This article examines some of the political and symbolic issues inherent in the touristic renegotiation of Torajan ritual and history, chronicling the strategies whereby Torajans attempt to refashion outsider imagery to enhance their own personal standing and position in the Indonesian ethnic hierarchy. The author suggests that the Toraja case challenges the popular assumption that tourism promotion brings a complete loss of agency to indigenous peoples: Torajans not only engage in ingenious political strategies to enhance their group's image, but vigorously contest perceived threats to their identity and power. The author argues that such processes of self-conscious cultural reformulation do not necessarily imply a collapse in meaning or emotive power; rather, the Toraja case lends support to recent calls to rethink the discourse of authenticity and staged authenticity. (Toraja, tourism, Indonesia, ethnic imagery, of tradition) In January of 1987, tourists descending from jets at the Ujung Pandang airport in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, were greeted with a mimeographed announcement of an elaborate, pageantry-filled funeral ceremony to be held in the Toraja highlands for the late Ne' Ke'te'.(2) Using a smattering of anthropological terminology, the pamphlet outlined the cultural functions of Torajan funeral rituals, made reference to a Torajan origin myth, and presented a schedule of events for the ten-day funeral ritual. Hoteliers and travel agents boasted that this was the first Torajan funeral ceremony that would adhere to a definite time schedule; this time no tourists would be disappointed with the last-minute postponements so typical of Torajan rituals. Television newscasters declared that this promised to be a truly unique Torajan event: the largest, most elaborate, and impressive funeral in several decades. As exceptional as this barrage of publicity was, the funeral (which was for my former Torajan mentor) proved to be momentous, but for very different reasons than those heralded in the media. Since the early 1970s, tourists have been visiting the Toraja highlands in ever-increasing numbers. In 1994 alone, approximately 53,700 foreign tourists and 205,000 domestic tourists(3) journeyed to the Toraja homeland, lured by guidebook accounts of Torajans' pageantry-filled funeral rituals, haunting burial cliffs, elaborate architecture, and breathtaking scenery. Touristic celebrity has precipitated a number new issues for the Toraja, certain aspects of which have been discussed elsewhere (Adams 1984, 1993a, 1993b, 1995; Crystal 1977, 1994; Volkman 1987, 1990; Yamashita 1994). This article concerns the ways in which Torajan history and custom are being reshaped as a result of tourism development. Over the past two decades, anthropologists and historians have become increasingly concerned with processes of cultural construction and (cf. Wagner 1981 [1975]; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Linnekin 1983, 1992; Handler and Linnekin 1984; Clifford 1988; Jackson 1989; Hanson 1989; Keesing 1989; White and Lindstrom 1993). As many have stressed, in order to advance our understanding of the construction of tradition, our questions must go beyond examinations of which aspects of culture are authentic and which are invented (White 1991:3). Closer attention must be paid to the processes whereby traditions are invented and the conditions under which custom is renegotiated. This article explores some of the microprocesses involved in the contemporary renegotiation of Toraja history and ritual practice. Whereas the majority of studies of the invention of concern the artificial creation of ritual traditions by colonial governments or indigenous elites, the focus here is on a different sort of context in which tradition is negotiated: that of ethnic tourism. As the Toraja case suggests, encounters with foreign tourists (and a national government interested in further stimulating tourism revenues) are prompting new challenges to local forms of meaning, power, and identity. …
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Jan 1, 1999
K Sawabe + 1
Open Access