A traveler in Sulawesi, Indonesia, is invited to a Ma’nene – an ancient Toraja ritual of raising the dead for a celebration. As crowds compete to take selfies with a mummified body, he reconsiders his culturally determined attitude to death.
The person dies. Their body is mummified and kept at home, sometimes for two or three years at a time, until the family decides that enough time has passed. Then comes the funeral, where entire villages turn out for days of singing, dancing, feasting, and – most importantly – the sacrifice of buffalo that the deceased has accrued throughout their life.
Once the rituals are complete, the body is placed in a coffin and laid to rest in a family grave carved into a cliffside, often decorated with life-sized wooden dolls of its departed inhabitants. At last, the grave is sealed off with an elaborately carved wooden door.
In almost any other culture, that very literal closure would surely be the end of the end: an act that, in the physical world, permanently consigns the person inside to the memories of those still around. But like most doors, those marking the graves of Toraja are made to be opened again.
I’d arrived in Sulawesi, Indonesia, at the end of August, escaping from the sweltering sprawl of Makassar to the relative coolness of Rantepao, the cultural heart of Toraja. Like plenty of travelers before me, I’d been drawn here by something not far from morbid curiosity about the region’s animist death rituals, which have held out against centuries of influence by two major Abrahamic faiths.
Stepping off the bus, I walked to my guesthouse along roads lined with rice fields, where the harvest was starting to wrap up. Nowadays, most of the harvesting is done using tractors the locals have affectionately dubbed the “Japanese buffalo,” a guide would later tell me. Their mechanized droning filled the late afternoon air.
I didn’t know it then, but the end of the harvest was a pivotal time in the spiritual calendar of the Toraja people; the only time of year when one of their most important ceremonies can take place.
The next day, Jacob, the owner of my guesthouse, told me and my fellow guests that a traditional ceremony was taking place in a nearby village that very morning, and we were welcome to tag along if we wanted. Of course, I was down.
I wasn’t completely clear on the details, so I assumed that it would be one of the funeral ceremonies I’d heard so much about. I steeled myself against the possibility of witnessing the mass buffalo sacrifice – the kind of morbid curiosity I wasn’t in much of a hurry to fulfill.
Equipped with rental scooters that had seen far better days, we followed Jacob out of town, up steep and crumbling roads that led deeper into the mountains. After close to an hour of careful driving, we pulled up close to the bottom of a sheer cliff face, turned to Swiss cheese by the graves of wealthy Toraja families. Behind the caves were a row of iconic tongkonan houses; their oversized boat-shaped roofs harking back to the Toraja people’s distant seafaring past.
Usually a peaceful sanctuary of reflection, the graveside was now heaving with people. The crowds were punctuated by towering ladders of bamboo with children clinging to their lower rungs, encircled by shimmering incense smoke. This wasn’t just a funeral. We’d arrived at a Ma’nene ceremony, and we’d soon find out what it involved.
She’d died 28 years ago, the same year I was born. We watched as her family opened the door to her grave and carefully extracted her coffin, which they laid on the ground. For another hour or so, our view of the ceremony was obscured by the family surrounding her.
As Jacob told us, the time was spent cutting away her old clothes, brushing her hair, and rubbing her skin with preserving, aromatic oils. When the treatment was complete, they dressed her in brand-new clothes and held up her body for the waiting crowd to admire. Finally, they gathered around her to pose for a family photo.
The crowd surged around me. Western and Indonesian tourists alike jostled to capture the body from the best angle with their phone cameras. If any decorum was expected from the spectators, it was completely abandoned in the moment. One Westerner even managed to get an arm around the body’s shoulders to take a selfie.
The literal dead body aside, I couldn’t help feeling a little horrified at the spectacle of an Indigenous ceremony being turned into an Instagram content goldmine. But my own camera was out, and I couldn’t pretend for a second that I was an exception.
Despite the chaos churning around them, the family didn’t seem to mind. They held thoughtful smiles as they kept the tourist hordes at bay. According to Jacob, they were proud to share the memory of their departed ancestor.
Here was a woman old enough to be my great-grandmother, surrounded by children young enough to be my own. All of them had forged a direct, physical relationship with their ancestor, which would last for generations to come.
Over the past year, I’d lost three of my own grandparents, including both of my grandmothers. All of them were devout Christians and knew that something else was waiting on the other side, better than the world they’d just left. Two distinct worlds, with death representing the hard barrier between them.
While I’ve lost my own faith, I don’t think my own perception of death is a million miles away: a sudden transition from a state of being to not-being within the universe I call home. For me, my grandparents’ approach to that transition had been steeped in stress and looming apprehension. With their crossing of the barrier came grief for what will never return and a small but guilty relief that it’s finally over.
But as we witnessed the Ma’nene, it became strikingly clear that the people of Toraja see things differently. While they have converted to Christianity themselves – at least an interpretation of it that allows it to merge with their more ancient beliefs – death must seem like a blurred spectrum. For them, death itself is just one step on a long journey from one state of being to another.
Later on, watching the sunset back at the guesthouse, we asked ourselves whether this was a better way of doing things. Would I personally want such an enduring physical relationship with my own grandparents, generations after their deaths? Definitely not, I concluded.
It wasn’t just the thought of my beloved ancestors’ bodies being plastered all over the internet that made me recoil from the idea. For me and my family, the way that I personally processed the loss of my grandparents made sense. It helped us to work through our grief. But in the end, the whole process is just another series of rituals constructed entirely in our minds, their order decided by the cultures that shaped us.
In the Ma’nene, the Toraja haven’t built a better or worse process, simply a different one; one which hasn’t yet been replaced by the homogenizing influence of more dominant belief systems.
After taking pictures with their not-so-lost ancestor, the family placed her back in the coffin. There was another body in the grave that was due for the same treatment, but for reasons known only to the family, it wasn’t the right time for them just yet.
So, almost anticlimactically, the coffins were returned in the grave. The same process would play out every three years, Jacob told us, until the mummified bodies had decayed beyond recognition: a point in time that only the family would know when to call.
For now, the Ma’nene was over, and the grave door was sealed shut – but not forever.
