Indonesia funeral rituals

Kristina Banne has been dead for almost nine years but her oldest son still tenderly applies her favourite musk-pink face powder. He lifts her mummified corpse out of the coffin and smiles for family portraits. The corpses are removed from their tombs, groomed and dressed in new outfits. They smell mildewy but the odour is not foul. Some wear sunglasses and jeans, others delicately beaded white satin dresses and bejewelled earrings. A young man places a lit cigarette in the mouth of his dead relative.

Tana Toraja is a region of South Sulawesi in Indonesia, a picturesque mountainous region that is home to an indigenous group known as the Torajans. For the Torajans, the most important thing about life is death and because of this, they have established some of the most unique and complex burial rituals in the world, which continue to be practiced today. The Torajans work hard in life to amass wealth for their death, with elaborate funeral rites the ultimate symbol of wealth and prosperity to those both inside and outside the community. In order to prevent the body from decaying and putrefying, it was traditionally wrapped in blankets and preserved with herbal elixirs and smoldering fires — although this has largely died out and the bodies are now preserved with formalin formaldehyde and water injections, which eventually results in mummification. Each day family members will visit the body, talk to body and bring it food and drink up to 4 times a day. Visitors to the house will be introduced to the deceased and great care will be taken to include the deceased in household life. Traditionally they were only carved to reveal the gender of their subject but they have become more and more extravagant and a likeness to the deceased is now expected, as is being dressed in an outfit formerly owned by the deceased.

The Torajans are an ethnic group indigenous to a mountainous region of South Sulawesi , Indonesia. Their population is approximately 1,,, of whom , live in the regency of Tana Toraja "Land of Toraja". The word Toraja comes from the Buginese language term to riaja , meaning "people of the uplands".

While death is typically treated with a joyless outlook in Western culture, the complete opposite is true for Indonesia's Toraja people. For them, death is not something to dread and avoid, but a central part of living that involves honoring the deceased with the utmost care to aid their passage into the afterlife. Funerals are major celebrations that take years of preparation. In the meantime, the dead bodies remain in their family homes.