Known for their spectacular funeral rituals, effigy-filled burial
cliffs, and elaborately carved architecture, the people of Tana Toraja, Indonesia number some 346,000. Although they continue to adhere to animist traditions, the Toraja are a predominantly Christian minority in a Muslim
country. The most important thing in a Torajan’s life is saving enough money and
having enough children to ensure their funeral is the most prestigious. Funerals are often held years after death, the body having spent the
intervening time lying in state beneath the family home. The family uses
the time to save for the big day, which will be a huge affair,
involving hundreds of guests who will bring dozens of buffalo and pigs,
all destined to be slaughtered and eaten that afternoon. Torajans are rarely buried in the ground. The cliff graves
of Lemo
and Londa
are surrounded by rice fields.
The Torajans believe that you take your worldly posessions with you
to the afterlife. So burials included posessions, much like the Egyptians. Theft of these burial
items led the Torajans to build grave sites in caves hollowed out in
cliff faces. In front of the burial
caves are "
tau tau" - wooden effigies that represent the people buried
in the caves. To inter the coffin,one man climbs into the grave, first, to make room,
while the others push the casket from the outside. It takes half an hour before both man and coffin
are in the grave. The original man must then crawl through the coffins to get out of the grave so it can be sealed.
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| tau tau effigies |
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| tau tau effigies |
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| Coffins piled up in caves among ancestor bones |
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| Ancetsor coffins |
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| Ancestor bones |
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| Coffins piled into a cave |
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| Coffins and bones lie in this cave |
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| Coffins and the possessions of the dead |
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| Ancestor skulls with cigarette offerings |
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| Coffins piled within a cave |
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| Ladder in front of the cliff grave before interment |
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| The door which seals the grave into a cliff |
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