Not a Hazardous Sport

Anthropologist Nigel Barley, author of "The Innocent Anthropologist" and "A Plague of Caterpillars", recounts the perils and pitfalls of his journey to the remote district of Tarajaland in Indonesia, recording the Toraja people on the island of Sulawesi.

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Tiring of the horrors of West Africa, an area which he has spent much of his professional life studying, anthropologist Nigel Barley taught himself Indonesian and spent a number of months at the end of 1985 on the island of Sulawesi. Here he hoped to find unsullied cultures to study, unspoilt natives to investigate. Barley found plenty to wonder at and plenty to admire among the Toraja, a vastly interesting people whose culture include headhunting, transvestite priests, and massacre of buffalo.