. Then the whole thing was strapped together with ropes and plastic cabling.
Positioning the coffin
A couple of enormous albino buffalo were brought in next and paraded around the grounds. The buffalo is the central tenet of the entire ceremony, in fact a funeral without buffalo cannot be considered as a funeral at all. This, for the family, is where the biggest expense lies, but it’s necessary as the spirits of the animals are responsible for guiding the deceased human to the first stage of the afterlife, puya, a place of limbo from where a reckoning is made by Pong Lalondong (in many ways an equivalent of St Peter) who assesses whether enough sacrifice has been made as appropriate to the deceased’s rank in life. ‘Enough’ or more gets you quickly into paradise and an instant promotion to deata or divine spirit. For ‘nobles’, this takes the sacrifice of at least 24 buffalo (23 males, 1 female), but the more beasts dispatched will considerably expedite the entire process. The quality of the buffalo matters a lot too. Smaller, black buffalo might make up the numbers, but these are the cheaper kind and do not offer anywhere near the kind of cachet a large strapping specimen can supply. Best of all are albinos with golden horns. Their sacrifice can apparently speed the sick to their celestial transit lounge in as little as 2 minutes. The family of the mayor’s wife were offering more than 100 sturdy black buffalo and 9 albinos for the occasion, pretty much guaranteeing her almost instant arrival as well as casting their own prestige in virtual stone.
The cost of buffalo tended to dominate our conversations here. At a later visit to the vast buffalo market in the town of Rantepao, Peso pointed at each beast and determined what it would go for. A ‘standard’ sized animal sells somewhere between $2,000 to $5,000. A larger beast might go for twice as much. The best example of an albino, with backwards sweeping gold horns and bright blue eyes can command an asking price of up to $50,000. Peso estimated that the funeral of the mayor’s wife would likely cost the family upwards of $750,000.
One of the prized albino buffalo (note one black eye, one blue)
Prayers for the dead
Hoping its fatty pig for lunch
Prayers for the dead
Lunch, when it eventually arrived, consisted of boiled rice which we tipped into waxed paper troughs and ate with our right hands. It was supplemented by the fat and meat of the recently slaughtered pigs at a ratio of about 9:1. Not the most appetising of meals for us, but the locals loved it. Almost immediately afterwards, the men who’d built the funeral litter gunned into action once more and with much shouting and whooping hoisted the platform onto their shoulders. Here they paused for a moment, then bounced the platform up and down – a show of strength with a great deal of laughter and merriment. A solemn and sober occasion this was not going to be…
The widower was installed on his platform too, hoisted up and again bounced around with great jollity. Throughout the procession he managed to maintain a look of distant reflection and dignity, no doubt for form’s sake, but it can’t have been easy.
The pall-bearers advanced, followed by a train of attendees and flanked by us and a few other tourists. Progress was slow despite the evident enthusiasm of the bearers, largely as a host of overhead cables had to be negotiated. On clear stretches though, pace was quick and hilarious. We were encouraged to get in front of the procession and take photographs of the party which wound its way up a hill to the local village temple where the coffin was to be placed for a further week as the rest of the funeral ceremony was played out. At the temple steps, the entire litter was deconstructed (it had only travelled about 200 metres at most), and the coffin borne up to the topmost plinth overlooking the rest of the village. The bearers had a welcome breather and sat on the temple steps laughing and chain smoking for 10 minutes.
The funeral cortege gets stuck in the overhead cables
Selfies with the deceased
Well earned fag break
The cortege halts in front of the temple
Though the first day of a funeral is not the time for large scale animal sacrifice (the 100 plus buffalo due for dispatch were in the diary for next week, an event that was likely to take a whole 2 days), each day requires at least one beast to be killed. On a small patch of ground opposite the temple, a nervous looking black buffalo was shuffling about, almost sensing its moments were numbered. The few tourists that were there gathered round to watch, and later wished they hadn’t. A local ‘shaman’, who looked more like a scruffy kid to us, lifted the animal’s head with its nose rope, swiftly drew a blade across its throat and deftly ran away. The buffalo hardly reacted at first, then clumsily and pathetically stumbled and fell over some bamboo poles near its feet, staggering back up and around the post it was tied to with blood spurting from its neck wound. The ‘shaman’ came in again, slashed through more throat flesh and sprinted off. It wasn’t quick. The animal only died after about 3 or 4 minutes, eventually collapsing to the ground and twitching for several minutes more. The energy and exuberance we’d gained from the vibrant cortege moments before died along with it. We were left sickened and profoundly flat. The locals didn’t even bat an eyelid. It’s one thing trying to appreciate traditions for what they are and not assess them against your own morality. It’s another thing altogether witnessing a slow and merciless killing in front of your eyes.
The sacrificial buffalo
We left shortly afterwards as that was the final act of the day. For some light relief we journeyed on to another village where Peso offered to show us a couple of corpses that had been ‘sick’ for several years and who seemed happy enough to entertain voyeuristic foreigners gawping at their remains.
En route we chanced upon a buffalo fight organised by local villagers as a means to indulge in some illegal gambling. The fighting consists of one male buffalo pushed up against another so that their horns meet. This seems to trigger an explosive response in both and they ram against each other until one gives ground and turns tail. The first fight seemed difficult to get going as both beasts seemed more intent on eating the grass at their feet than butting their opponent. When they did spur into action it was short-lived and the dominant male looked slightly disappointed as his meeker foe scuttled off with barely a scrap. The next bout was more entertaining. The animals were painted up with slogans and names, some more elaborate than others. One of the buffalo in the second fight was labelled ‘Fuck’ for some odd reason, though judging by its subsequent reaction it was probably what was going through its mind. Courage not being ‘Fuck’s primary characteristic, his initial reaction on touching horns was to run away as fast as he could. His opponent, sensing clear victory, pursued him with vigour. The locals tried to grab both, but they were running so fast it was impossible to stop them. ‘Fuck’ careered all over the place for several minutes, including a dangerous moment when he headed straight for us, with his challenger refusing to stop pursuit. Everyone, including us, found the whole episode highly hilarious and we were almost disappointed when the victor was eventually caught. At least it brighted the mood.
Country Tongkanon, Tana Toraja
We were a little late to the corpse viewing, but luckily our hosts were unperturbed. Peso introduced us to an elderly lady who was around 80 when she’d fallen ‘sick’ along with her son, who’d contracted the same illness a few years later. Both were lying in open coffins with their mummified faces on display. The elderly lady had been there for nearly 8 years but her family had just about got the money together to hold the funeral at the end of the month. I asked Peso about the obvious disconnect between the idea of speeding one’s loved one to paradise and the fact that they’d been dead for many years already. “But they’re not dead,” he corrected, “they’re sick.” “They’re not the only one’s,” I almost said.
Still a looker, 4 years dead
Next day we attended a ‘Celebration House’ ceremony at another Tongkanon complex with another guide, Paulus. Peso had told us that this ceremony was a way in which the dead could be pushed up the celestial pecking order. Unless you’re ‘noble’ and rich, a funeral that does not include the right sacrificial numbers (or where the sick person passed away with unpaid debts) necessitates further, future sacrifice to compensate. In the meantime the deceased remains neither here nor there. We couldn’t help but wonder that there must be millions of souls up in the ether striving for perfection but never really likely to attain it if their families couldn’t keep up with sacrificial demands. What then? Anyway, Paulus informed us, Peso was completely wrong. The celebration house ceremony was only received by the already divine so they could bless a new or recently renovated house (and also performed to keep them sweet with more sacrifice). Even the guides couldn’t agree on the rules.
On arrival here we were slightly dismayed to find a large pen in which were kept around 40 to 50 squeaking pigs. “Are these to be sacrificed today?” we enquired. “Oh yes,” beamed Paulus, “these and many more”. Throughout our time there more trussed-up piggies were brought into the courtyard and simply deposited on the ground. Most struggled to release themselves from their tethers. Some succeeded and merrily snorted around the place, getting under everyone’s feet. Some of the larger specimens were kept in open bamboo cages, their snouts comically poking out. All, inevitably, were doomed.
Aside from a few announcements, a parade of relatives receiving a blessing from a shaman (a daub of pig’s blood) and a few dancing girls, not much seemed to be happening. Most of the relatives were wearing bright yellow attire though and the scene, situated as it was in the wonderful architecture of the Tongkanon, was marvellously picturesque and we were happy just to soak it up. The time came for the pigs to go. “Right, time to leave,” insisted Paulus. The small number of other tourists there were also pushed to make a hasty exit. From bitter experience, it seems, fragile western sensibilities need to be protected from sights and sounds like this. Weeping, fainting, vomiting, anger, prolonged trauma were common reactions the guides had encountered before. Not many could put up with the hideous screeching of multiple dying pigs, not to mention the smell and the small rivers of blood created by the dispatch of so many large mammals. Remembering the buffalo from the day before, we weren’t overly inclined to protest…
Celebration House ceremony
Tiny dancers, Tana Toraja
A happier occasion was on the agenda anyway. An hour or so later we turned up at a local wedding, signed ourselves into the guestbook and were presented with a gift of two glass tea cups with lids sporting small plastic bears. Paulus showed us to a seating area and we sat there, for about 2 hours, waiting for something to happen. Aside from some appalling but amusing singing by random guests on a karaoke machine, nothing much occurred at all. Eventually the bride and groom arrived, having just been married in a local church, and were led in procession to a raised platform by copious quantities of dancing maidens. A few speeches next, in which the bride was advised about her wifely duties (feminism ain’t big here) and the groom told to ‘man-up’ in order to keep her happy. Then a quick buffet lunch and we were off. We got to meet the couple at least, along with their parents on the platform, joining a long line of those who’d just stuffed themselves and now wanted to bugger off. It seemed a little mercenary, but that’s just what happens here.
We picked up with Peso again on our third day and asked if we could see the buffalo market, supposedly the biggest in the world and most certainly the biggest in Asia, to get a feel for what one looks for when selecting the choicest beast. It was the day of the weekly market, luckily, so the place was packed with hundreds of animals and rather quiet gents gently negotiating prices. In one of the noisiest countries imaginable it was interesting to see that offers, declines, reoffers and agreements were done with the minimum of fuss and hardly any words. Peso scoffed at the inferior offerings shipped in from overseas, from the likes of Malaysia and the Philippines. Nowhere near as desirable as home grown but more expensive Sulawesi specimens or enormous beasts from Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo. We felt a few horns, looked up a few noses and squeezed a few flanks. Peso pointed at each one and named its probable price. To our eyes the albino buffalo looked downright hideous, though Peso marvelled jealously at each one. The less grey in the body the better the beast, apparently, though none are ever perfectly pink. Horns are best if swept back and naturally golden. Some owners had painted their animal’s horns in a ridiculous attempt to make them look more gold coloured, and we rightly refused to contemplate them in our assessments. We stumbled into more familiar territory though when we came across the adjacent market trading in fighting birds (having been to the downright brutal cockpits of Manila a few years back we now felt almost qualified to give opinions). Here the birds are allowed to fight, but only so potential buyers can assess their martial abilities. Unlike in fights for real, there were no 2-inch blades strapped to heels to slash and maim opponents, though the bouts were just as intense and mesmeric.
Buffalo market, Rantepao
Only the most handsome command the best prices…
At the fighting bird market, Rantepao
Peso’s mate shows off his prize cock
Dudes with attitude
At the fighting bird market, Rantepao
Back on schedule again, our next outings covered the burial places of the dead, post funeral rites. Torajans, whether en route to puya, or happily ensconced in paradise, are all ‘buried’ after their funerals. The fashion for how and where this occurs has evolved over time and ranges from isolation in high inaccessible cliff caves, to suspension in coffins against cliff walls, or internment in carved out rock niches. Some now repose in modern tombs that resemble Christian cemeteries. Bodies, however, are never stored underground. With the exception of the latter, all burial sites for nobility are watched over by groups of life-sized manekins, called tau-tau. These range from unsophisticated dummy-like affairs to rather elaborate and supposedly accurate representations of the deceased. As with all things funeral here, the money spent on the effigy of your relative has a direct bearing on your family prestige, but interestingly, has no effect on the speed of transition from the earthly realm to the two stages of paradise. Instead the tau-tau is a tangible link between the living and the dead and is said to be a vessel that the soul’s spirit can use for ‘interaction’ with the family. From the start of the funeral, relatives talk to it as if it were the person themselves (the corpse now being interred in a coffin). Once the funeral’s over, the tau-tau is placed on a high balcony in a cliff face and becomes a physical manifestation of the deceased’s new role as a watchful, deified guardian. Only noble souls with enough air-miles to spend on the quick connecting flight from puya to paradise get to get a tau-tau however – you have to be sure Aunt Fanny’s going to get in before you commission her effigy in expensive jack-fruit wood.
Peso told us about a slightly sinister black market trade in stolen tau-tau. Apparently the Japanese have a penchant for installing them in their Balinese villas and will pay very good money for them. Occasionally they have them stolen to order. Unsurprisingly, security around tau-tau sites is pretty intense. Some are now kept in lockable cages.
As we left the grave sites we chatted to a young lad who’d showed us around a cave littered with forgotten skulls and bones. He was ambitious and jealous of his friends who’d managed to emigrate to America. We asked him why he wanted to go. He answered that it was the only way he would be able to afford the exorbitant costs of the future funerals of his relatives. He must have been sixteen at most.
It’s not often you come across a place that beguiles you wholeheartedly. We’re old hands at this game and it’s sometimes difficult not to be dismissive or cynical about traditions that seem like mere variations on a theme, exotic though that theme might ultimately be. Here however, there was no danger of that in the slightest. We were thrilled to discover we could still be thrilled. I’m writing this two weeks after we’ve left the region. We’re still asking ourselves questions and trying to find out the answers. It’s undoubtedly the most fascinating culture we’ve encountered on this trip so far, perhaps of all our travels, though it’s remarkably similar to the reverence for the dead we saw in Madagascar and the utterly bonkers voodou practices we found in Togo and Benin. It’s a fabulous case in point. You might think you’ve seen it all. Discovering that you most definitely haven’t remains a wonderful pleasure.
Footnote: One of our more glaringly obvious questions about Torajan beliefs was how they could be squared off with the concurrent practice of Christianity. With the exception of the particularly old or obstinate, Torajans are all baptised, celebrate Christmas and go to church on Sundays. But the idea of relatives as divine guardian deities and the wholesale slaughter of thousands of animals is not exactly coherent with the teachings of the church. People seem to regard ‘traditional practices’ and ‘religion’ as separate spheres of influence, but even that didn’t seem wholly convincing. We suspect that mercantile interests firmly rooted on earth might be the answer. The business of buffalo and pig selling, lending and slaughter is a bizarre form of banking here and animals are registered as legally enforceable debts even when given from one family member to another. The system is complex and intertwined and would be extremely difficult to dismantle even if desired. More importantly though, holding a lavish, expensive funeral clearly denotes to their peers that a family is of creditworthy and reliable character. In other words, those who lavish thousands fulfilling their traditional after-life duties are much more likely to remain successful and influential in the life of this world than those who do not.
Simon (15th July 2026)
This is one of your most surreal posts and the graphic photos certainly are shocking. I can understand your inability to get your head around this ‘tradition’.
By the way, are you ever coming back to the UK? 🤔
Yes it was a bit surreal and shocking living through it to be honest..!! Sorry if it turned your stomach!
Yes we’re coming back too, probably in October. We’re running out of cash!
A very interesting read, glad youre still managing to find things that surprise and shock you. Amazing pictures as always that really bring it to life … although on this occassion should probably come with a warning 😅
Ha ha. Sorry – shock value doesn’t come with warnings…. Yes it is wonderful to know you can still be surprised and fascinated, even if the subject matter happens to be rather alien to our ways of thinking (or perhaps because of exactly that)…