Sulawesi is a vast island to the east of Borneo. Shaped like a spider with long draping legs, Sulawesi is home to a great diversity of distinctive peoples, languages and cultural traditions.
Toraja, meaning “people of the uplands”, was the appellation given to peoples of highland Central Sulawesi by the neighboring and at times, antagonistic, coastal Buginese. Ensconced and isolated in their territories in the highlands of central Sulawesi, the Toraja evaded Dutch colonial control until the relatively late year of 1905. As a result, they were able to maintain the traditions that created and fostered a profound megalithic civilization. A central focus of the presentation below is on the aesthetic traditions of the Mamasa, Kalumpang, Tae, Toala and Sa'dan speakers-- collectively known as the Toraja, alongside a small selection of exemplary works fashioned by the peoples of Minahasa, Kulawi, and the Lake Poso area.
Toraja culture centers around aristocratic prerogatives, where wealth and prestige are measured in numbers of buffalo, in titles, and in the great aristocratic houses known as tongkonan. These houses are regarded as living entities that reflect a microcosm of the Torajan worldview of kinship, life, death, power, and status. Toraja men excelled in carving and building. Their remarkable structures are adorned with carved panels, ornamented doors, the horns of sacred water buffalo, and striking buffalo imagery.
In Mamasa, on rare occasions, houses were also decorated on the front and rear facades at cardinal points, and just below the house's central transverse beam with bold figures of seminal ancestors.
From the curving roof that mirrors the sky to the sturdy legs of a house’s raised pylons, every part of a grand dwelling is named, cared for, and partitioned in accordance with life’s dualities and the dictates of 'aluk to dolo,' 'the way of the ancestors.'
Weavers from Kalumpang and Rongkong were justly renowned for their bold and potent Pori Lonjong, Sekomandi, and Porisitutu ikat textiles. Men of prerequisite skill and insight often drew the finest painted cloth and wax-resist banners, known respectively as mawa and sarita.
Whereas the storied Torajan mortuary practices and burial shrouds belong to the realm of the West, sarita banners are used to celebrate the 'life-enhancing ceremonies of the East' that bless the erection of great houses while warding off illness and other malevolent forces. Mawa, or ma'a, as they are sometimes called, serve as visual prayers with a talismanic function to augur bountiful agricultural cycles and the increased fecundity of the buffalo herds.
Splendid works of art from the island of Sulawesi reside in a diversity of first-rate museum collections including Museum Nasional Indonesia, The Dallas Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Honolulu Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Fowler Museum at UCLA, The British Museum, and Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.
Scholarly approaches to the material culture and art history of Sulawesi can be found in the writings of Roxana Waterston, Hetty Nooy Palm, Robyn Maxwell, Robert Holmgren, Anita Spertus, Jowa Imre Kis-Jovak, and Eric Crystal.