Tourism and the Toraja People of Indonesia: A Conflicted Culture

The Toraja are a group of indigenous people who reside in South Sulawesi, a mountainous region of Indonesia. The name Toraja is not self-given and likely came from the Bugis language. The meaning of "Toraja" roughly translates to "people of the highlands". Originally, the people who lived in the highlands of Sulawesi chose to think of themselves in terms of their small bands and families. It was not until well into the 20th century that the Toraja began to identify themselves as one ethnic group and under this collective name. Perhaps this is fitting as the Torajan identity and culture seems to be continually influenced and redefined by outside sources.

For hundreds of years the Toraja led a relatively undisturbed existence. The coastal peoples would limit Torajan access to the outside world, as would the terrain. In 1685, a French priest was the first European to write about the Toraja. The Dutch first established power on the island of Sulawesi in the 1600s, but mostly left the Toraja alone at this time. The highlands were difficult to penetrate and held no real draw for the Europeans since the land was not very productive. It was for this reason that the region was one of the last to fall under the control of the Dutch.

It was centuries later before the Dutch would actually access the highlands of Sulawesi, making descriptions and taking photographs while there. In the 1920s the Dutch would begin working to convert the Toraja from their animist belief system to Christianity. The Dutch would also forbid the Torajans from owning slaves, disrupting their traditional class system that consisted of the nobility, the commoners, and slaves. The Dutch also insisted that they begin to pay taxes to the Dutch government. This would prove to be only the beginning of great outside influences on the Torajan people and their culture.

In the 1970s a drastic shift began to occur for the Toraja. The highland region, by then known as Tana Toraja, received road improvements that made the area much more easily accessible yet still remote. As far as the Indonesia government was concerned this helped to make it into an ideal tourist area and they began to heavily develop it as such. In 1973 there were few more than 400 recorded tourists, yet by 1976 more than 12,000 people had visited the region of Tana Toraja.

The Toraja have come to be known to outsiders mostly for two culturally significant things - their funeral rites and their "tongkonan". The tongkonan are the traditional ancestral houses and one of the most instantly recognizable aspects of the Torajan culture. The houses are elevated and made mostly of wood, but without nails and covered with intricate carvings. The most notable feature of a tongkonan is the large arcing, boat-shaped roof, traditionally made from bamboo, which has also been compared to the horns of the water buffalo an important animal to the Toraja.

The tongkonan houses have always been at the center of the social lives of the Torajans. The type of tongkonan traditionally reflected the social standing of the family, and similarly served as a kind of genealogical record for each family. The more elaborate homes were reserved for the noble families and those villagers considered to be commoners were only allowed to carve specific areas of the house as a symbol of their lesser status. Slaves were not allowed to carve their tongkonans at all.

Today's tongkonan differ from the traditional in several ways, many of which demonstrate how outside influences have affected and corrupted the traditional culture. The roofs are now more often made of iron than bamboo. The local government now helps with the cost of building, which is done by the residents, for the benefit of tourists to the area. In fact, in the 1980s, it became law that any homes built along main roads must include traditional tongkonan embellishments, regardless of the social standing of the family.

The smaller, more traditional houses are sometimes marketed as being where the Toraja live, but they are actually rarely used as homes, as they are too small and inconvenient for modern Torajan villagers. Some have been built specifically to be rented and used by tourists and local hotels include many of the same architectural forms. Small replicas of the houses are sold to tourists as key chains and other souvenirs. Visitors can find t-shirts emblazoned with the distinctive tongkonan silhouette.

As Torajan commoners find more lucrative opportunities both in local tourism and in other parts of Indonesia, they are building greater wealth and status and therefore building greater and more elaborate tongkonans, blurring the line further between the common and the noble classes. The result is a physical manifestation of how far the erosion of the hierarchy has progressed since slavery was first abolished and particularly since the Toraja began to seek outside forms of income and status.

Much like the tongkonan, the funeral rites of the Toraja are elaborate and highly symbolic to their culture. Also like the tongkonan, the funerals of the Toraja have been promoted to tourists and have taken a path divergent from that of the original symbolic meaning. In fact, you could say that the focus of Toraja tourism is the rituals associated with funerals. Funerals are now sometimes postponed to co-ordinate with visiting tour groups.

The funerals vary in intricacy and size depending on the wealth and status of the deceased. According to tradition, the surviving family of the deceased must sacrifice water buffalo in order to inherit property. The funeral is a critical event to those who still practice the ancient beliefs.

The first step in the funeral ceremonies is to build the ceremonial field or "rante". Around this are built shelters or "lantang" in which the funeral guests will stay.

There are two ceremonies for each funeral, one directly following the death and the second occurring whenever the family has amassed the resources to carry it out. This second ceremony may draw up to thousands of guests and last for days. It includes rituals like dancing and buffalo fighting. The nobles who die are given death feasts involving the slaughter of water buffalo and pigs, the meat of which is distributed to all the villagers involved in the funeral. Realistically carved effigies are also made of the deceased..

These elaborate funeral rites are traditional and have been going on for hundreds of years. However, most Torajans now practice Christianity rather than the traditional religion of "aluk". The rituals have therefore mostly lost their religious meaning and are more spectacle than spiritual. The death feasts, effigies, and elaborate ceremonies are no longer reserved for nobles but instead are given for anyone whose family can afford them.

Since at least the 1970s, the funerals have been promoted as a tourist attraction and are advertised as the kind of funeral given to all Toraja citizens. The anthropologist Kathleen Adams noted that, in 1987, "tourists descending from jets at the Ujung Pandang airport in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, were greeted with a mimeographed announcement of an elaborate, pageantry-filled funeral ceremony." Some funerals have even been televised.

After the elaborate funeral rites the bodies of the deceased are buried in mortuary complexes in cliffs with the effigies of the dead looking outward. Even these are sold as an attraction for the visiting tourists.

The tourist trade sells the Toraja as a package, marketing stereotypes and erroneous beliefs about the culture. The Toraja take part in this trade and earn wealth from it and are therefore enticed to put on a show for the tourists, giving the outsiders what they expect to find, whether that representation is accurate or not.

Since the Sulawesi highlands were first accessed by Europeans, the Toraja have found themselves in a constantly changing cultural and political climate, incredibly susceptible to outside influence. Outsiders have given them their name, changed their religion, and significantly altered their strong class system. In turn, the Toraja themselves have made the tongkonans, once homes for the nobles, into a symbol for the culture as a whole. Ceremonies for the nobles' funerals have lost some religious importance and become spectacles advertised on pamphlets at airports.

It would seem that the Toraja culture as a whole suffers from an identity crisis, the once specific and important lines of their society blurred to where they cannot agree on where the lines are any longer. While the Toraja culture of today strongly reflects traditions and beliefs of the past it is erroneous to say that the Toraja culture that is sold to tourists as a centuries old, unchanging society is indeed the same culture that the Dutch stumbled upon in the 1600s. The modern Toraja seem caught somewhere between the past and present, holding on to the customs of their ancestors yet changing them even as they do so.

WORKS CITED:

Adams, Kathleen M. Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identities, Tourism, and Power in Tana Toraja. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006

--- "Come to Tana Toraja, 'Land of Heavenly Kings': Travel Agents as Brokers in Ethnicity" Annals of Tourism Research, Vol 11, pp 469-485, 1984

--- "Ethnic Tourism and the Renegotiation of Tradition in Tana Toraja" Ethnology. Vol. 36, 1997

--- "More than an ethnic marker: Toraja Art as Identity Negotiator" American Ethnologist 25 no.3,

pp 327-51, 1998

Bisht, Narendra S. and T. S. Bankoti. Encyclopaedia of the South East Asian Ethnography. Volume 1 A-L. India: Global Vision Publishing, 2004

Errington, Shelly. "The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress"Berkeley University of California Press, 1998.

Volkman, Toby Alice. Feasts of honor: Ritual and Change in the Toraja Highlands. Illinois: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Press, 1985

Yamashita, Shinji. "Manipulating Ethnic Tradition: The Funeral Ceremony, Tourism and Television Among the Toraja of Sulawesi." Indonesia, Vol. 58, (Oct., 1994), pp. 69-82