TANA TORAJA

The Toraja landscape is a mountainous one of great natural beauty. This landscape is imbued with meaning partly through the Aluk to Dolo, which, like most indigenous religions of small-scale societies, is characteristically animist and highly localized, being intimately linked with the context in which it has evolved. Aluk populates the natural world with deata — deities or nature spirits — and attributes to the ancestors, whose rock graves dot the landscape, a close familiar presence and a continued concern with the fertility of the land and of their living descendants who work it. Features of the landscape such as mountains and rivers have a place in myths and oral histories, especially the genealogies and accounts attached to particular noble origin-houses. Some of these myths tell of founding ancestral couples described as to manurun di langi’ (ones who descended from the sky) and to kendek diomai liku (ones who rose out of a pool), of whom the man is said to have descended from the sky on to a mountain top, and married a woman who rose out of a river pool. These supernatural ancestors give prestige to the houses they founded, which in the past were the locus of political power, their occupants exercising control over local villages or groups of villages. The houses themselves were visibly magnificent, with their huge roofs and rich carving, contrasting with the simple bamboo houses built by commoners. Periodically they would serve even more dramatically as centres of power, whenever they became the sites for the enactment of elaborate rituals, which validated and reinforced the status of aristocratic families, while simultaneously becoming a part of the house’s ongoing history. 

In Tana Toraja, houses, genealogies, myths and histories are all closely bound up together and embedded in local landscapes. Houses are the major points of reference within the bilateral kinship system. People trace their descent equally from houses on both sides of the family, where their parents, grandparents, or more distant ancestors were born. At the birth of a child, the father buries the afterbirth on the east side of the house, so that over time, the house becomes the place where “many placentae are buried”, and thus should never be moved. Some origin-houses associated with very important ancestors have in fact long ceased to exist, but their sites are still well remembered and in theory if the descendants willed it, they could be rebuilt. These houses have genealogies with a depth of between twenty and thirty generations, and many people in Toraja can ultimately trace descent back to them. When people recount such genealogies, they tell who married whom, who were their children, and where those children then moved to in order to found new “branch” houses of their own. Founding and branch houses are sometimes characterized as “mother” and “child” (indo’na/anakna); sometimes, in a botanical metaphor familiar from many other Indonesian societies, as “trunk” and “branch” (garonto’/tangke), or the original founding house may be termed ongi’na (ongi: stem, as in the stem of a fruit); when demonstrating this idea, one informant picked up a mangosteen, another a coconut, pointing out how “the whole fruit grows from the stem”. The house sites form a sort of network, providing what is as much a geographical as a historical account of the settlement of the Toraja landscape, as people spread out to cultivate new areas. Possibly the most widely acknowledged and important site of all is Banua Puan, in Mengkendek, where the ancestor Tangdilino’ is said to have built the first carved tongkonan to have been consecrated with rituals.4 Tangdilino’ was not a to manurun, but was one of the earliest Toraja ancestors — in one genealogy I collected, he is shown as two, in another as eight, generations removed from the first human couple on earth. The site at Banua Puan is well remembered, though it has not had a house on it for centuries; it is still vacant, and has been kept clear by local Mengkendek descendants, although a church has been built close beside it. Most noble houses all over Tana Toraja can trace some link to Banua Puan; one informant, Pak Kila’ (a member of the Parandangan Ada’, an association of representatives of the Aluk to Dolo), described it as the penggarontosan (from garonto’: base, trunk) —the original tongkonan from which all others derive. Even though no material structure has existed here for so long, Banua Puan has kept a vital place in oral memory.

The idea of the house as a substitute for written history was made explicit to me by one noble informant, Tandiruru of Alang-Alang. Unlike their neighbours of the Bugis and Makasar lowland kingdoms, Toraja never developed a written script of their own. But instead of the written chronicles which the Bugis and Makasar peoples recorded on strips of palm leaf (lontara’), Torajans, he pointed out, had the tongkonan. “History” here, as everywhere, serves particular purposes. It is a prerogative of the aristocracy, who were the only ones permitted to build elaborately carved houses, and the only ones with an interest in remembering long genealogies. Many of these genealogies contain the names of the protagonists of well-known mythical stories. Objects associated with some of these characters are preserved as powerful heirlooms inside the houses with which they are associated. Tongkonan and genealogy, used in the past as legitimating devices by the aristocracy, are still relevant today as the nobility of different areas compete with each other. Now the arena is one not simply of local but of national politics, and a newly commercializing economy. Those areas that can most convincingly present themselves as richest in “authentic” Toraja history and culture are in a better position to lay claim to a share of tourism development funds, to be used for the maintenance or renewal of origin-houses and the improvement of infrastructure such as roads. They may then look forward to an increasing number of wealthy foreign visitors passing through. Mythical ancestors and events, and finely carved houses to go with them, remain an essential ingredient of these contested histories.