Photos from Indonesia’s annual harvest ritual where corpses are exhumed and groomed before being paraded

A village in Indonesia called Torajan in the highlands of South Sulawesi recently held their annual harvest ritual by exhuming corpses of their loved ones before parading them around the village.

The people in the village are said to have a very close relationship with the dead, and sometimes they keep mummified bodies in their homes for weeks or even years before burying them.

Before the ceremony, the tribesmen exhumed the corpses and pampered them with new haircuts, new clothes, and even cigarettes before reuniting them with their living relations.

According to National Geographic, the festival is a time of celebration for the Torajan people, but nobody knows precisely when or how the culture around death started, as the tribe only developed a written language sometime in the early 1900s.

Recent carbon dating on wooden coffin fragments shows the practice dates back until at least 800AD, and likely even further than that.

More photos below..