by Nigel Barley
While they could all navigate in and out of work unaided, it was Johannis who was silently accorded the role of link-man with the outside world. He was expected to internalize the map of the underground, the techniques of using public telephones and ways of discouraging the attentions of drunks. On the second evening we lost him in Piccadilly in the crowds. A desperate search failed to trace him. When we arrived home he had returned before us, unaided, on the underground. I was impressed.
In their basic flexibility, only one thing, it seemed, was not negotiable. They had to have rice three times a day. Attempts to wean them on to other kinds of food via spaghetti or noodles failed. They would try alternatives with deep distaste, never complain but not eat them either. I soon abandoned all attempts to vary the diet. Potatoes and such like were acceptable but only as a supplement to rice, never as a substitute. This meant that days would begin about six o’clock in the morning with the boiling of rice. The three months of their stay are viewed through the steam of rice. A Western house is strangely ill-suited to rice. After a few weeks it blocked sinks, drains, stuck to the floor. Chicken is the ultimate luxury food for Torajans and they could not get enough of it. Chicken pie was the least offensive English food. The pie is a very English idea, difficult even in other European languages. Johannis referred to it as ‘chicken cake’.
Before the opening of the exhibition, it was important that the rice-barn should at least resemble something under construction rather than a mere heap of wood. The carvers set to work with a will. The materials had been brought over in the form of large beams of wood and bamboo tiles for the roof. There is a great snobbery in tiles amongst the Toraja. The Baruppu’ builders sneered at valley builders who cut tiles with saws instead of slicing them the manly way, with powerful strokes of a machete. Tiles cut by saw, they insisted, would rapidly rot. They began by constructing the central box of the barn – the part that would stand on the legs and that the roof would go on top of. It is a wonderful thing to see a Torajan carpenter mark a line on a thick tree trunk and convert it with a whir of machete strokes into a plank. The Torajans watched power tools at work and decided that, for most purposes, their own techniques were faster.
Once the box was complete, it would be disassembled, painted black, carved and coloured and rebuilt in its final position on top of the legs. Until then it made a handy changing room since they had to work with bare feet. Feet are as essential as hands for carving. They are used for gripping and steadying the wood that is being worked on. The gallery was rapidly converted into a convincing building site, knee-deep in wood shavings, teapots and cups.
There have been many efforts in recent years to liven up our museums, to convert them from the frosty banks of the art world into enjoyable and informative places. The great enemy of such moves is the glass case. Indispensable in its way, it nevertheless cuts off and insulates objects, makes them dead. Every museum curator knows that the exhibition everyone wants to get into is the one that he is trying to keep them out of, because it is still being built. Just as rehearsals are usually much more interesting than performances, so an exhibition in the course of arrangement offers much greater entertainment than the polished final product. The building site has an inherent fascination for the British: viewing platforms are provided on many construction sites so that the public can enjoy the spectacle. If one puts all this together, the Torajan exhibition seems inevitable.
The Torajans rapidly became used to the fact of people watching them work and quite quickly ‘regulars’ became apparent - those who would come in several times a week to chart their progress. From the very first, Nenek loved it. In his own culture he is very much a star, a performer, and aware of the dignity of his position. Yet even at the beginning problems appeared.
The other carvers were all related to Nenek. The precise kinship had been collapsed and simplified. Any attempt to unravel them was greeted with, ‘We are one family.’ Because of his age and status as a priest, however, he expected great respect. Tanduk and Karre had been his pupils. Nowadays they worked as independent builders, but they had come together for the purposes of this exhibition. Nenek regarded them as his students, returned to work under his supervision. They had other views.
The first problem came, as in the theatre, with the billing. Around the rice-barn site were a number of panels explaining the enterprise and showing early stages of the collection of raw materials in Indonesia. Karre counted that Nenek appeared more often than himself. Nenek had even made the transition to the main background photographic display in his high priest’s outfit. Tanduk too could be seen there in a shot of the market. Why had he been excluded? He appeared only slightly mollified when I pointed out the frequency with which his children appeared. Most of the children in the village seemed to be Karre’s.
At later stages, Nenek insisted on demonstrating his authority, recutting a part that Karre had already worked. The dispute concerned whether a ‘horn’ – a sticking-out spur of the barn – should be straight or curved. From such problems, feuds begin. A cold war broke out. It began to look as if Karre and Nenek would not speak to each other again, that there would be an unfriendly atmosphere in the gallery. Fortunately, Third World people are hopelessly romanticized in our culture. One reviewer, visiting the museum, commented on the wonderful spirit of co-operation that enabled these people to work together without the need to exchange a word and expressed the hope that such might become the case in the British workplace.
British working practices were hard to understand. In Torajaland builders would labour from dawn to dusk until the job was done. Precise calculation of materials was never necessary. There was always more growing just up the hill. Normally, builders would sleep under the barn they were building, wrapped in their cloaks. They could not understand why this should not be so in England. It was impossible to get them to stop at 5 p.m. At that hour, it was still light in England. Indeed, unlike Indonesia where dusk is about six o’clock regardless of the season, it would continue to be light until much later. Why then should they lay down tools?
Sundays off they could understand. That was for going to church if you were Christian – or, in England, watching church services on television, which was even better. But not to work on Saturdays was monstrous. They rose, of course, as soon as it was light and expected all English people to be already at work as they would be back home.
The rice-barn grew little by little, and then in great leaps as the prepared sections were slotted together. Karre proved to be a relentless carving machine, churning out panel after panel of geometric forms. To his annoyance, however, only Nenek could produce the really complicated non-symmetrical patterns of gentle curves for the main beams. Nenek increased his discomfort by chewing areca-nut compulsively, in the knowledge that Karre was a smoker not allowed to smoke in the gallery. Visitors, too, clearly found Nenek a much more sympathetic carver than Karre. Being less concerned with speed, he was always willing to smile or call Johannis over to interpret so he could talk to people. Johannis, too, clearly enjoyed himself surprising visitors with his English and teaching young ladies how to paint.
When they returned to the house in the evening, the carvers would bath and eat, chat, watch television. They greatly appreciated a glass of beer – so hard to come by in Baruppu’. Nenek took a daily spoonful of the ‘medicine’ he had come to like. He had rapidly convinced all the museum guards that ‘medicine’ would make an appropriate present and began laying down a cellar.
But soon they would return to carving. Nenek erected a little bamboo table outside in the garden. When the weather was fine enough, he would carve out there. It had a strange, Robinson Crusoe appearance, with an umbrella tied on as sunshade. Johannis had been disparaging about the garden.
‘You should plant all the flowers in straight lines, otherwise it is like the jungle.’
Nenek disagreed. ‘This is a good garden. I have planted some coffee. I am sure it will grow here.’
He changed the subject. �
��How much does a house like this cost?’ I told him.
‘Surely that cannot be right?’ We did the calculations again. It was correct.
Nenek stared aghast. ‘Have you that much money?’ I explained about thirty-five-year mortgages and interest. He laughed. ‘And Dutchmen keep coming and telling us we are crazy to spend all our money on buffalo to kill. You are the same with your houses. Houses are important to us too but we would never spend that much. Get me the wood and I will build you one for much less.’
‘It is different here, Nenek,’ explained Johannis with his worldly wisdom. ‘Here, they do not have to pay school fees.’ His obsession again.
Nenek indicated a man working on his house two or three doors down.
‘Who is that man?’
‘I don’t know, Nenek. He just lives there.’
‘You do not know his name?’
‘No.’
‘He is not one of your family?’
‘No.’
He laid down his knife and looked at me in silent awe. ‘Truly, you must be very strong to live so alone.’
The others colonized the kitchen, carving, painting, sharpening knives. We cooked rice in an artisanal workshop.
Much that we would have considered as waste, they employed for useful purposes. Plastic waterpipes left over from plumbing work were made into new handles for their knives. Old slates from the roof were speedily converted into fine whetstones. Nenek found an empty champagne bottle in a skip somewhere and used it for pounding clay to make earth colours, like a poignant symbol of the wastefulness of our culture. The plastic food trays from the plane were obviously far too valuable to throw away and he had surreptitiously removed them. They were now used as containers for paint.
He had a deep love of children. Frequently he would carve little panels depicting buffaloes and give them to children who came in to watch him. Often parents and teachers were so touched by this unexpected gesture that they went away in tears. Torajans were maintaining their reputation as great promoters of crying.
Problems with Indonesian ‘butterflies’ did not end in Surabaya and Ujung Pandang. The most popular brand of pressurized oil-lamp is also a ‘butterfly’ in Indonesia. To go into an ironmonger’s shop and ask the Chinese girl behind the counter for a ‘butterfly’, however, involves no risk of misunderstanding. She will simply ask, ‘Asli atau biasa?’ ‘Do you want a genuine one or the normal sort?’ It is a question that pulls you up short. In Indonesia, copyright laws are rudimentary. Most things are regularly copied, down to the trademark. Copies are often just as good as the original but they are expected to be cheaper.
The question could also be asked of the rice-barn the carvers were building. In their native village of Baruppu’, rice-barns do not normally have bamboo roofs. Roofs are generally of wooden slates or the inner bark of a particular palm-tree, a material rather like a Brillo pad. If you ask why this should be so, Baruppu’ans will explain that there was a terrible fire some thirty years ago that destroyed all suitable bamboo for roofs. If bamboo tiles were to be used, they would have to be imported at huge cost from the valley. Only a rich man could conceive of such a notion. If you point to the magnificent stands of bamboo around the village that were the undoing of Johannis’s cousin, they say that they cannot be sure but, in all probability, this bamboo is not suitable for roofs. Since bamboo roofs should last up to fifty years and the fire was thirty years ago, the arithmetic does not quite add up. The fact seems to be that, while everyone knows that – ideally – a barn should have a bamboo roof, no one can or wants to spend the money on one.
When it came to discussions about the museum rice-barn, the Torajans were horrified at the suggestion that a barn in a museum should have anything other than a bamboo roof. It would, they explained laughing, be crude, improper. They would be ashamed. If people came from Indonesia, they would be ridiculed. So the barn in the museum had to have a fine bamboo roof of a type that they had had in their heads since they were children but rarely built. I am not sure whether this made it more or less genuine. This was, it seemed, the reason that Karre had been selected. He was the one man in Baruppu’ who had done a bamboo roof before. A certain lack of experience was revealed, however, in his estimates of the time and material needed for the job. One day he would announce that the roof would take two months. There was only half the material needed. The next day it would take only three weeks. There would be plenty of bamboo left over. On really bad days the carvers would have long discussions about the roof and then troop up to my office to look at a photograph of a rice-barn, turning it gloomily this way and that. It was all very unnerving, since there was absolutely no possibility of securing more bamboo in England at so late a stage.
While the public enjoyed the spectacle of the rice-barn, it was a fine opportunity to document the entire process of its construction and collect information that would be very difficult to acquire in the field. It became more and more evident how great is the cultural importance of the rice-barn.
In form it is like a Torajan house except that it normally faces south rather than north. It is much more than merely a place to store food. It is also important for the spirits that control the fertility of the rice.
In anthropology the Torajans are known as the standard example of a form of classification termed ‘complementary binary opposition’. Such a complex name masks a very simple principle. The entire world is divided up into opposites, such as light/dark, right/left, male/female, life/death, which govern appropriate behaviour. In theory, then, it is possible simply to read off the essential elements of any Torajan ceremony in terms of these opposites. If one is present at a festival of life, it will be morning, people will be facing east, wearing light clothes and so on. If it is a festival of death it will be past noon, people will be facing west, clad in black, etc., etc. Such classifications can be seen to be active in the most minor and seemingly irrational acts – a hidden structure lying behind the apparent chaos of another culture. Unfortunately, it never quite seems to work.
The rice-barn, as stated, is like a house but all the directions are reversed. This is particularly clear when guests of honour are required to sit on the platform of the barn. Instead of sitting at the north-east, the normally auspicious side, they sit at the south-west, usually associated with death. In this way, normal spatial patterns are reversed within the rice-barn. That this is so might seem odd but it can be accounted for as part of a wider phenomenon of inversion and mediation. Thus, mediators – things that belong neither to one firm category nor another – are often inverted. The standard example in our own culture is the point where the old year joins the new. New Year festivals are characterized by army officers waiting on their men and all sorts of absurdities of dress and behaviour.
Torajan rites rigorously segregate and oppose the ceremonies of the east and west, those of life and death. The only point at which these meet – are mediated – is the rice-barn. It is here that the seed for next year’s crop is kept. Here too, in the days when Torajans were headhunters, human skulls were stored to increase general fertility and well-being; the point, then, at which life and death meet and are converted into each other.
In many areas it is the moment at which a corpse is placed on the rice-barn that marks the official start of death. Until then, the (to us) deceased is spoken of as ‘having a headache’. In Baruppu’ they do not do this, but have a further refinement. The word for a rice-barn is alang. The bier on which the dead body is transported to the tomb is made in the form of a rice-barn but of throwaway materials – paper and plywood. It is called an alang-alang. The rice-barn then is the device that shunts people from one ritual position to another. The reversal of directions is appropriate.
Yet this explanation too seems inadequate. Nenek gave me a lot of information about festivals and rice-barns while working in the museum, but it was interesting that while the geographical directions involved were always ‘correct’, he constantly changed the reasons why they were so. Why
did an honoured guest sit in the inauspicious south-west of the barn? Because the barn faced south not north so directions were changed. Was that why a priest of life sat on the west side? No, he did so so that he could face east, the auspicious side. The more one tried to tie up abstract classifications with what people actually did, the clearer it became that the system was unbreachable. You could always find a reason for justifying what people did even if that reason contradicted one invoked earlier. So the classifications were not the rules of iron that they appeared to be to the outsider. They were merely something to be nodded towards deferentially.
The carving on a barn is the same as that on the house. Each of the motifs has a name, and the position that it can occupy on the barn is subject to rules. For example, the motif of cockerels standing on sunbursts should go high under the eaves. It simultaneously combines many meanings as do the other motifs. Whole books have been written on the patterns of Torajan carving.
During the construction process, however, a further point emerged. I had climbed on to the barn to take some pictures of the technique by which roof-tiles are attached and was joking with the carvers. There was a sudden cry of rage from Nenek down below.
‘Stop that!’ he shouted. ‘You must never joke on a rice-barn.’ What could he mean? ‘The house is the mother,’ he explained, ‘the rice-barn is the father.’ Binary opposition again. ‘When you are building a house, you can gossip and play about, it does not matter. But a rice-barn is a male thing, it is serious. Mice are playful animals. If you joke while building a rice-barn, they will invade it and gobble up the rice.’
