Bizarre Cultural Practices: Living With The Dead
The Toraja people of Indonesia practice a truly singular ritual of exhuming the corpses of their fellow villagers. But it doesn’t end there: The corpse is draped in special garments and paraded around the village. Even the bodies of children and bodies that are decades old are exhumed.
The ritual is mainly carried out in order to clean the corpses, their garments, and coffins, and to ceremonially return the corpses to their home village. That is, if someone died outside the village, the corpse will be taken to the spot of death, then walked back to the village, as an act of returning home.
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