Waruga

The Minahasa · Airmadidi and Sawangan, North Minahasa

A waruga is a Minahasa stone tomb: a box with a chamber in it and a roof-shaped lid. The dead were placed inside seated, facing north, and the next of the family were added to the same box over generations. Three things make it worth building here. It is not for the living — the only one in the collection. Its chamber is measured against a body seated and folded, as a Balinese bale is measured against its owner’s standing body. And it is cut from a single stone with no second material and no joint, which makes it the exact opposite of the woloan house the same people build to be taken apart and carried away. The sun in this model is computed for Airmadidi, 1.4° N and 124.98° E.

The most important thing about a real waruga is not here: the carving. The face of the stone is cut with what the person did in life — fisherman, midwife, soldier, teacher — and it is that record which makes these stones still readable today. It is not modelled, for the reason the other packs give about carving, and the absence weighs far more here than anywhere else in the collection. Beyond it: waruga vary widely and what is built here is the common form; the chamber is assembled as four walls and a floor where a real one is cut as a hollow in a single block; the ranks of waruga at Sawangan and Airmadidi are a removal of the last century rather than a rule of the tradition; and not one figure here comes from a measurement, though this is the one building in the project of which hundreds of examples still stand and could be measured tomorrow.