PHOTOS: The Dead Live With Their Loved Ones On This Indonesian Island
PHOTOS: The Dead Live With Their Loved Ones On This Indonesian Island
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As a host, 90-year-old Alfrida Lantong is somewhat passive. Lying resolutely on her back and gazing up through a pair of thick, dusty spectacles, she roundly ignores her son's murmured greeting as he enters the room, and she pays little heed to the gaggle of grandchildren clustered around her.
But Alfrida can hardly be blamed for her unresponsiveness. After all, she has been dead for the last seven years.
Grandchildren of Alfrida Lantong, who died in 2012, visit her in her coffin at the family's home near Rantepau, a town in the Sulawesi region of Indonesia.
Alfrida belongs to the Toraja people of southern Sulawesi in Indonesia, for whom the line between life and death is not black and white. Though her heart stopped beating in 2012, as far as her family is concerned, she is only "to macula," which translates loosely as "sick." They still visit her regularly, talk to her and bring her three meals a day, which they leave on the floor.
After saying goodbye, Alfrida's son, Mesak, covers her with a light veil and closes the lid of her coffin before exiting the room. He will visit her again at suppertime. "We would miss her if she didn't still live here," says the 47-year- old. "She looked after us our whole lives, so now it is important that we look after her too."
Mesak holds a picture of his mother, Alfirda, who died in 2012.
Beyond her silent companionship, one of the reasons Alfrida still lives with her family is that even after seven years, preparations for her funeral are not yet complete. In Torajan culture, a person's funeral is the most important day of his or her life. Funerals can be so expensive that successive generations will be saddled with crippling debt. The events can last a week and involve the slaughter of hundreds of livestock.
"We need more time to save," says Mesak, whose family belongs to what he calls the "noble" class in the stratified Torajan caste system. "The community would not respect us if we did a small funeral. We must sacrifice many buffalo."
Toraja country stretches for hundreds of miles across the mountainous interior of Sulawesi, a land of verdant hills and scattered villages connected by a network of dirt tracks that wind their way through lush rice paddies and patches of thick forest. It is an enclave of Christianity in a predominantly Muslim country, although traditional beliefs remain prevalent. Especially when it comes to death.
Throughout most of the world, death is a topic that generally inspires dread. It marks the sudden and irreversible rupture of a person from their loved ones. Even if one believes in an afterlife, the immediate severing of the connection between the dead and the living is absolute. When anthropomorphized in popular culture, death is often depicted as a malevolent entity, the sinister black-cloaked figure clutching a scythe.
Not so in Tana Toraja. Here, death is not something to shy away from. It is an all-pervading presence in day-to-day life, inscribed into the landscape in eerie wooden "tau-tau" statues, commissioned by the bereaved to remember the dead, and into the social calendar, which revolves heavily around funerals.
Death is even central to the economy: Families often save for years so they can afford the elaborate exchange of gifts, money and freshly slaughtered meat that take place during the events, which are seen as a key means of redistributing wealth in Toraja society.
Death provides livelihoods for thousands of people here, both in the tourism sector and in funeral-related businesses. That includes the farmhands who look after the exorbitantly expensive sacrificial buffaloes, the restaurants and hotels springing up in Rantepau, and the artisans who craft the wooden tau-tau statues that adorn the graves.
These statues — which range in appearance from highly stylized to disconcertingly lifelike — are a prominent feature of the caves, outcrops and escarpments that dot the countryside. For Jeffrey Maguling, a young tau-tau carver whose family has been in the business for four generations, the statues are an art form as well as a source of income.
Jeffrey Maguling carves a tau-tau statue for the family of a recently deceased woman. The tau-tau will stand by her grave.
Tommy Trenchard and Aurélie Marrier d'Unienville
"I don't just copy photos of the dead person," says Maguling, who works from a small wooden shack by the roadside south of Rantepau town. "I try to capture the person's character. It takes me about ten days to make one." And he can sell a statuefor about 15 million rupiah, or $1,108.
"There's more demand than in my father's time," he adds. "The population has grown, so there are more people dying. It makes me happy when my clients like the tau-tau. But I will always share their sadness."
It's not that Torajans don't mourn their loved ones. But the process is softened by the gradual — and never-ending — nature of the transition from one world to another in Toraja cosmology. Even after people are buried, they are not really gone. Their tau-tau continue to stand tall on their cliff-top perches, eternally surveying the bustling land of the living below.
In some communities, to show respect, the dead are exhumed every few years and dressed in fresh clothes, often with a new pair of sunglasses, as if their pride over their appearance had not expired with their bodies.
And when a baby dies, the body is sometimes buried in a hole carved out of the trunk of a tree, so that the two may live on and grow together.
When a Torajan baby dies, the child is sometimes buried inside the trunk of a tree in the hope that he will continue to grow with the tree.
Tommy Trenchard and Aurélie Marrier d'Unienville
In a village near Alfrida Lantong's home, set on a steep hillside above a sea of brilliant, apple-green rice paddies, another Torajan family is making last-minute preparations for their big day. The "sick" man, Lucas Ruruk, was a farmer from one of the middle social classes. His funeral will be of average size by Torajan standards. Yet the family is still expecting 5,000 guests and estimate that the event, which will last several days, will cost roughly 250 million Indonesian rupees (around $18,000). That's roughly five times Indonesia's average yearly income.
MMW
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