Tongkonan

Tongkonan is the traditional ancestral house, or rumah adat of the Torajan people, in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Tongkonan have a distinguishing boat-shaped and oversized saddleback roof. Like most of Indonesia’s Austronesian-based traditional architecture tongkonan are built on piles. The construction of tongkonan is laborious work and it is usually built with the help of all family members. In the original Toraja society, only nobles had the right to build tongkonan. Commoners live in smaller and less decorated homes called banua.

Sulawesi (formerly known as The Celebes) is a large island, extraordinarily contorted in shape, lying between Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) and the Maluku Island group (also known as The Molluccas). It is an island abundant in natural resources with a rich and varied array of cultures including some of the most distinctive and anthropologically significant in Indonesia. The dominant groups of the island are the seafaring and once piratical Muslim Bugis and Makassarese in the island’s south-west, and the strongly Christian Minahasa of the northern peninsula. The Toraja, of South Sulawesi are, however, arguably one of the most distinctive of ethnic groups in all Indonesia.

The name Toraja is of Bugis origin and is given to the people of rugged northern part of the south peninsula. The Toraja are a proto-Malay people whose origins lie in mainland South East Asia, possibly Cambodia. Like many Indonesian ethnic groups, the Toraja were head-hunters and participants in inter-village raids; villages were thus located strategically on hill tops and were heavily fortified. The Dutch colonialists pacified the Toraja and led them to build their villages in valleys and changed their agriculture from a slash and burn variety to wet-rice cultivation, and pig and buffalo raising.

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