To balance out all our fun scuba diving, we did a bit of cultural tourism on the island of Sulawesi. There’s a region called Tana Toraja with peculiar funerary habits that we thought sounded like it might be worth a couple 10 hour bus rides to check out. The region is largely Christian, but the locals have mixed in much of their animalistic tribal beliefs and such to create a set of rituals and practices around death that are pretty, well, interesting. When someone dies, there is a huge funeral ceremony. Temporary buildings are erected from bamboo to hold all the guests and everyone brings offerings of pigs or highly prized buffalo for the family.
The ceremony might go on for up to a week for important/rich families. Towards the end, most of the animals are slaughtered and the meat eaten and then extras given to the guest and villagers or sold back at the markets. In these pictures, all the buildings are temporary; built on the family’s rice paddies. In the short time we were there (invited in for tea and deserts, of course), we saw a few thousand people come through in groups, all bearing animals; over 100 pigs and probably fifty buffalo while we were there. Guestimates were that over 100 buffalo would end up being sacrificed for this queen of the village with ten kids. She was almost 100 years old.