I had heard of mummification occurring in very dry or very cold climates, but the lush, humid air of Indonesia hardly fell into that category. So how did the dead of this village become mummies? The answer depended on who you asked. Some claimed they would only mummify the body in the old way—pouring oils into the person’s mouth and throat, and spreading special tea leaves and tree barks on the skin. The tannins in the tea and bark bind with and shrink the proteins in the skin, making it stronger, stiffer, and more resistant to bacterial attack. The process is similar to how a taxidermist would preserve an animal hide (hence the word “tanning” in leather).
The new trend in Torajan body mummification is none other than good ol’ embalmer’s formalin (a solution of formaldehyde, methyl alcohol, and water) injected into the body. One woman I spoke to did not want her family members to receive the more invasive injections, but said in a conspiratorial tone, “I know other people are doing it.”
The villagers in this region of Toraja are amateur taxidermists of the human body. Given that the Torajans now use similar chemical formulas as North Americans to mummify their dead, I wondered why Westerners are so horrified at the practice. Perhaps it is not the extreme preservation that offends. Rather, it is that a Torajan body doesn’t sequester itself in a sealed casket, walled in a cement fortress underneath the earth, but instead dares to hang around among the living.**
— From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty
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Trigger Warning: Animal death, animal sacrifice, corpses, dead bodies.
This is a look at the rituals associated with the Torajan people.
“We are not afraid of the dead body, because our love for our ancestors is much greater than our fear.”
They live with their family when they die, and treat them as if they are only sick, up until the funeral -- which may be weeks, months, or years away. They save up so they can have a bull sacrifice, as they believe that will be what escorts their dead into the afterlife.
Then, every now and then, they take out their dead, re-dress them, and spend time with them in a ritual known as “ma’nene”. It roughly means “the ceremony of cleaning corpses”, which is about what it is. You clean them up, put them in new clothes, take pictures with them, maybe go to a religious ceremony with them, and then tuck them away again for next time.
To many of us, the thought of exhuming a corpse every few years is probably revolting, or at the least, uncomfortable. However, this practice does show that isn’t a universally human thing, and there are many ways to tend to and honor the dead.
This goes a bit beyond what I’d like to do, considering I want my body to rejoin nature, but I do envy that comfort with the dead. My kneejerk reaction when thinking about dealing with a dead body -- not newly dead -- is to push it away. My mind just wants to reject it, even though that will one day be me.
Last night I got up to some strange YouTubing. An interview with a mortician taught me that when bodies are buried in Christian cemeteries (which I think most are by tradition), they're laid with their heads toward the west and their feet toward the east. This is so that when the second coming of Christ occurs, and all good Christians are brought back to life, they will rise facing Jesus.
I found that tradition interesting, though not in any literal sense, much how I feel about Christianity in general. At Uncle B's wake last month, I spoke with my cousin about that very Christian belief and how it made it difficult for him to consider cremating his mother.
"Do you really believe in that, though? You think there's a possibility that would actually happen?" I wondered.
"No? I don't know!"
"How would people get out of their locked coffins and 6 feet of dirt?" My imagination kept getting stuck on that in particular.
"We're talking about people coming back to life, I'm pretty sure relatively small logistics like that would be accounted for," he snapped back. He seemed irritated, not because I was questioning him but because it's an annoying place to be, thinking something is ridiculous and yet fearing it all the same; wanting so badly to do the right thing for the person you love but feeling so out of your depth about how to do that, you're willing to surrender to something fantastical or superstitious.
I could understand why it gave him apprehension to cremate his mother, not knowing that only weeks after that conversation I'd be meeting with a funeral director having a similar conversation about my father.
After the mortician interview, I watched a short documentary about an Indonesian tribe, the Torajans, whose tradition is to keep the bodies of their dead loved ones around Weekend At Bernie's-style.
I don't mean that disrespectfully. The love they show for their family and their ancestry is beautiful, and the more I watched and learned, the more I understood the traditions. They honor the descent into grief by going slowly, caring for the body as it decays, intentionally planning a meaningful funeral, and even after burial, ritually exhuming the body for ongoing care.
When families in the documentary would gather for the latter, Ma'Nene, or a second funeral, their grief and sorrow during exhumation were gutturally palpable. But once the body was available to see and touch, even though they had to confront more signs of decomposition than the last time, the family seemed so much more at peace. Their love had somewhere to go, the absence of which is exactly why grief can hurt so much. They would kiss their loved one on the forehead or brush their hair, and they'd even clean and redress the body for a refreshed burial. While I may not be interested in doing all that with your corpse, I could understand feeling calmed by some physical reminder of you, like seeing again the hands that used to hold mine when I was young.
My perspective, while moveable, has mostly been that the body is no longer the site of the person, if anything of the person remains at all. Yet it fascinates me to see a dead body as something worth preserving all the while explicitly confronting and accepting its decay. Still, it was a trip getting past my initial Western reactions to family portraits that center a visible corpse being propped up by the living.
When I was watching these videos and expanding my capacity for ideas of your dead body, I didn't know that you had already been cremated. I was still trying to reconcile thoughts of your body in all sorts of states of decay. But it turns out, your body had already been, as the cremation authorization form put it, "mechanically pulverized into an unrecognizable consistency." Words I both morbidly chuckle at and feel a quaking sickness about.
It's not that the Torajans changed my mind about agreeing to your cremation, nor my own, for that matter. But like my cousin, I found myself in an existential panic where I thought "what if Jesus comes back and my dad doesn't have a body to reclaim?!"
I guess if your soul ends up damned for all eternity, at least I'll join you there someday.
In any case, you being cremated feels like another "finality" in the whole thing. Not because I'm still actively trying to negotiate your death - you're dead and usually, for the most part, I know that. But because the death of a person so large in your life leaves a lot of things undone and those things are constantly being remembered unexpectedly. I think about conversations we never finished, questions I had that will never get answers, phone calls you will never receive. I think about how you will never be at my wedding or help me move into my own home. I know I took a while to get to those things but I thought there would still be time.
I confront a new finality of you every day. Today? That your physical body no longer exists. Your cells and your DNA, your fingernails and few remaining hair follicles, your eyes and your nose and the heart that made a mess of things in the first place, however previously unalive, are now no longer. It's weird to me. I wonder how you'd feel about that.
TANA TORAJA, ENDONEZYA Yazı ve Fotoğraf: Olay Salcan, 22 Temmuz 2018 Endonezya’da sıcaklığa ilaveten yüksek rutubet alışık olmadığım bir durum. Bu durum zaman zaman gezi hızımı kesmesine rağmen gezi için yaptığım planımı aksatmıyor. Görülecek o kadar çok yer var ki biraz duraklasam programın aksayacağının bilinci içerisindeyim. Ben de programa bağlı kalarak bu yerlerin tamamını görmek …
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TANA TORAJA, ENDONEZYA Yazı ve Fotoğraf: Olay Salcan, 22 Temmuz 2018 Endonezya’da sıcaklığa ilaveten yüksek rutubet alışık olmadığım bir durum. Bu durum zaman zaman gezi hızımı kesmesine rağmen gezi için yaptığım planımı aksatmıyor. Görülecek o kadar çok yer var ki biraz duraklasam programın aksayacağının bilinci içerisindeyim. Ben de programa bağlı kalarak bu yerlerin tamamını görmek …
TANA TORAJA, ENDONEZYA Yazı ve Fotoğraf: Olay Salcan, 22 Temmuz 2018 Endonezya’da sıcaklığa ilaveten yüksek rutubet alışık olmadığım bir durum. Bu durum zaman zaman gezi hızımı kesmesine rağmen gezi için yaptığım planımı aksatmıyor. Görülecek o kadar çok yer var ki biraz duraklasam programın aksayacağının bilinci içerisindeyim. Ben de programa bağlı kalarak bu yerlerin tamamını görmek …
