I WOKE REFRESHED after fourteen comatose hours in our hotel in the city of Rantepao. We went to meet our guide, Agus—pronounced “Ah Goose”—in the lobby. He was compact and fit, handsome. Agus had been taking Dutch and German tourists on deep jungle and rafting treks for twenty-five years, but in recent years had developed a special death-focused relationship with Paul. Agus told us that the ma’nene’ (the ritual we had come to see) wouldn’t happen until tomorrow (“on Toraja time”). Today’s adventure would be an appetizer to the ma’nene’: a Torajan funeral.
We wound down endless dirt roads in Agus’s SUV, through the emerald green hills. For several miles we were caught behind a moped with a hairy black pig tied down with neon green rope behind the driver. I scooted forward in my seat. Was the pig dead? As if on cue, the pig’s hooves went into swimming motion.
Agus caught me looking. “Pigs are harder to carry on a bike than a person. They squirm.”
The pig was heading to the same Torajan funeral we were. One of us would not be coming back.
YOU COULD HEAR the funeral before you saw it: drums and cymbals crashing. We entered the swirl of people following behind the corpse. The body was being transferred in a replica of a traditional Torajan house. These houses, known as tongkonan, resemble no residence you’ve ever seen, standing high on stilts with a roof that swoops up to two points in the sky. This corpse, inside his mini-house, was carried atop the shoulders of thirty-five young men.
The crowd jostled into a central courtyard as the corpse made its way around the periphery. It was slow going—the house was heavier than expected and the men had to stop every thirty seconds or so and set it down.
In the center of the courtyard stood a buffalo, robust and serious in its demeanor. The buffalo’s presence implied a vague threat of what was to come. Staked to the ground by a short rope, it looked like the lamb left out for the hungry T-Rex in Jurassic Park. As Chekhov said about the theater, if you reveal a gun on stage in Act I, it better go off by the final act.
Tourists (at least, the ones I could tell were tourists because of their white skin and Western European accents) were corralled in the far back corner of the courtyard. This is the primary tension of Toraja’s death tourism industry: how to get tourists close, but not too close. Our exile in Section J seemed more than fair to me, and I plunked myself down to observe as Paul set up his camera for photographs. Today he wore an outfit better suited to the humid weather: denim overalls, a sheriff’s badge, polka-dot socks, and a cowboy hat.
There were some tourists who did not get the hint. One couple perched themselves in folding chairs alongside the dead man’s family in the VIP section. The locals were too polite to ask them to leave. An older German woman with crudely dyed blond hair walked directly into the center of the courtyard, through the unfolding festivities, taking photographs with her iPad thrust into local children’s faces and chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. I wanted to yank her out with a vaudeville cane.
Tourism in Tana Toraja is a recent development, almost unheard of before the 1970s. The Indonesian government had concentrated on developing tourism (to great success) on other islands like Bali and Java, but Tana Toraja had something those other places didn’t: impressive, ritualistic death. They no longer wanted to be viewed by the rest of Indonesia as a place of “headhunters and black magic,” but as participants in a high culture tradition.
The corpse made its way into the courtyard. The men carrying the house thrust it up and down, chanting and grunting. They went at it until they exhausted themselves and had to set the whole house down, then took a deep breath and did it again. It was hypnotic to watch the surging effort, especially compared to the staid pace of a standard pallbearers’ procession in the West.
The corpse was (is, if you’re Torajan) that of a man named Rovinus Lintin. He was important to the village, a government worker and farmer. Behind me stood a five-foot-high color poster of Rovinus’s face. The image showed a man in his late sixties in a sharp blue suit and a pencil-thin John Waters mustache.
Children in elaborate beaded costumes ran through the courtyard, dodging the men carrying squealing pigs tied to bamboo stakes. The men were taking the pigs to a hidden back area. The door of the main house was closed off by a hanging tapestry featuring a full roster of Disney princesses; Belle, Ariel, and Aurora watched the pigs pass to the slaughter. I wondered if moped-pig from earlier in the day was among them.
These Torajan funerals are not casual B.Y.O.B(uffalo) events. Each pig and sacrificial animal had been brought by a different family, and carefully recorded. There is a system of debts that keeps people coming to funerals for years. As Agus said, “You bring a pig to my mother’s funeral now, I will bring one for you someday.” Torajan and American death culture share this particular trait of overexpenditure; no one wants to be perceived as disrespecting the dead.
All of these rituals might seem complicated, but Agus claimed they have actually become far less so. His parents were born into the animistic Aluk religion, but his father converted to Catholicism at age sixteen. Agus gave his theory: “There are 7,777 rituals in Aluk. People left because it got too complicated.” Catholicism hardly seems the place to go for fewer complicated rituals, but there you go.
The crowd went silent as the priest came over the loudspeaker and began his sermon. I didn’t understand the words, but he punctuated his speech with salutes to the deceased, booming “RO-vinus LIN-TOOOOOOON!” at top volume. For twenty minutes he spoke, and when he started to lose the crowd with the repetitive phrasing he screamed into the microphone, like a death metal rocker, “COOOOOEEEEE!” Let me tell you, if you’re sitting next to a speaker and don’t see a “COOOOOEEEEE!” coming, it can be devastating. Agus translated the expression as something akin to “listen up!” In recent years the narration at Torajan funerals (as well as choreography and costume choices) has taken cues from television variety shows.