Art as Politics

Chapter 1. Carvings, Christianity, and CHiPs

Some researchers are lured by distant, palm-fringed island beach communities ; others are enticed by bustling urban centers; but in my case it was the high tropical mountains of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, homeland of an ethnic group known as the Sa’dan Toraja.1 (See Map 1.) Ever since my first undergraduate literary encounters with Sa’dan Toraja “death cults” and ornately carved Toraja houses, I had been captivated by this Christian enclave ensconced in a predominantly Muslim nation. I soon discovered that I was not the only one intrigued by the Sa’dan Toraja, for after only a cursory review of the anthropological literature I learned that a dozen anthropologists and thousands of European tourists had preceded me to this once-remote region. Wondering how this outsider attention had affected Sa’dan Toraja self-conceptions, I set off for Tana Toraja Regency in April of 1984 as a young graduate student on a Fulbright Fellowship. My intention was to spend twenty months studying ethnic and artistic change among the Sa’dan Toraja, especially in the context of Christian conversion, modernization , and tourism. I did not realize at the time that those twenty months would extend into two decades of visits and research on topics ranging from Toraja carving and “touristification,” to local engagements with nationalism , to current-day Toraja responses to the ongoing threat of religious and ethnic violence. Prior to my first voyage to Indonesia, I had spent my early years of graduate school immersed in the anthropological literature on the Toraja and their Indonesian neighbors. From several months of anticipatory mapgazing , I knew that the Sa’dan Toraja were an Indonesian hinterland group, based in the rugged mountains near the center of the orchid-shaped island of Sulawesi, about 900 miles from Indonesia’s Java-based capital of Jakarta. Of the hundreds of ethnic groups comprising the world’s fourth largest nation,2 the Sa’dan Toraja were a relatively small minority group, number1 Carvings, Christianity, and CHiPs 2 : chapter 1 ing just over 338,000. Their neighboring ethnic groups, the Bugis and Makassarese, were much larger and had long ago developed powerful Muslim kingdoms in the lowlands of southern Sulawesi. The Bugis were celebrated seafarers, with satellite settlements along the shores of many eastern Indonesian islands. In contrast, the landlocked Toraja resided in isolated mountaintop hamlets and were only fully unified in the twentieth century, following the arrival of Dutch colonial administration. In the months prior to my departure for Indonesia, I voraciously consumed anthropological, historical , and popular accounts of the Sa’dan Toraja and was anxious to begin my own study of Toraja transformations in the age of tourism and artistic commodification. I had also devoted several years to learning Indonesian. In the summer of 1983, I made my first trip to Indonesia to study advanced Indonesian at a university on the island of Java. That experience offered me initial glimpses of how other Indonesians imagined the Sa’dan Toraja. My Javanese hosts and acquaintances frequently questioned me about my intentions to conduct research in Tana Toraja—as an anthropologist, didn’t I know that there wasn’t any culture (kebudayaan, BI) there? If I was truly interested in culture, these Javanese acquaintances advised me, I should stay on Java or go to Bali. Toraja was a backwards land of black magic and headhunters . Rather than rerouting me, however, their comments made me all the more curious about this denigrated “hinterland” people. When I finally arrived in the South Sulawesi capital of Makassar3 the following year, I was equipped with a thick bundle of research clearance letters, a portable typewriter (laptops were still virtually unknown), and a suitcase weighted with a few classic ethnographies and the token escapist novel recommended by one of my graduate advisors. Informally billed as the “Gateway to Torajaland” by English-language guidebooks, Makassar was, in 1984, a bustling, predominantly Muslim port city with an evergrowing core of modern government buildings and luxury hotels. Even in the narrow, dusty seaside streets of the old town, where one could momentarily imagine being transported back a hundred years to the days of Dutch colonialism, the contrast between the old and the new, between impoverishment and affluence, was palpable. As rickety bicycle bells chimed and car horns wailed, sweaty, bare-chested pedicab drivers threaded their way between polished black BMWs and exhaust-spewing Kijang4 minivans stuffed with passengers. Eighteenth-century buildings, crumbling and shuttered, abutted the marble facades of boutiques...