When Death Doesn’t Mean Goodbye

Life

THE 'SECOND FUNERAL'

Pictureof a boy giving a thumbs-up sign in front of his grandmother's body

Funerals glue Torajans tightly, one family to the next, one village to the next. Funerals consume savings as people outdo each other in gifts of animals, creating multigenerational obligations and conspicuous consumption. Your cousin donates a buffalo? You must give a bigger one. You can’t repay a past gift? Then your son or daughter must. If they can’t, the burden will fall to your grandchildren. This dark side of funeral obligations can be clearly heard in the cries of the emcee announcing the gifts. “Whose pig is this?” he intones over a loudspeaker. “Whose buffalo is this?” In a metal-roofed shelter below, government officials tally the quality and size of each gift for tax purposes. At the ceremony’s end the neat ledger will be presented to the family, which will be expected to reciprocate when some member of a giver’s family dies.

Torajan funerals are also great fun. A funeral is a wedding, a bar mitzvah, and a family reunion all in one, easily outstripping the conviviality of Irish wakes. Lavish funerals are a chance to meet and mingle, to eat and drink well, to enjoy games and entertainment—even to network for jobs or eye prospective mates. There are water buffalo fights. (“No gambling,” the emcee announces. “The family is Christian, and the police are here. The family does not support gambling.”) As a cry goes up summoning the strongest to move the coffin to the tower, at least 50 young men seize the bamboo poles. They chant their way around the field, pumping the coffin up and down as the lyrics grow bawdy: something about body parts, and size, and sexual prowess. A water fight breaks out, with the bearers drenching each other, and the guests, with water from plastic cups.

“You can make an excuse for a wedding, but you have to come to a funeral,” says Daniel Rantetasak, 52, who sits one bright afternoon in the VIP section at the funeral of Lassi Allo To’dang, Dinda’s grandfather. Daniel figures he has attended more than 300 funerals in his lifetime. He says that at a funeral like this a minimum of 24 buffalo should be sacrificed. Sometimes the number may exceed a hundred. At an average of 20 million rupiah per buffalo ($1,425)—prices can go much higher for the most prized, mottled ones—an elite funeral can top $400,000 in buffalo costs alone, paid for by socially compulsory donations and by the many family members who send money home from abroad. Food and drink for hundreds of guests and temporary bamboo housing for visitors add to the costs. People devote resources to funerals even while struggling to pay $10,000 for university expenses. One woman remembers her grandmother saying funds were too scarce to pay for college. A few weeks later her grandmother spent thousands on pigs for a relative’s ceremony. “I was a victim of tradition,” the woman says. It is commonly said that in Toraja, one lives to die.

Pictureof friends and family carrying a body to its grave in a funeral bier

Yet some Western tourists who come to Toraja seeking the exotic pageantry of funerals find that the human connections, unflinching contact with death, and sheer fun help shift their thinking about their own culture’s habits. “When someone dies in Spain, it’s the worst thing that can happen in a family,” says Antonio Mouchet, an IT consultant touring from Madrid. “We Western people ... don’t think of the end. Here, they have been preparing for years.”

I avert my eyes at the buffalo sacrifice—55 will be killed in total. It feels brutal to Western sensibilities. Torajans look on unfazed; their concern is more for the group than the individual, says Stanislaus Sandarupa, a Torajan and a linguistic anthropologist at Hasanuddin University, in Makassar. The buffalo’s obligation, he says, is to provide meat to ensure human existence. People, in turn, must care for the species and make sure it endures.

While the funeral is unfolding in town, another set of ceremonies is taking place in the countryside. August is a month not only for funerals but also for ma’nene’—the “second funerals” held by families every few years when they return to ancestral tombs to tidy up, bring the dead snacks and cigarettes, and take long-buried bodies out for a turn in the sun and put fresh clothing on them. Daniel Seba Sambara presides over a gathering that includes his wife, a daughter and granddaughter, son, son-in-law, and many others congregated around a grand family crypt on a breezy spot overlooking a valley. Daniel wears new trousers and looks slightly surprised, as if peering out from behind new wire-rimmed glasses. He died in 2012 after 20 years with diabetes. This is the first time his family has seen him since he was interred. This week, for the ceremony of ma’nene’, he was hauled out along with a dozen or so much longer dead relatives, his companions in the crypt.

Pictureof upper-class family propping up the body of a relative

Relaxed and fit, Pieter, Daniel’s son, followed his father in the construction business in Papua Province, more than a thousand miles away. Pieter’s orange polo shirt is fashionable. His English is excellent. His daughter, Monna, a civil engineer, passes around cell phone pictures of her choir camp in Cincinnati. Pieter and his family are thoroughly modern Torajans.

So how does he feel seeing his three-years-dead father lashed to a stucco pillar, with relatives posed at his side? Proud. And excited. His father’s body is relatively intact and recognizable, unlike those of other relatives lying nearby, which look more like Halloween skeletons. His skin is smooth. His fingernails and beard have grown since they saw him last, relatives exclaim. Daniel was nicknamed Ne’ Boss—Grandpa Boss—years ago, a commentary on his rags-to-riches success. The body’s state is a sign to Pieter that he too will prosper. “Not everybody is like this. It will bring his children and grandchildren success,” he says, gleefully.

Pictureof the aftermath of a water buffalo sacrifice at a funeral

I approached this moment with trepidation. After all, we Westerners cringe at the sight of a corpse. Confronted with several, I find myself curiously calm and interested. Everyone is festive, wearing bright colors and appearing decidedly happy. The smell is musty, like a bunch of blankets put away wet and stored for several years. The sight is definitely odd but surprisingly not unpleasant or gruesome. “The way they handle the bodies, it’s not scary at all,” says Ki Tan, an Indonesian who grew up in the Netherlands, as he watches a family interact with a group of long-dead loved ones, including a year-old child, dead for 38 years. Nearby, a 21-year-old backpacker from Berlin grows reflective. “I feel very lucky to have seen this,” says Maria Hart, recalling sadly that she was so upset by her own grandfather’s death that she refused to attend his funeral. “On a personal level, I take some comfort in the tradition,” says Kathleen Adams, an anthropologist at Loyola University Chicago who has lived among Torajans and their dead.

The important thing, Torajans say, is that they are not just individuals. The death of one person is only the dropping of a single stitch in an intricate financial, social, and emotional canvas winding backward through ancestors and forward through children. How did Torajans come to believe this? I wonder. Go ask Kambuno, the people say. He’s the man who knows the answers.

In search of Kambuno, we wind northward from the small town of Pangala, skirting rice fields and passing through village after village. Shopkeepers, motorbike riders, and passersby direct us. Everyone knows where Kambuno lives. Two schoolgirls in white shirts, navy skirts, and black ties hop in the car to point the way. When the road peters out, we continue on foot up a steep, rocky course.

We find Petrus Kambuno, wiry, goateed, almost toothless, cutting grass by the side of the road. “You are lucky you found me,” he says. “There is no one left but me who knows these stories.” He claims to be 90 years old. He spins a Genesis-like creation tale, with Toraja at its center. “Here God created man in heaven, and woman from the Earth,” he says. Looking out over lime green terraced rice fields framed against an aquamarine sky, it’s easy to believe that God chose this to be his Eden.

Pictureof Torajan woman grieving as her mother is buried

Kambuno continues: God gave the gifts of bamboo and bananas from the Earth and betel and lime from the heavens. “He commanded us to use these things that give people pleasure to ease our grief, to make ourselves feel happy if we are sad when someone dies.”

I realize I’m asking the wrong question. Torajans, it appears, are probably more deeply connected than we are to the way people everywhere feel death: the desire to stay connected to loved ones in both body and spirit; to believe that people don’t ever really die permanently; and to have, and to become, an ancestor. So the question isn’t why do Torajans do what they do, but why do we do what we do? How did we distance ourselves so much from death, which is, after all, just a part of life? How did we lose the sense of being connected to each other, to our place in society, in the universe?

Kambuno gestures at his family crypt, which he says holds more than ten relatives. “My father is in here,” he says. “But I am here, so he is not really dead. My mother is in here, but I have daughters, so she is not really dead. My daughters have been exchanged for my mother. I have been exchanged for my father.”