「肉の政治学」 : サダン・トラジャの死者祭宴

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The people of the Sa'dan Toraja, the southern branch of the mountain people ("Toraja") in Central Sulawesi of Indoncsia, often say, "We live to die." An anthropologist who studies their society would understand that these words carry crucial implications. The ritual of the dead is their central concern and every effort during life is directed toward death. They accumulate wealth to spend it almost all on the occasion of death. The people who live as members of Toraja society cannot abandon this custom, because the obligation to hold a ritual for the deceased and to participate in the rituals for the relatives or neighbours forms an essential part of their own identity. Even the villagers who have been converted to Christianity or received modern education cannot despise these conventions. If they neglect this "old-fashioned and "irrational" practice they will lose their position in the village community. Thus it may not be an exaggeration to say that their society revolves around "death". This paper aims first to describe the death ritual of the Sa'dan Toraja in detail and, second, to discuss several important problems it contains, based on the data collected during my field research from September 1976 unti January 1978. Although the economy is now founded upon wet rice cultivation in the beautifully terraced fields on the mountain slopes at 800 to 1, 600 meters above sea level, the culture of the Sa'dan Toraja shows striking features of the swidden cultivators in Southeast Asia, that is to say, feasts with the sacrifice of cocks, pigs and water buffaloes, the erection of megaliths, head hunting practices, the use of ship motifs and so on. In particular their death ritual has much in common with the "feast of merit" as it is found among the upland peoples of mainland Southeast Asia. This fact leads me to the assumption that the death ritual of the Sa'dan Toraja is a kind of transformation or developed form of "feast of merit" with pompous stage-setting and elaborate arrangement which is attained by the increase of wealth through the introduction of wet rice cultivation. Therefore, it seems to me more relevant to call their ritual of the dead "death feast", the "feast of merit' on the occasion of death. The death feast is strictly ranked, according to their custom. The rank and scale of the feast, measured by the amount of sacrificed water buffaloes and the main feast, which is counted by the day, depends upon the social rank and wealth of the deceased and his family. In the death feast named dirapa'i, the highest rank, scores of water buffaloes and more than one hundred pigs are consumed for the period of the feast that covers in total one or more years. In the "autocratic" southern villages of the regency of Toraja Land it is the threefold division of social classes the nobles or chief class (puang) , commoners (to makaka) and "slaves" (kaunan) that plays an important role in determining which rank of the feast to hold. Thus, the wealthy noble or the man of the chief class hopes, or is required, to hold a great feast of high rank, because the funeral ceremony gives him the opportunity to reaffirm his socio-political status or rather promote his prestige in his village community. In order to give the full picture of the death feast in the Sa'dan Toraja, the argument of this paper is presented through three main stages of discussion. The theme in each stage is as follows: (1) examination of the ritual categories of the Sa'dan Toraja, (2) a case study on a death feast, and (3) the presentation of some important problems which the death feast contains.
日本文化人類学会の論文
1979-06-30

「肉の政治学」 : サダン・トラジャの死者祭宴

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