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The Toraja Of Sulawesi, Indonesia Essay

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The Toraja of Sulawesi, Indonesia attract thousands of tourists annually with their elaborate funeral ceremonies, beautiful traditional tongkonan houses, and burial cliffs. The tourists want to experience the true nature of the traditional Torajan culture, but what if the true nature of the Torajan culture has already passed us by? This paper will explore the idea of how the tourism business is promoting the Toraja to present a façade of traditional Toraja life to the tourists who come to visit them. The Toraja themselves also add to the façade they present to the tourists by using anthropologists they befriend that are studying them to help recreate the Torajan image in a way that better suits the Toraja politically. So how is tourism and the Toraja’s self-consciousness about their political image affecting their culture? The Toraja are losing their culture because they have to keep a façade so they maintain the income from the tourist industry and they are also worried about the repercussions any kind of wrong move could have for their political image.
A Brief History The Toraja live in Sulawesi, Indonesia and have a vibrant, thriving culture that has endured many changes over hundreds of years. According to Waterson (2009), the Toraja, like many other cultures, were given their name by the outside influence upon them. When the Dutch discovered the Toraja, a Dutchman named Kruyt decided on the term Toraja, meaning “people of the uplands” (Waterson, 2009. Pg, 10). The

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