Trans-cultural Authorship, Copyright and Film. The Case of Funeral Rituals among the Toraja in Sulawesi, Indonesia

Project Director: Prof. Dr. Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin (Cultural and Social Anthropology)
Co-Project Director: Dr. Beate Engelbrecht
Research Associate: Dr.des Karin Klenke

The reserach project focuses on the efforts of the Toraja in Sulawesi, Indonesia, to achieve UNESCO world heritage status for their cultural heritage. Known for its traditionally, richly decorated houses, one Toraja village had made an initial attempt to achieve such a certification. The regional UNESCO commission considered this application not sufficiently representative for the Toraja people and suggested instead that ten Toraja villages ought to draft an application for nomination as a cultural landscape as this would likely have bigger chances of success. A UNESCO cultural landscape entails a culturally shaped region including the entire way of life practiced. The form of subsistence (wet rice agriculture), burial practices in the cliffs, architecture and carving as well as rituals all form part of this specific cultural landscape. The research project documents the negotiations arising from this new effort on the local, regional and national level. We focus on different conceptions of property, authorship, inheritance and belonging as well as competing claims associated with such concepts.

The project emphasizes, furthermore, the meaning of film as a medium of representation as well as a method of generating data. We will film processes of discussion and negotation among actors in the villages as well as within national committees, so as to permit a detailed analysis. Film will also be used to investigate which aspects of their culture the Toraja choose themselves to suggest for UNESCO certification. Also of interest is the question how the Toraja seek to represent their culture through film (“indigenous filmmaking” practices). In addition, an ethnographic film will be made, in collaboration with Toraja actors, on aspects of their cultural landscape application for UNESCO (carried out by Dr. Beate Engelbrecht).