Making a Living between Crises and Ceremonies in Tana Toraja

Front matter

Making a Living between Crises and Ceremonies

in Tana Toraja

The Practice of Everyday Life of a South Sulawesi Highland Community in Indonesia

Contents

Makassar: A Transit City... ecesssssssssecssecsseesseeeeees Tana Toraja: A Social Labyrinth Crisis and Ceremonies: An Intriguing Paradox.

Construing Everyday Life... eesssssssssscssecssecssessseesssescsaseessssenseenssesssees Outline of This Study iiisiscissiciennaranannioanssmenmainmnn ais Networks Of Kina....ccssssssssssssssssssessssssssssssssesssescssssscssssacsacsscesssscanesseeseseees 52 ‘A Sense Of PLACE ssisscisscessssscsncssvccnnsssvtesessensiessesusest asses estiesuassiavuesstiwiacteies 60 A Conception of Transnationalisim .sisssssssisiissiisssioninsisisiisna 63 Torajans on the Move Before merantau „u.s...

After meräntäüsamvariurniunneneniiia auaa The Torajan Migrant World after 2000 .ssssssssssssssssssssssssrtseeeessessseseerenresss 80 Different Settings, Same Outcome: Two Torajan Diasporas AS OWA PAE OG ieri ie eiee e eE e a Eiaa 82 Migrant Networks and Organizations ....sssssssssssesssssssssreeseesssresesrsrree 86 (Trans)migrants in the City: The Case of Makassar... go vi CONTENTS

Chapter One

The sound of a gong and drumbeat echo throughout the valley, announcing the arrival of a new group of guests at the ceremonial field. Large bamboo shelters surround the rectangular arena to accommodate the thousands of guests. At the centre stands a two-storey bamboo construction that contains the body of Ne’Sukku who died eleven months earlier, in June 2002. She will be carried to the family grave on the following day, after seven days of rituals. The arriving guests pay their last respects to the deceased woman in a formal procession and slowly walk around the ritual field, leading water buffalo and carrying pigs, jugs of palm wine and baskets of rice. Their names and gifts are announced to the guests already seated in the shelters around the field. One of Ne’Sukku’s children carefully writes down all gifts that are brought in; already hundreds of buffalo and pigs, tons of rice in sacks, dozens of vats of palm wine and millions of rupiah. Relatives, friends and acquaintances come from far and near in the highlands of Tana Toraja to bring their gifts for the family of the deceased. Moreover, hundreds of migrants—who live all over Indonesia and beyond—have returned to Tana Toraja to attend this funeral ceremony. Some are wearing the latest fashions and are taking photographs with their digital cameras. Amid the bustling, men are hacking buffalo meat into small pieces for distribution among the guests. Slowly, the whole ritual field is covered with blood, bones and meat as tens of buffalo are slaughtered.

Watching this extravagant funeral ceremony and the tremendous mobilization of resources which it involves, one finds it hard to believe that Indonesia was affected by an economic and political crisis in the late 1990s. Moreover, this funeral is not an extreme event but typical of hundreds of similar funeral and tongkonan (ancestral house) ceremonies that continue to be organized every year! One may ask what has been going on in this mountainous district? While Indonesia has suffered an economic

1 According to official accounts, in 2001 the number of ceremonies in Tana Toraja reached 2,045, of which 1,872 were funerals (BPKD Tana Toraja:2002). At these ceremonies a total of as many as 8,157 buffalo and 25,235 pigs were slaughtered.

© EDWIN DE JONG, 2013 | DOI 10.1163/9789004252479_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND License.

crisis, Torajans? have still managed to pull enough money together to organize large ceremonies. Moreover, why are these funerals so important that thousands of local people and migrants find the time and money to participate? When I arrived in Tana Toraja in 2001, and again in 2002, to map the way in which people at the local level make a living in the aftermath of an Indonesian economic crisis that had led to a near virtual collapse of the national economy, I was thus confronted with people who spend most or all of their entire household budget on funeral ceremonies. Unravelling this paradox and through that obtaining a thorough understanding of the way in which Torajans make a living in times of economic crisis is the purpose of this study.

Tana Toraja is a mountainous region in the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi, which is probably best known for its beautiful scenery, colourfully painted houses with saddle roofs and spectacular funeral ceremonies (see Map 1.1). For years it has been among the most popular tourist destinations in Indonesia and a site for countless anthropological studies. Unlike most of the preceding researchers (see for example Nooy- Palm 1979a; Volkman 1985; Crystal 1974) who have documented cultural and symbolic aspects of such funeral ceremonies, I had prepared for a socioeconomic approach. When I entered the research scene, cultural aspects and ideals, such as the funeral ceremony, but also ancestral houses and honour and shame (siri’) seemed to imbue Torajan lives in all the domains. I assumed that there must be a different logic behind the way Torajans make a living than a perspective based solely on income, employment, consumption criteria and basic needs. Though it seemed appropriate to depart from livelihood studies, because these frameworks pay significant attention to individual agency, their formulation is still heavily based on the economy while political, social and cultural aspects remain contextual. In Torajan lives (as in those of most people’s) much more is at stake than economic rationality. Behavior is equally influenced by what is socially and culturally valued and crucial. Besides the economy, human agents are embedded in various political, cultural and social structures that influence their practices. Most livelihood analyses appeared to be of little help in understanding the full complexities of everyday Torajan life

2 There are various spellings for the name of the people inhabiting Tana Toraja. The more common ones used in English language literature are Toraja, Toradja and Toraya. Because I find it confusing to use exactly the same name for the people as the area they originate from, I opted for the term Torajan when referring to a person who originates from the Tana Toraja region and Torajans to refer to the people from Tana Toraja. This approach is favored by Torajan linguistic experts at the Christian University of Tana Toraja (IKIP).

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, Makassar

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INDONESIA

SULAWESI

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Map 11. Indonesia, Sulawesi island, Makassar, Tana Toraja and the research villages of Palipu’ and Kondo’.

Source: The last ‘Map from Sulawesi and Tana Toraja’ adapted from Waterson (2003).

and to be overly focused on economic factors. As Sajogyo, the chairman of the Working Body of an Afro-Economic Survey of Indonesia, explained in 1971, ‘If you want to understand the economy of my country, study our culture and our political system; if you want to understand our culture and our political system, study our economy’ (Penny 19711122). Through adding a broad spectrum of concepts and analytical approaches to the livelihood perspective, this study should deliver a more complete picture than existing livelihood and poverty studies.

Tana Toraja’s people derive their living mainly from agriculture, livestock, tourism, government jobs and small-scale industry and manufacturing. Many Torajans have left their homeland in search of work, for education, or to escape the constraints of social stratification. Torajans tend to be ready to move from place to place and have a long history of out-migration, but at the same time most migrants maintain strong ties with kin in their homeland. Torajans have a strong sense of identity, and their extensive cultural repertoire (for example, ancestral houses and large funeral ceremonies) and sense of kinship still constitutes the frame of reference in most Torajan lives, whether at home or away. The increasing mobility of Torajans has led to a broad array of dispersed and/or fragmented networks that cut across political boundaries and span multiple localities. Contemporary Torajan society consists of networks scattered all over the world, with the largest densities in Indonesia, and major concentrations in Tana Toraja and Makassar,? the capital city of South Sulawesi. Therefore, a conventional, single-site ‘exemplary’ location, with an independently bounded set of relationships and activities is inadequate for a profound understanding of Torajan livelihoods.

Various economic, cultural and socio-political changes have taken place in Tana Toraja that are important for understanding the contemporary setting in which Torajans make a living. Given this, an exploration of the general lines and details of history as well as the systematic dynamics of the various transitional periods and local processes of the economic, cultural and socio-political domains form an important part of this study. By providing an extensive historical dimension, this study also tries to get a grip on the often confusing and contradictory ethnographic accounts of the social and political organization of Tana Toraja. Further, it aims to advance the ethnography of highland Tana Toraja as well as to further the comparative study of numerous similar societies. Torajans show both

3 The name ‘Makassar’ was formally reinstated on 13 October 1999 after it had been changed to Ujung Pandang in 1971. For a more detailed explanation, see Morrell 2001a.

unique characteristics as well as striking similarities to other ethnic groups in the Indonesian archipelago (most notably Minangkabau, Dayak and Bali Aga) and elsewhere in the world (for example, the Ashanti in Ghana, the highland people of central Luzon in the Philippines and the peasant communities, or comunidades, in the Peruvian central highlands).

Determining on an approach that goes beyond a purely economic perspective and takes into account the cultural realms requires both analytical accommodation and reconceptualization and has methodological implications for the way data are gathered. Methodologically, capturing such a complex object of study with no clear boundaries requires a move away from a ‘conventional single-site location’ to a research design with ‘multiple sites’ (Marcus 1995:95) that extends the description of the particular in detail toward a more holistic approach, or shifts from an ethnographic study of a single community to a method based on inter-local comparison—which proceeds by ‘following the people’, ‘following the thing’, and ‘following the story’. The present account is the result of a multi-sited, multi-dimensional and multi-method piece of research in which I followed the Torajan people, their goods and their stories from the highlands to the city of Makassar and even to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta.

Makassar: A Transit City

A wall painting in the Protestant church in kampong RAMA shows an exquisite Torajan landscape with lush rice terraces stacked against mountain ridges stretching up to the sky. The mountain plateau is traversed by a swiftly flowing stream in which eye-catching white-spotted buffalo are bathing. On hillocks in the midst of the rice terraces stand large saddleroofed houses decorated with colourful carvings. The place is a heaven on earth—at least that is what the painting on the church wall behind the altar leads you to believe. This church, named Gereja Toraja is about seven kilometres from the centre of Makassar. The abbreviation RAMA* stands for Rantepao-Makale, the only two towns in Tana Toraja itself. For a long time, the neighbourhood has been predominantly inhabited by Torajans, and it is the only place whose name directly reflects the ethnicity of the Torajan highlands. However, it is not difficult to discover that Torajans are

4 Most abbreviations in Indonesia have a double meaning; ‘Rama is also the name of an important Hindu god.

spread all over Makassar, from neighbourhoods of well-to-do citizens to slum areas. At all corners of the city, particularly in the Indonesian-style houses of the richer families, one finds ornamental elements of the façades of typical Torajan houses. These better off residents work at the government offices, high schools, hospitals, universities and small-scale industries, as well as in shops and out on the streets as vendors. In fact, Makassar is the home of the largest Torajan community living outside Tana Toraja with an estimated 70,000 Torajan migrants residing in the provincial capital of South Sulawesi.

The city port of Makassar is located on the southwestern tip of the orchid-shaped island of Sulawesi (see Map 1.1) and has been the gateway to the eastern archipelago of Indonesia for centuries. It has become a microcosm of the people who originate from the populous province itself and from the thousands of islands that make up the social fabric of eastern Indonesia. Among these peoples, the Torajans constitute the fourth largest ethnic group. They come to the city to work, study, buy supplies, enjoy leisure activities, or simply because the city is a necessary transit point on the way to or from other places in Indonesia and abroad. By bus, Tana Toraja is a day’s trip away from Makassar, which makes it difficult to transfer immediately to connecting airplanes and boats on the same day as one’s departure. Most migrants regularly return to the Torajan highlands (even from distant countries) for funerals and other important rituals. These rituals seem to be an effective mechanism for maintaining strong ties between migrants and Torajans in the highlands, even for second- and third- generation migrants who were not born in Tana Toraja. As a consequence, tens of thousands of Torajans travel through Makassar each year.

One example is Pa’ Salusu® who lives with his wife, two children and maid on the eastern edge of the city in a fairly large house. His house has four guest rooms to accommodate the many visitors traveling between Tana Toraja and Kalimantan, Irian Jaya, Java or beyond. He often receives distant relatives who show up unannounced to spend the night at his house. Travellers who have stayed at his house have given it the apposite name ‘transit hotel’. In fact, Torajans in Makassar are orchestrating and managing migrants’ visits not only by providing a place to stay, but also through making arrangements, such as buying or booking onward bus, boat or airplane tickets. To some extent, they function also as intermediaries between family members and acquaintances living in the highlands

5 False names are sometimes used in this book to protect the privacy of individuals described.

and those overseas. The communication infrastructure in Tana Toraja is still rather limited, especially in the more remote areas, and Torajans in Makassar are often contacted first to relay a message to family members living elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, given that thousands of Torajans living all over Indonesia and abroad return to the highlands to attend funeral ceremonies without receiving any formal invitation— something forbidden by Torajan custom—one can deduce that communication lines within the Torajan transnational network are highly effective.

While Makassar, through its favourable geographical location, is the central hub of the transnational or translocal Torajan network, the network itself gravitates toward Tana Toraja. Torajans might reside and live outside the highlands, but their focus in life is still centred upon Tana Toraja or, more specifically, their ancestral home; meaning both the physical structure and the group of people that belong to it. In other words, the social organization of the Torajan migrant community in Makassar is a reflection of the home society. Migrants are organized in so-called kerukunan (associations) that are based on kinship or place of origin in Tana Toraja, and social relations among them are often based on long-standing relationships between their families in the homeland. Moreover, the most respected and powerful Torajans in Makassar all originate from the highest social class in the highlands. Moving up the social ladder, or at least protection of their status, can only be achieved through particular performances in the highlands, especially in the ceremonial domain. This has led to an injection of migrant-money into Torajan rituals and, consequently, to an ever-increasing size, cost and extravagance of funeral ceremonies, and to the re-building of ancestral houses. Although migrants might have left Tana Toraja, they remain closely tied to their home family and, as such, even have a large influence over them and the broader region; in both a cultural and political sense. When local elections are due, Torajan politicians go to Makassar to lobby for support from the Torajan elites, thereby gaining the loyalty of their associates in Tana Toraja. If they have substantial objections, powerful migrants might even be able to prevent the implementation of particular policy measures in Tana Toraja. Therefore, the local district head and his entourage regularly visit Makassar to find support for their plans from among the urban Torajan elites. Further, on their visits to Tana Toraja, these well-educated elites often provide unsolicited advice to the district head on issues such as education, healthcare, employment, tourism and, to a lesser extent, agriculture.

In short, Makassar is the home of the largest Torajan migrant community in the world and houses many brokers that play a central role in the national and transnational networks of Torajans. The social organization of the migrant community is a reflection of the social structure in their homeland, and many migrants either transfer considerable financial sums to their relatives in Tana Toraja (mostly as contributions to funeral ceremonies) or interfere in the political affairs of the region. Clearly anyone interested in Tana Toraja needs to examine Makassar, or more specifically the Torajan community living there. Having acknowledged this fact, the researcher faces the question as to where these Torajan migrants actually come from? Or, to put it differently, how does the place they feel so connected with look like in a geographical, socio-political, cultural and economic sense?

Tana Toraja: A Social Labyrinth

The second time I arrived in Tana Toraja I made a confusing journey into the depth of Torajan life. After spending some time in the torrid and bustling city of Makassar, the pleasant mountain climate and serenity of Tana Toraja were a pleasant surprise when I got off the bus in the town of Makale, the administrative capital of Tana Toraja. A small, friendly looking man in his early sixties welcomed me and escorted me to a nicely decorated brick house, a few hundred metres from the bus stop. As I learned later, this was the restored ancestor-house of his wife’s family, and my accommodation for the coming months. His wife, Tante (aunt), as I was expected to call her, had been born in this house and moved to the city of Makassar when she was 18 to continue her education. After graduation she found a position as a teacher at an elementary school on the island of Buton (off the south coast of Sulawesi). There she met her present husband, known as Oom (uncle) to me. Oom and Tante have taught all over Indonesia, from Buton to Irian Jaya to Makassar and to Pare Pare. After four decades of wanderings through the archipelago they returned to Tana Toraja in 1992. In the highlands they taught at a local elementary school in the village of Ge’tengan for eight years until they retired. Two years before they moved into the modernized family house where I had found accommodation.

During preparations for my fieldwork, I had already met Tante’s younger brother who worked at the Indonesian Embassy in the Netherlands. He kindly offered me a room in his house in Makassar, and I gratefully accepted. I spent some time there together with his niece (who took care of the house during his absence), a student nephew, a servant, a gardener and lots of other family members who often stayed overnight on their way to Tana Toraja or on their way back. This niece turned out to be the daughter of Oom and Tante, and Torajan hospitality is such that I was invited to stay with them in Makale.

My new base was a large house with a shiny tiled roof and a facade colourfully decorated with typical Torajan symbols such as buffalo, roosters, kris, and so on; but it was by no means one of the most impressive houses in Makale. Above the front door a small plaque showing the family name — a combination of the family names of Tante’s father and mother. Tante’s mother is associated with one of the noblest families in Tana Toraja, and staying with this family opened many doors during my research. South Sulawesi society is highly stratified, and starting from the bottom social rank would have been seen as highly inappropriate and definitely offensive. Living with a Torajan family of noble descent also gave me the opportunity to look behind the scenes of the rich set of rituals that abound in Tana Toraja, as the nobility are often involved in a large number of ceremonies. Although association with high status people does also have some drawbacks, I never encountered any problems in approaching lower status people, especially in the villages where I lived among people of all classes.

What struck me from the outset was the paramount importance of culture in the lives of most Torajans. Funeral ceremonies soon demanded recognition as a major influence on people’s lives, and I discovered that my initial research outline was quite short-sighted; excluding ceremonies from any livelihood study of Tana Toraja would yield distorted results. During my visits to government offices, where I was looking for general figures about the economy and political organization of Tana Toraja, several civil servants or even all of them would often leave the offices to attend a funeral or house rebuilding ceremony. Throughout Tana Toraja, I often saw trucks, minibuses and cars full of people coming from and going to these ceremonies—easily recognized by their traditional clothes—and a few days after my arrival in Tana Toraja I found myself at a funeral ceremony, together with thousands of other participants. In one way or another, most conversations with Torajan people led to the subject of the funeral ceremonies, and when I raised the issue of the economic crisis in Tana Toraja, the standard answer was along the lines of ‘It seems that there is no economic crisis in Tana Toraja because the funeral ceremonies are going on. In fact the size of the feasts is even increasing.’

Some added, ‘There is no crisis because so many Torajan migrants still send money home and ceremonies can take place as usual.

Torajan society is very status-conscious, and social interaction is patterned along class lines: noble class, middle class, commoners and slaves. Funeral ceremonies are important occasions where the status and wealth of individuals and whole families are actively articulated and validated, but even more importantly, they are the only occasion where this can be contested. To maintain their high status and by that their siri’ (honour),® Tante and her family needed to spend a lot of money, time and energy on appropriate gifts. Since I was staying at the family house, I was in the midst of all these activities. Tante was responsible for recording the gifts of the family and more-or-less orchestrated the selection of gifts and collection of money involved in gift-giving. Based on past records, she determined the nature and value of the gift to be purchased for a forthcoming ceremony. Subsequently, Tante informed her brothers and sisters of the sum of money needed. All members contributed in accordance with their financial capacity, meaning that the ones in Jakarta, Makassar and abroad contributed most of the money. If a pig or buffalo had to be purchased, Tante sent her brother-in-law to search for an appropriate animal at the cattle market. Besides organizing the gifts, Tante had to appear at ceremonies as a representative of the family. At peak periods, this might amount to several ceremonies a week. Frequently Tante looked exhausted from meeting all these responsibilities. Because a high status person would never step into the public sphere of a ceremony without the support of an entourage, Tante always left for a ceremony in the company of several family members, either current residents of Tana Toraja or returning migrants.

The house itself apparently played a central role in keeping the family network together, since all migrant relatives visited the house on their return to Tana Toraja. Torajans have a great respect for their ancestors, and through this for the houses they founded. The ancestral house I was staying in had been recently rebuilt and no longer showed any similarities to the ‘traditional’ tongkonan except for some symbols on the façade. All the family members had contributed money toward the building and furnishing. As Tante is the oldest child of the founders, she was invited to move from her small house in Ge’tengan to the newly-built family house in

6 In fact, sir’ is a complex notion that cannot be easily translated by only one word as it means both honour and shame. This will be further elaborated upon and explained in Chapter 6.

CRISIS AND CEREMONIES: AN INTRIGUING PARADOX ll

Makale. I came to understand that this modernistic house was much more than a material asset.

Since Torajans have allegiances to several houses from which their ancestors originated, a newcomer needs some time to unravel the composition and structure of the family. I was puzzled by the complexity of this house society and the obscurity of family boundaries and wondered whether I should concentrate on the household or on the family-group centred upon particular houses (tongkonan)? The tongkonan appeared to be the heart of Torajan society and influence most people’s actions and behaviour. Other social relationships and organizations are also important parts of Torajan life, but the wealth and survival of the tongkonan and its members always seemed to come first. Irrespective of the size of the research unit I chose, I realized that socio-cultural connections are such an integral part (possibly even the major part) of any Torajan life that these connections could not be ignored in a study on livelihoods.

During further endeavours to discover Tana Toraja, my image of Torajan social organization became even more blurred. I was initially searching for a single exemplary or typical village to study from a social and economic point of view. Already overwhelmed by the complexity of the social organization and the cultural repertoire of the Torajan people, I found that the social and cultural ambience differed even between various localities within Tana Toraja, most notably between groups living in the northern or southern regions. This observation left me with the same question as the one that Barth (1993) posed for the island of Bali: ‘Where then might be the type locality of Balinese [in my case Torajan] culture as it appears in our literature—the place where the anthropologist can find the desired “whole” represented—and what might be the area of its distribution?’

Most anthropologists who have entered Tana Toraja since the 1970s have focused on intensive but narrow data from study of a single village, from which they have made generalizations that fail to account for variations between villages. In addition, the growing attention given to the highlands has led to extensive media coverage and attracted a growing number of tourists from Europe, the United States and Australia. Much like the painting in the church in Makassar, all these trends have created an image of Tana Toraja as a mountain area covered with lush green rice fields, inhabited by a distinct, culturally homogeneous group of people that organize extravagant funeral rituals, live in carved ancestral houses, bury their dead in cliffside burial vaults and make effigies of the dead. Although that image does apply to some places, empirical facts show much more variation and require greater specificity.

The framework of ideals and ambitions, and the ways to achieve those ideals (such as through staging expensive funerals) differs considerably between the north and south. Since early times, the social organization in the south has been more complex, sophisticated and rigid than in the north. The feudal model of organization in the southern part unites a number of ritual-based communities that are ruled by a so-called puang, a chief from the highest class. These puang exercise considerable authority because blood ties determine status to such a degree that mobility between different social classes is rare. Conversely, people in the northern region of Tana Toraja hold firmly to the original, loosely structured social organization and put a strong emphasis on their democratic style as opposed to the oppressive domination, as they see it, of the southern puang. Birth rank seems to play a lesser role in the north, and most inhabitants can acquire status by acquiring wealth. The dynamics of this northern type of social stratification have intensified competition for social status, and consequently increased the number and size of funeral and house-building ceremonies where battles over status take place. In the south, only the puang families and their descendants organize extraordinarily large and expensive funeral ceremonies to protect or increase their social status. People from lower ranks hold much smaller and less costly ceremonies.

In line with the differentiation between north and south, defined by customs and ‘tradition, at a higher level some people plead for a subdivision of the Tana Toraja district into northern and southern regencies, as that supposedly would correspond to the traditional socio-political organization that existed before the arrival of the Dutch colonial administration.” This struggle to fragment Tana Toraja unfolded after the political and administrative decentralization policy of the Indonesian government was launched in 2001.

Not only is there a socio-cultural divide between north and south; the areas also show striking differences in ecology, subsistence, land tenure and economic organization. The lush green rice terraces that spill down hillsides like giant steps, for which Tana Toraja is well known, are more characteristic of the north than the south. Moreover, the vast irrigated rice fields seen around the town of Rantepao are absent in the southern area. Consequently, the reason for migration and destinations of migrant

7 The district called North Toraja (Toraja Utara) was officially approved by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Jakarta by 2008, thus the region was separated from the district known as Tana Toraja.

Ill. 1.1. A panoramic view of rice fields in the North of Tana Toraja (photo by Edwin de Jong).

household members, and the extent of the remittances they send home, also differ between the two regions.

Nevertheless, these differences between regions should not be exaggerated. In broad outlines, many commonalities exist, and in most situations of interaction between Torajans, differences are underplayed. Besides, as Wikan (1990:xxiii) also noted for Balinese society, it is not enough to speak simply of differences between north and south. ‘It is a ubiquitous feature of complex traditional civilizations that their institutions are locally variable, forms are prolific, and regionalism flourishes on all levels. This fact is often missed and regularly distorted in the usual format of anthropological studies’. To summarize, the existing image of Tana Toraja as an undifferentiated society does hold for several domains, but there are also notable differences between north and south, and even within each of them as considerable variations occur.