crossing the wallace line

It is a journey of thousands of miles straight across the Indian Ocean.

The people of Madagascar originated in Indonesia-- I had heard this suggestion a dozen times, but being afraid of boats and the ocean, I guess I just assumed that the uncanny similarities between these two peoples had somehow happened as a result of continental drift... (!)

No-- it seems that the long ago people now known as Indonesians rode the trade-winds across open waters on outrigger boats that were said to resemble great swimming spiders. The ancient Greeks reported seeing them as far west as the Red Sea, and wikipedia says these ancient Indonesians hailed either from Borneo or from Southern Sulawesi (I assume this is from DNA testing).

Eiji Hattori, however, claims they had to be the Torajans, and he bases this on their very similar funerary customs.

Other evidence fits as well-- first, that there is a similar people in Borneo located near the large lake on that island that are thought to be related to the Torajans. The Torajans, however, did not originally come from Sulawesi or Borneo as they are original inhabitants of South China or Indochina...and so the story goes ....when you start trying to disentangle where any group of people originally comes from, things get complicated.

What we know for sure is that a group of people (the proto-Torajans) washed up a very long time ago shipwrecked on the spider-shaped island of the mythical Celebes (now known as Sulawesi). And there, they begin to build great houses in the shape of gigantic boats.

Perhaps they set out again for Borneo and for Africa-- or perhaps those were a different wave of the same original southern Chinese? I prefer to think of them as the unlucky boat people, who setting off, washed up on the shores of southern Sulawesi where, heart broken, they began building their houses in the shape of the boats that had brought them there. Trying to get back home, they attempted several trips back-- only to wash up on Bornean shores and then way across the ocean on yet another island off the coast of Africa. There is no evidence whatsoever that their spider boats ever touched shore anywhere else in East Africa, but on Madagascar, Hattori claims, you see boats just like the spider boats described by the ancient Greeks right there bobbing up and down in the harbors.

Remember the boogyman? Well, he also lives in Indonesia. Fierce pirates, the bugis descended on the southern coast of Sulawesi-- subtle as a typhoon. The Torajans had no choice but to leave behind their homes along the seashore and head north-- deep into the mountains. At that point now so far from the Sea, they must have known that their cause was truly lost.

And, yet deep in the highlands, they still constructed those houses.

Hattori compares them to the famed gassho-zukuri ("Prayer hands" construction) houses of Japan. I thought they most resembled longhouses like you see in Borneo but just with those inexplicable roofs. Housing large extended families, behind each house you will see a granery built in the same construction (only smaller). Everything is up on piles-- but of course this is common practice throughout Oceania and Asia.

When I was traveling in the Land of the Toraja (Tana Toraja), given my love of astonomy, I was more impressed with the galactic explanation of the houses which suggested that the Torajans believed themselves decended from a peoples of a planet in some distant galaxy and that these boat houses were actually symbolic of the rocketships which had carried them there.

Now, though, I somehow find myself far more impressed with the seafaring explanation.

I remember it was a very early morning flight from Denpasar to Ujung Pandang (capital city of Sulawesi and home of the Bugis). Crossing the Wallace line, we arrived into a beautifully exotic harbor city, which rather than being full of pirates, was full of more mosquitoes than I was comfortable seeing in one place!

We borderd a bus and passed mosque after mosque.It was a full day on the bus and arriving into the town at nightfall, the driver deposited us right at the door of our hotel before honking his goodbyes and driving off. The town of Rantepao, in which we had just arrived, is the center of Tana Toraja.

In Tana Toraja people repeat the phrase that "dying is the biggest event in a person's life." That is a misfortunate expression I think. However, it is true that traditionally funerals were the biggest and most important communal event of life in Tana Toraja.

When a loved one dies, the body is kept first in a room in the great house. If they can gather the necessary funds quickly enough the funeral happens within a year but if it takes longer, they might temporarily bury the body under the house.

In fact, many traditional cultures have this concept of a two-phase funeral. The Japanese too in ancient times believed that the souls of the dead resided very closeby until gradually fading into the spirit of the trees or mountains.

That thought of the dead being somehow very close in proximity to the living is as old as the mountains. We forget this since all the major world religions posit a heaven that is in a separate realm-- and while Buddhists, Muslims and Christians may entertain the thought of purgatory (or a day of judgement) in general the dead make a hasty trip to paradise after death. Hattori explains that at least in three cases that he knows of-- that is in ancient Japan, the Torajans and on the island of Madagascar there is this two-tiered funeral custom. (I've heard they have it in Borneo too as well, which is how the jars are used).

It is during the first preliminary funeral that the Torajan effigies are made. Called Tao-tao, they are effigies thought to embody the soul of the dead person.

When the the second funeral is feasible (this is single the largest expenditure a family undertakes and sometimes it can take several years to raise the funds), several temporary structures are erected to house the guests and animals for slaughter. As the funeral lasts around 5 days, the family not only has to pay for the ceremony itself but has to feed and house the hundreds of guests for the entire time.

We had somehow stumbled on day 5 of a funeral being held in a village outside Rantepao. The last day of the funeral, it was the day when everyone said goodbye to the deceased, and the family insisted we join in. This is from my journal:

"They had placed the casket and the tao tao in two separate chariots, which people then danced around for what seemed like hours. Forming two big circles, we went around and around, singing and dancing around them. After this, they set fire to the structure that had housed the tao tao for the past 5 days. The tao tao looked like a small old woman, with glistening white eyes (with dark pupils set right in the middle). They then cut a puppy's ear and let the blood drip on the casket. And this was followed by a food fight said to scare away any evil spirits. I thought this was odd for Christians (which the Torajans are) and then as if to punish me for such a thought I got hit on the head with a flying piece of roast pork!)

We then followed after as they traipsed way back into the mountains and then watched in amazement as two men climbed up rope ladders (like the kind you imagine used in the deep caves of Southeast Asia where men collect bird's nests for soup). They somehow manueavered their way to the very top holding on to the coffin and the tao tao where they then placed both in a special hallow cut out of the face of the mountain. The coffin was placed way back in the depths of the hallow, while the effigy was propped up front, right again the balcony where it stood looking down on us."

It had not even been two years since my own father had passed away. Since we were not raised within a Church, my father's funeral had been conducted hastily and truly uncomfortably (as if we were all wearing clothes that did not fit right). After the funeral, pictures of dad were slowly removed from here and there around the house and that was that. There were no real rituals to help us get through the days, weeks and months-- well, let's just say it-- there were no rituals to get us through the years following his death. Because there were no real rituals, my grief was never given a voice. I had no way to collectively express grief-- and no where was I more aware of this than in Tana Toraja.

In Japan, of course, Buddhist funerals include ceremonies which are performed for 49 years-- held on the anniversary of death every year to mark the death of a loved one.

Watching the ceremonies in Tana Toraja, I couldn't help but feel that rather than being morbid (morbidly clinging to the dead) that these ceremonies were a celebration of family, love, and more than anything of life itself.

**

A few years after my short trip to Sulawesi, I was in Bali again and had the chance to meet Lorne Blair of Ring of Fire fame in Ubud, Bali. He was in the process of building a gorgeous house with a huge pitched roof in a village outside Ubud. Made entirely of wood, it had a roomy wooden veranda encircling it. The interior was open and airy and everywhere there was art which he had brought back from his travels to remote places. In that beautiful airy house, we spoke of funerals the entire time. He agreed with me that in fact remembering the dead is a form of deep reverence for life itself. To mark a life lived and to give voice to the great sadness of those left behind must be one of the most basic human instincts of all.. we discussed the ancient Persian towers of silence-- and of course about the Torajan funeral customs as well.

I told him that I would very much like to make it to the far north of Sulawesi-- to Manado, the town located at the very northern tip of the island. That was before fighting between Christians and Muslims took the bloody turn it took. It was also before the discovery of the miraculous fish, the coelcanth-- another East Africa-Sulawesi link?? was discovered in the waters off the coast there.

Not long after that, Blair fell down a manhole in Ubud and died from complications. The village he lived in-- along with his family-- organized an elaborate Balinese funeral to which the entire vilage turned out for. When I heard about it, I thought how much he would have liked that.

I have written before that my own story began in Indonesia. Studying dance, it was from that place from which I began my journey. Robert Harrison, author of Dominion of the Dead, says that he thinks it is in the mourning of the dead (and the disposal of our human remains) that most distinguish us as a species. I would say that it is in our story-telling and meaning-making capacity in which our humanity is most clearly evoked. But I agree with him that the dead do not belong to themselves as much as they belong to the community of loved ones that mourn them and that, indeed, this act of communal mourning is perhaps the greatest celebration of life.

As I was listening to a show he did on Post-humanism, in which he was talking of mourning and the human need for rituals and ceremonies surrounding death, I suddenly remembered a heart-breaking image that I saw in a BBC documentary about one of the schools washed away in the tsunami in Japan in 2011. Of the children lost that day, there were a few from this school never found. The parents could not rest. One mother would wake up every morning and spend her days on a bulldozer shoveling the debris for a sign of her daughter. She knew her daughter was dead but her need to care for the remains was impossible for her to ignore. Days passed and finally her daughter was found--not by her but by a fisherman. It was only the head.. The scene was just heart-wrenching as the mother said, "she traveled very far in the water." This was not the end for her though, for she continued to search for the other children unaacounted for since she could not stand still while other parents were still suffering, unable to mourn. 

 ***

Photos by my talented sister--from that time when we crossed the Wallace Line♥

For more, see my blog post, shanghai--and the lady from shu (bedhaya hagoromo) and below again is Rick Emmert's magical performmance of the noh play Hagoromo to Javanese gamelan with Javanese dancers.

Comments

[chriswaugh_bj]

There is a distant link between Madagascar and my home, too. The peoples of Madagascar, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific are Austronesian- linguistically speaking, at least. Long, long ago, some of the Proto-Austronesians of Taiwan (the ancestors of today's 高山族) decided to move south through the Phillipines into Malaysia and Indonesia. One group decided to head west and crossed the Indian Ocean to Madagascar. Another group decided to head east and fanned out through my homeocean. By all the evidence we have, the ancient Polynesians were highly skilled navigators who could read the stars, winds and ocean currents like modern navigators read maps and GPS, and their expansion through the Pacific was certainly not done by accident, rather by exploration and design. So perhaps it was no accident that their ancestors island-hopped southwards, and that some of their cousins struck out westwards?

And your description of Tana Toraja is very beautiful.

[Peony]

Chris, it is so good to hear from you. Thank you for this great comment, too! Whenever I get a comment like your's, it makes me so glad for having written the Post in the first place.

Those double-hulled canoes...

Not that long ago I finished translating a romance novel-- which got me into all kinds of trouble with these "sexy" scenes that were very cheesy and really I felt so embarrassed trying to get right (do people really like that? I kept emailing the author, "Wouldn't it be better without all that? To which he responded, "No, I think that should stay!")

Anyway, the story was set in Hawaii in the times of King Kamehameha and there was all this interesting historical background about the ancient Polynesians. Like you, I just became so fascinated by the skills and courage of these ancient peoples who would just set out across open waters in double-hulled canoes. It is pretty fantastic- the desire to explore; to know; to see.

I guess the Hawaiians had traveled all that way from ancient tahiti and believed that after death they would return to the land of their ancestors-- ie, Tahiti. Which, of course, is remarkable that not only did they travel that far but over the generations they did not necessarily forget where they came from either.

It's like they just glided on the surface of the water--- right across the ocean...

So, are you in Beijing for the holidays? I hope you enjoy the season wherever you are.

[chriswaugh_bj]

Yes, I'm in Beijing, and enjoying it as much as possible- which is actually quite a lot. I'll be enjoying it still more in about a month's time.

The Maori of my homeland are the same. Over the generations- and it's been roughly 1000 years since their ancestors settled there (New Zealand was the last place on earth to be settled by humans)- kept the memory of what they call Hawai'iki alive. Hawai'iki is the ancestral homeland, distant across the ocean. I'm not sure of their traditional beliefs about the afterlife- many are now atheist, agnostic, Christian, Mormon or follow some blend of Maori tradition and Christianity- but the northern tip of New Zealand, where the Tasman Sea meets the open Pacific- a stretch of ocean notorious for its insanely swirling currents- they call Te Rerenga Wairua- the leaping-off place of the spirits. They believed that when a person died, his/her spirit would travel up to that northern most spit of land and thence jump into the next life.

Actually, this article (http://tinyurl.com/5cn2ve) has a couple of interesting comments:

"There is no more appropriate point of departure for the journey between the living and the dead than Te Rerenga Wairua, not only for its desolate appearance, but also for its situation, at the northwestern extremity of the island, angling into the Pacific, towards the islands of origin. Most Polynesian islands have a Rerenga Wairua but as we move Northwards through the Pacific the Rerenga of each island swings Westward, homing towards mysterious and enigmatic Hawaiiki."

For those of us born and raised in Polynesia, West leads to Asia- northwest for us Kiwis, more or less due west for those from the more climatically pleasant parts of our ocean. West is where the earliest ancestors of the Polynesians came from- West leads to Melanesia, thence to Asia.

Last time I went back to New Zealand I saw Te Rerenga Wairua from the air. The weather was incredibly, beautifully clear as only the Pacific can manage, and looking down, both at that last spit of land and at the sea swirling around it, I could see- this was a place for spirits to enter the next life, a place for sailors and other casual tourists to steer clear of.

Where I come from, it seems, ocean is everything.

[KR]

Just was looking at your "ritual" post. Fantastic photo! Had been reading recently about migrations of Austronesian language groups (originally out of South China, via Taiwan, 3500BC) in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. Supposedly the Javanese/Sumatrans (Western-Malayo-Polynesians) were arriving in Madagascar at about the same time as the Oceanic Eastern-Malayo- Polynesians made it to Hawaii (around 500 AD).

This summer I saw depictions of the boats and houses* (supposedly in the Madagascan settlements) in the bas-reliefs on Borobudur, dating from around later 8th century (almost concurrent with founding of Kyoto). Supporting evidence : dispersion of Indonesian fruits (as far as West Africa), and forms of musical instruments - as well as the roots of Malagasy language, not to mention genetic traces in the Madagascans, back to Borneo
(See this)

At Borobudur we also saw the Samudra Raksa (single hull with outriggers on both sides) in a nearby museum - a traditionally-built replica trader that in 2003/4 was sailed on the Cinnamon Route as far as Ghana, to prove it could be done. Borobudur Ship Expedition

Borobudur Seafaring Myth

ship carving
replica under sail

Borobudur 1

Borobudur 2

Borobudur 3

[Bathrobe]

Chris, weren't there people (Polynesian people?) in New Zealand before the Maoris arrived?

Glad you're enjoying Beijing. It's been awfully hot recently.

[Jelajah IPTEK]

Many knowledge and information I got from your site, thanks and greetings of friendship from Indonesia.

[Chris Waugh]

Bathrobe, there was an old story doing the rounds even as late as when I was a kid that before the Maori, New Zealand was populated by a Melanesian race called the Moriori - older, more obnoxious versions of the myth describes them as inferior to the Maori - who the Maori killed and ate. These days the story is widely considered to be a load of old cobblers, a convenient myth to make us Pakeha not feel so bad about our own colonisation of Aotearoa. The real world Moriori are the original inhabitants of the Chatham Islands/Rekohu and generally considered to be of the same Polynesian origin as the Maori, although their language and culture developed in isolation from mainland NZ and so are markedly different. They were conquered, eaten, enslaved and nearly wiped out by an invasion by Ngati Mutunga and Ngati Tama, from Taranaki on the West Coast of the North Island, in the 1830s. They're now enjoying a cultural revival.

My first two comments were written four years ago, but yes, I am still enjoying Beijing. I'm also enjoying rereading these old posts - they certainly stand the test of time. Thanks, Peony.