Subject: to kapua 'big man' warrior
Setting: tribal warfare, anti-colonial resistance, Sulawesi highlands late 19th - mid-20thc
Event Photos
* Blair/Blair 1988 p70-71
"We had read that the Toraja hunted heads until as recently as the 1920s, but they were feared by their neighbours less for their ferocity than for their magic, part of which was their unnerving reputation for being able to cause the dead to walk. Toraja warriors had to die in their own 'Rante,' or village circle, if their souls were successfully to return to the stars. Should they die beyond the Rante, then their shamans, the stories went, could quicken their corpses long enough for them to walk home under their own steam, even without their heads. Various anthropologists had remarked on this zombie tradition -- but in Makassar Werner [Meyer] had given us a supplementary twist to the story.
"The occupying Japanese forces had apparently been so terrified by the Toraja that after a few peremptory massacres they had left them to themselves. On several occasions, according to Werner's informants, groups of Toraja resistance fighters had been taken into the forest by the Japanese, machine-gunned, and left there as a warning to others. Later in the evening their horrified executioners had reported encountering them again, in serious disrepair, shambling in single file back through the forest towards their Rante."
* Quaritch-Wales 1952 p2
"Although Toraja warfare seems to have been basically connected with the need to obtain heads for ritual use, actual causes of war included disputes about claims over slaves, buffaloes or land, non-payment of fines inflicted by one village on another, vendettas and feuds. War parties varied in number from a party of ten or twelve to a couple of hundred when a famous chief collected followers from several clans. The former could attack only an isolated house, the latter a village. The young men were encouraged by the women, and those young men unwilling to go were the subject of mockery. The accusation: This was necessary and, since war was regarded as a trial by ordeal, if defeat resulted, the inference was that the accusation had been justified. An accusation was needed in order to gain the co-operation of the ancestor gods, and it also had the power of a curse. If one clan wanted to steal another's cattle, but had no accusation to offer, it in some way irritated the intended enemy into offering an insult which could then be used as a basis for an accusation."
Primary Sources
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Secondary Sources
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Field Notes
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