ABSTRACT
His wife dead, Ambe’na Doko said, ‘My feelings [are] like a crazy person. My head [isn’t] thinking in a fixed way. What it [is] that I [am] thinking in the house, I don’t know. I never [think] about the work in the fields…. My heart [is] very full’ (Wellenkamp, 1991, p. 127). Generalizing from Wellenkamp’s description of ways of dealing with death among the 350,000 Toraja of Sulawesi in Indonesia, we would expect that as his wife was dying Ambe’na Doko would have heard her conversing with the souls of the dead and would have responded to her request for a luxury food such as palm wine. When she ceased breathing, she might have been cradled in his arms. Messengers would be sent to tell other relatives of the death. Although the Toraja try to maintain emotional equanimity and believe that intense sorrow may endanger one, it is permissible and even desirable to express intense grief through crying, calling out to the dead, and sobbing for a limited time period at the funeral, while near the body or an effigy of the body, or when first returning home after the death.
