Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toraja

by Douglas W. Hollan, Jane Wellenkamp

Contentment and Suffering, a psychocultural ethnography of the Toraja wet-rice farmers of Indonesia, provides a rich portrait of Torajan life and contributes to debates on the relationship between culture and individual psychology.

Hollan and Wellenkamp describe the central aspects of Torajan personal experience -emotion, identity, and sense of self- and a variety of fascinating cultural practices, including possession trance, kickfights, elaborate mortuary customs, dream interpretation, and buffalo sacrifice.

Presenting exceptionally detailed ethnographic data through a person-centered perspective and extensive use of open-ended interviews, Contentment and Suffering engagingly expresses how the Toraja understand their lives.

276 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1993

Reviews

[didi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t turn your face [to a man] if he’s looking at you “because many people here will say words [utter a magic spell to seduce the woman]!” . . . Once [the spell] is said, the woman’s heart will flutter, flutter, flutter, and she’ll want to look at the man. (After the man says the spell?) Yes. So that by afternoon, the woman desires to meet with the man. She wants to be with him.

[Esmie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating.