Art as Politics

Chapter 4. Mortuary Effigies and Identity Politics

In the late 1920s a young Frenchwoman named Titayna set off on an adventure to the Borneo and Sulawesi hinterlands. Her travels were later chronicled in the sensationally titled book: A Woman in the Land of the Headhunters (Une femme chez les chausseurs de têtes). Describing her horseback arrival in the Sa’dan Toraja region, Titayna wrote: We climb, climb, without cease. In front of us a sheer wall blocks the valley . . . its vertical surfaces attainable only by the birds of prey, whose shadows trace circles on the valley below. Nevertheless, just in the center, dizzily separated from earth and sky, I catch a glimpse of immobile men. My horse whips through the vines and I realize that these beings suspended on the abyss are not men but statues. Their hands extended with palms towards the sky, their blank eyes fixed on the invisible. Crowded together on a rock-hewn balcony, they were at once very human and yet very close to these spirits of which Islanders speak in whispered voices. . . . I slowly bring my horse back to a walking pace. For we are traveling now in full magic. (Titayna 1934:40–42, author’s translation) Ever since the first European explorers arrived in the Sulawesi highlands in the late nineteenth century, outsiders have been captivated by these wooden effigies of the dead that stand solemnly on platforms chiseled into limestone cliffs or clustered like sentries in the openings of musty caves, alongside crumbling ancestral sarcophagi. These sculpted human images, known as tau-tau, are deeply tied to Toraja aluk to dolo religious conceptions and to elite identity in Tana Toraja. In recent decades Torajas’ relationships with their tau-tau have undergone dramatic changes, as missionization, nationalism, tourism, the international art market, and the Indonesian economic crisis of the late 1990s have, in different ways, transformed Toraja perceptions of these effigies of the dead. In this chapter I explore the chang4 Mortuary Effigies and Identity Politics 112 : chapter 4 ing significance of these mortuary effigies and the ways in which these objects are used by various Toraja individuals and groups to project certain identities for themselves and, in so doing, navigate their relationships with others. Such relationships are often enmeshed in complex social, political, and economic inequalities. Like the tongkonan, Toraja effigies of the dead are central to ongoing dialogues about the nature of Toraja identity and religious beliefs. Debates surrounding effigies of the dead are also tethered to rank and class relationships in Tana Toraja. Unlike the tongkonan, however, the tau-tau has met with more controversy. INTRODUCING THE TAU-TAUS Although I had seen many postcards of tau-taus and had visited a few of the more famed grave sites during my first month in Rantepao, my personal introduction to the figures came via one of my adoptive Toraja siblings . Soon after settling into Ne’ Duma’s and Indo’ Rampo‘s house, I began to develop a special bond with their youngest child, nine-year-old Lendu. A bright, skinny boy with a radiant, crooked-toothed smile, Lendu had an outgoing, inquisitive nature. His conversations with his older sister , Emi, were peppered with questions about the workings of the world, and my arrival on the scene gave him not only a new object of curiosity, but someone with whom he could assume the role of teacher. In the afternoons during my first weeks in the village, Lendu would scurry home from the open-air elementary school in the next hamlet and station himself on the front verandah where I was often writing in my notebook or interviewing passing tourists. His friends would frequently join us there and, as they carved tops from tree seeds or sculpted bamboo oto-oto (little cars) with wheels made from old flip-flops, we would talk about children’s games in Toraja and the United States. When he became more comfortable with me, Lendu would shyly ask to see my books, and I would bring out the tattered childhood copy of Goodnight Moon that I’d tucked in my suitcase or my crisp new edition of Where There Is No Doctor, and we would compare notes on the English and Toraja words for the objects depicted on the pages. One grey afternoon, when we tired of gazing at pictures of dozing rabbits and sketches of maladies like elephantiasis, I proposed that Lendu and his friends give me a “tour” of the village. I was curious...