by Nigel Barley
Toraja
NIGEL BARLEY
To Din
Contents
PREFACE
New Departures
Tales of Two Cities
Sailor Ways
The Ethnographic Frontier
Horse-trading
This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us
Of Rice and Men
Mountain Barnstormers
Conjugal Rites
Let Me Call You … Pong
The Return Match
ILLUSTRATIONS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF STAMFORD RAFFLES
ROGUE RAIDER
ISLAND OF DEMONS
THE DEVIL’S GARDEN
COPYRIGHT
Preface
Traditionally, anthropologists have written about other peoples in the form of academic monographs. The authors of these somewhat sere and austere volumes are omniscient and Olympian in their vision. Not only do they have a faculty of shrewd cultural insight superior to that of the ‘natives’ themselves, but they never make mistakes and they are never deceived by themselves or others. On the maps of alien culture they offer, there are no dead ends. They have no emotional existence. They are never excited or depressed. Above all, they never like or dislike the people they are studying.
This is not such a monograph. It deals with first attempts to get to grips with a ‘new’ people – indeed a whole ‘new’ continent. It documents false trails and linguistic incompetences, refuted preconceptions and the deceptions practised by self and others. Above all, it trades not in generalizations, but encounters with individuals.
From the strict anthropological perspective, these encounters are vitiated by the fact that they took place not in the first local tongue of the people but in Indonesian. The Republic of Indonesia has many hundreds, if not thousands, of local languages. First approaches are therefore always through the medium of the national language, and its use is a mark of the preliminary nature of the contact involved. Such contacts – over the more than two years dealt with by this book – nevertheless turned into relationships of real personal and emotional content.
Monographs are written in reverse. They impose a spurious order on reality where everything fits. This book was written in the course of the experience it documents. A quite different work could have been constructed starting from the magnificent Torajan rice-barn that now stands in the galleries of the Museum of Mankind in London, showing how the plan to build it made ethnographic, financial and museological sense. But that is not the way it happened.
Many people helped in the project that is the matter of this book. In England, the Director and Trustees of the British Museum had the vision to finance such a speculative enterprise. Without the unflagging support and understanding of Jean Rankine and Malcolm McLeod, it could have never come to pass.
In Indonesia, thanks are due to Ibu Hariyati Soebadio of the Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, Bapak Yoop Ave and Luther Barrung of the Departemen Parpostel – all of whom led me by the hand through the official channels that I could never have navigated without their continued good will. Bapak Yakob, Bupati of Tana Toraja, Bapak Patandianan of Sospol and Nico Pasaka were ever helpful. In Mamasa, Drs Silas Tarrupadang is owed warm thanks for his unstinting hospitality and assistance. Professor and Ibu Abbas of Hasanuddin University went out of their way to help me in a time of dire need. One anti-acknowledgement is due to Bapak W. Arlen of the Immigration Office, Ujung Pandang.
I am also grateful to H. E. Bapak Suhartoyo and Bapak Hidayat of the Indonesian Embassy in London. A special vote of thanks is due to Bapak W. Miftach, also of the Indonesian Embassy in London, for his sustained support, assistance and friendship throughout this project.
The Torajan Foundation of Jakarta – especially Bapak J. Parapak and Bapak H. Parinding – took a warm personal interest in the Torajan exhibition from its inception and acted as sponsors, as did Garuda Indonesia.
Without the cheerful friendship, assistance and understanding of Sallehuddin bin Hajji Abdullah Sani, this project would not have been conceived and could not have been executed.
Above all, thanks are due to the many ordinary Torajan men and women who took me to their hearts and aided me without thought of reward or personal convenience.
Nigel Barley
New Departures
‘Anthropology is not a hazardous sport.’ I had always suspected that this was so but it was comforting to have it confirmed in black and white by a reputable insurance company of enduring probity. They, after all, should know such things.
The declaration was the end result of an extended correspondence conducted more in the spirit of detached concern than serious enquiry. I had insured my health for a two-month fieldtrip and been unwise enough to read the small print. This being the 1980s and the world as it was, I was not covered for nuclear attack or nationalization by a foreign government. Even more alarming, I was covered for up to twelve months if hijacked. Freefall parachute jumping was specifically forbidden together with ‘all other hazardous sports’. But it was now official: ‘Anthropology is not a hazardous sport.’
The equipment laid out on the bed seemed to contest the assertion. I had water-purifying tablets, remedies against two sorts of malaria, athlete’s foot, suppurating ulcers and eyelids, amoebic dysentery, hay fever, sunburn, infestation by lice and ticks, seasickness and compulsive vomiting. Only much, much later would I realize that I had forgotten the aspirins.
It was to be a stern rather than an easy trip, a last pitting of a visibly sagging frame against severe geography where everything would probably have to be carried up mountains and across ravines, a last act of physical optimism before admitting that urban life and middle age had ravaged beyond recall.
In one corner stood the new rucksack, gleaming iridescent green like the carapace of a tropical beetle. New boots glowed comfortingly beside it, exuding a promise of dry strength. Cameras had been cleaned and recalibrated. All the minor tasks had been dealt with just as a soldier cleans and oils his rifle before going into battle. Now, in pre-departure gloom, the wits were dulled, the senses muted. It was the moment for sitting on the luggage and feeling empty depression.
I have never really understood what it is that drives anthropologists off into the field. Possibly it is simply the triumph of sheer nosiness over reasonable caution, the fallibility of the human memory that denies the recollection of how uncomfortable and tedious much of field-work can be. Possibly it is the boredom of urban life, the stultifying effect of regular existence. Often departure is triggered by relatively minor occurrences that give a new slant on normal routine. I once felt tempted when a turgid report entitled ‘Applications of the Computer to Anthropology’ arrived on my desk at the precise moment I had spent forty minutes rewinding a typewriter ribbon by hand because my machine was so old that appropriate ribbons were no longer commercially available.
The point is that field-work is often an attempt by the researcher to resolve his own, very personal problems, rather than an attempt to understand other cultures. Within the profession, it is often viewed as a panacea for all ills. Broken marriage? Go and do some field-work to get back a sense of perspective. Depressed about lack of promotion? Field-work will give you something else to worry about.
But whatever the cause, ethnographers all recognize the call of the wild with the certainty that Muslims feel about the sudden, urgent need to go to Mecca.
Where to go? This time, not West Africa but somewhere fresh. Often I had been asked by students for advice on where to go for field-work. Some were driven by a relentless incubus to work on one topic alone, female circumcision or black-smithing. They were the easy ones to counsel. Others had quite simply fallen in love with a particular part of the world. They,
too, were easy. Such a love affair can be as good a basis for withstanding the many trials and disappointments of ethnography as any more stern theoretical obsession. Then there was the third, most difficult group, into which I myself seemed now to fall – what a colleague had unkindly termed the Social Democratic Party of anthropology – those who knew more clearly what they wanted to avoid than what they wished to seek.
When advising such as these, I had always asked something like: ‘Why don’t you go somewhere where the inhabitants are beautiful, friendly, where you would like the food and there are nice flowers?’ Often such people came back with excellent theses. Now I had to apply it to myself. West Africa was clearly excluded, but the answer came in a flash – Indonesia. I would have to make further enquiries.
I consulted an eminent Indonesianist – Dutch, of course, and therefore more English than the English with his houndstooth jacket, long, elegant vowels and a Sherlock Holmes pipe. He pointed the stem of it at me.
‘You are suffering from mental menopause,’ he said, puffing roundly. ‘You need a complete change. Anthropologists always go to their first field-work site and make the hard discovery that people there are not like the people at home – in your case that the Dowayos are not like the English. But they never get it clear that all peoples are unlike each other. You will go around for years looking at everyone as if they were Dowayos. Do you have a grant?’
‘Not yet. But I can probably sort out some funding.’ (The saddest thing about academic research is that when you are young you have plenty of time but no one will give you any money. By the time you have worked a little way up the hierarchy, you can normally persuade someone to fund you but you never have enough time to do anything important.)
‘Grants are wonderful things. I have often thought that I would write a book about the gap between what grants are given for and what they are actually spent on. My car,’ – he gestured through the window – ‘that is the grant to get my last book retyped. I sat up all night for six weeks and did it myself. It is not a very good car, but then it was not a very good book. I got married with a grant to enable me to study Achinese. My first daughter has a grant to allow me to visit Indonesian research facilities in Germany.’ Academics. The culture of genteel poverty.
‘You got divorced recently. Did you get a grant for that?’
‘No … That one, I paid for. But it was worth it.’
‘So where should I go?’
He puffed. ‘You will go to Sulawesi. If anyone asks why, you will explain it is because the children have pointed ears.’
‘Pointed ears? Like Mr Spock?’
‘Just so. We have him too.’
‘But why?’
He puffed smoke like an Indonesian volcano and smiled mysteriously. ‘Just go and you will see.’
I knew I was hooked. I would go to the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and look at the pointed ears of the children.
There may be pleasure in the remote anticipation of a journey. There is none in its immediate preparation. Injections. Should one really believe that smallpox has been ‘eradicated’? – a nice, clean, hard-edged word that was infinitely suspicious. Rabies? How likely were you to be bitten by a rabid dog? Yes, but you can catch it by being scratched by a cat or pecked by a bird. Gammaglobulin? The Americans swear by it. The British don’t believe in it. Ultimately, you make an arbitrary choice like a child grabbing a handful of sweets. How many shirts? How many pairs of socks? You never have enough to wear but always too many to carry. Cooking pots? Sleeping bags? There will be moments where both will be indispensable but are they worth the suffering involved in carrying them across Java? A review of teeth and feet, treating one’s body like a troublesome commodity in a slave market. A time to look at guidebooks and the previous works of ethnography.
Each seemed to tell a different story. Planning a route was impossible. They could not be reconciled into a unified vision. According to one, Indonesian ships were floating hell-holes, the nadir of degradation, filthy and pestilential. Another viewed them as havens of tranquillity. One traveller claimed that he had travelled tarmac roads which another traveller declared to have been cancelled. Travel books were as much works of fantasy as grant applications. My Dutchman probably wrote them. A secondary problem was that you could never be sure of the values of the writer. One man’s ‘comfortable’ was another’s ‘absurdly expensive’. In the end, the only thing to do was go and look.
There is a stage at which maps appear essential. In fact, they merely give a spurious sense of certainty that you know where you are going.
Map men are the true eccentrics of the book trade – wild-haired, glasses-pushed-up-on-forehead sort of people.
‘A map of Sulawesi? Charlie, we’ve got one here wants a map of Sulawesi.’ Charlie peered over a stack of maps at me. Apparently, they didn’t get the Sulawesi type here every day. Charlie was the glasses-pushed-down-to-tip-of-nose sort.
‘Can’t do you one. We’d love one for ourselves. Do you a prewar Dutch one with nothing on it. Indonesians have the copyright you see. Frightened of spies. Or you can have an American Airforce Survey but it comes on three sheets six foot square. Lovely bit of cartography.’
‘I’d hoped for something a little more convenient.’
‘We can do you East Malaysia Political. You get the rest of Borneo Physical Features up the far end and four inches of South Sulawesi to make up the square. But I suppose if you want to go more than ten miles from the capital, that’s not much use. We can do you a street map of the capital with directory.’
I looked at it. How often had one studied these ambitious tangles of streets and avenues that resolved themselves on the ground into hot, dusty little villages with only one real road.
‘No. I don’t think so. Anyway, the name’s changed. It’s not called Macassar any more. It’s Ujung Pandang.’
Charlie looked shocked. ‘My dear sir. This is a 1944 map.’ It was too. The directory was in Dutch.
Money being, as ever, in short supply, it was time to phone around the bucket-shops for a cheap ticket. One could not reasonably hope to find one to Sulawesi. The best thing would be to get to Singapore and hunt around.
What is astonishing is not that fares should vary from one airline to another, but that it is virtually impossible to pay the same fare to fly by the same airline on the same plane. As the trail cleared and the prices declined, the names of airlines seemed less and less real and more and more revealing. Finnair suggested a vanishing trick. Madair was expensive but suggested a bout of wild adventure. In the end, I settled for a Third World airline described as ‘all right once you’re in the air’. In an attic above Oxford Street, I rendezvoused with a nervy little man who looked like a demonstration of the disastrous effects of stress – wizened, twitchy, biting nails, chain-smoking. He was surrounded with huge heaps of paper and a telephone that rang incessantly. I paid my money and he began writing out the ticket. Ring, ring.
‘Hallo. What? Who? Oh dear. Ah, yes, well. I’m sorry about that. The problem is that at this time of the year all the traffic is going East so there will be a problem in getting a seat.’ There followed five minutes of placatory explanation to someone on the other end of the line who was manifestly very annoyed. He hung up, bit his nails and returned to writing out the ticket. Immediately, the phone rang again.
‘Hallo. What? When? Oh dear. Ah, well. The problem is that at this time of year all the Asians are heading West so there will be problems getting a seat.’ Another five minutes of soothing noises. He sucked desperately on a cigarette. Ring, ring.
‘Hallo. What? Oh dear. I am sorry. That’s never happened before in all the years I’ve been in this business. I certainly posted the ticket to you.’ He picked through a wad of tickets, put one in an envelope and began scribbling an address.
‘The trouble is that at this time of year, most of the Post Office is on holiday, so there will be delays.’
It was with the direst forebodings that I pocketed my ti
cket and left the office.
And so I arrived at pre-departure depression. Having taken a turn about the room with the beetle-carapace rucksack, I unpacked it and threw half the contents out. I needn’t have bothered. When I arrived at the airport, there was no room on the plane and no other plane for a week. I rang the pre-stressed travel agent.
‘What? Who? Well, that’s never happened before in all the years I’ve been in the business. The problem is that at this time of year the extra planes are held up by the monsoon. But I’ll give you a full refund. I’m putting it in an envelope now.’ When the cheque arrived, several weeks later, it bounced.
It is said that every positive term needs its negative to sharpen its definition and fix its place in the wider system of things. This is perhaps the role of Aeroflot in the airline world – a sort of antithetical airline. Instead of effete stewards, burly moustachioed wardresses. Instead of the fussy congelations of aircraft cuisine, fried chicken. Between London and Singapore, we ate fried chicken five times, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, always recognizable. Rather than lug my luggage back home, I had opted for the only cheap flight that day – on Aeroflot.
Some strange smell like oil of cloves had been introduced into the air supply. It was particularly pungent in the lavatory – a place entirely devoid of paper – and as a result of it, people would emerge red-faced and gasping. At moments of stress, such as landing, cold air streamed visibly from vents in the ceiling as off dry ice in a theatrical production. This terrified the Japanese who thought it was fire and whimpered until a wardress shouted at them in Russian. Thereafter they were not convinced but at least cowed.
The only relief from the bouts of fried chicken was the changing of planes in Moscow. Emerging in late evening from the miasma of cloves, we were made to queue on the stairs under 20 W bulbs as in a municipal brothel. Wardresses rushed among us inquisitorially shouting ‘Lusaka!’ Or was it ‘Osaka!’? Japanese and Zambians jostled each other without conviction. Our tickets were minutely examined. Our luggage was searched. A scowling young man checked our passports, reading them line by line with moving lips. He insisted on the removal of hats and glasses. Myself, he measured to check my actual height against that alleged in my passport. I cannot believe that the figures matched.
