Where the dead are not quite dead — Torajan funeral ceremonies last weeks and cost a family's life savings, the deceased travel with the living for months before burial, and cliff-face tombs have tau-tau effigies staring out over the rice terraces
Tana Toraja (area 3,205 sq km, pop. 230,000) is a highland regency in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, famous for one of the world's most elaborate and expensive death cult cultures. The Torajan people (Sa'dan Toraja) maintain a ceremonial tradition called Rambu Solo (smoke descending — contrasted with Rambu Tuka, smoke ascending, for life celebrations) in which funeral rites can last from three days to several weeks, involve the sacrifice of water buffalo (dozens to hundreds, depending on family wealth — a prized albino buffalo can cost the equivalent of a car), and represent the central social, e…
The Torajan people are believed to have arrived in Sulawesi from the north approximately 2,500–3,000 years ago, possibly from the Southeast Asian mainland, bringing a culture of megalith building and water buffalo sacrifice that predates Hinduism or Islam in Indonesia. The Torajan homeland in the Sa'dan River highland was effectively isolated from Sulawesi's coastal Bugis and Makassarese kingdoms for most of the pre-colonial period, which allowed their animist beliefs (Aluk To Dolo, 'the way of the ancestors') to persist intact until Dutch colonization in 1905–1913. The Dutch Reformed Church…