From the Archives: June ‘16

Make Room For What We Don’t Know

Expedition Field Notes — Sulawesi, Indonesia

You can travel a long way before realizing how much of home you’ve brought with you.

Your expectations. Your manners. Your sense of what’s appropriate at a wedding, or what grief is supposed to look like at a funeral.

None of it takes up space in your bag but it all makes the journey.

Experiencing funeral ceremonies among the Toraja people of Sulawesi brought that home to me. I could recognize the occasion. Understanding what they meant and why they do what they do required considerably more attention.

A funeral. A familiar word, carrying expectations I hadn’t thought to question.

Then I was there, and those expectations weren’t enough. My expectations were based on my own cultural norms. I carried them with me all the way to Indonesia.

Pico Iyer gets at something like this in his essay “Why We Travel.” He writes about travel’s ability to loosen our certainties, allowing us to see familiar things from an unfamiliar angle. To make room for what we don’t know. It’s an appealing idea when you’re reading at home. In somebody else’s community, it becomes a practical challenge.

Can you let an experience unfold before deciding what it means? Can you withhold judgement based on your own cultural norms for long enough to let the experience take you?

Can you admit that you don’t quite understand and therefore can’t pass appropriate judgement?

After years of teaching and leading students abroad, I think those are among the most useful questions an expedition can raise.

Some encounters deserve to remain unfinished in our minds until we’ve had time to properly reflect.

The funeral ceremony raised harder questions.

In some Toraja families, the deceased remain at home for an extended period before the funeral, cared for by relatives. The interval can last months or longer. We saw this first hand. Funeral rites bring together family obligations, spiritual beliefs, resources, and relationships in ways that a visitor cannot fully grasp from watching a single ceremony. Funerals are massive celebrations. Neighbors and family come from far and wide, often returning from employment abroad to take part in these ceremonies. Most who come, bring tokens to celebrate the life of the deceased. This is often in the form of a water buffalo or pig to sacrifice for the feast.

The sacrifice is not easy to watch. They stab the jugular vein of the beast and blood spurts from the wound as the animal thrashes about in it’s death throws. I watched this take place dozens of times, blood soaked mud abounds.

Even that brief description unsettles assumptions many of us bring from home. Yet can you reserve your judgement until you have time to process and understand that you are witnessing vastly different cultural norms in action? The vegans in my group of students had a very hard time with this and had some very difficult moments, as well pointed questions.

We tend to expect a particular sequence after a death. There are arrangements, a service, a burial or cremation. Then the calendar keeps moving, whether the people grieving are ready or not.

Encountering another approach makes that sequence visible as something learned.

It made me think about how communities give shape to loss. Who gathers? Who stays? How much time is allowed? What does it mean to continue caring for someone after death?

National Geographic’s reporting on Toraja funerary life offers a way into those questions. Beyond the images that initially draw a reader’s attention are families speaking about attachment, responsibility, and the difficulty of parting. Once the initial shock passes you begin to see that they deal with the same questions we do when a loved one passes on.

Those are things worth staying with.

A visitor can be surprised by a practice and still take the time to hear why it matters. That pause—between a first reaction and a judgment—is somewhere I want to spend more time.

Nigel Barley’s Toraja: Misadventures of a Social Anthropologist in Sulawesi, Indonesia belongs alongside these reflections.

One detail from his account is particularly useful to think about: Torajan woodcarvers travel to London to build a rice barn at the museum where he worked.

The direction of the journey changes.

Britain becomes the place being encountered. Its habits become available for inspection. The people usually positioned as the subjects of an outsider’s curiosity become travelers themselves.

I like what that does to the comfortable idea that we go abroad to observe other people.

We’re being encountered, too.

Our questions reveal things about us. So do our silences, our cameras, and the moments when we assume an explanation is owed. Being curious is a good beginning. Learning how to carry that curiosity takes practice.

The ceremony gave me something I couldn’t have packed in advance: questions about the ordinary arrangements of my own life. How we celebrate. How we gather. How we make room for grief. How readily we mistake familiarity for the only possible way.

That’s a reason to keep going places.

And it’s a reason to arrive with enough time to listen and make room for what we don’t know.

Yours in Exploration,
Brian Facemire
Founder, Vagabond Expeditions

Sources consulted beyond my own experience:

Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel”

National Geographic, article circa 2017 (pay wall) but here is a short YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOCbhSsuzXw

Nigel Barley, Toraja: Misadventures of an Anthropologist in Sulawesi Indonesia