Songs from the Thrice-Blooded Land presents extensive field documentation of Toraja ritual music. It concerns itself with the traditional, ritual, artistic and social life of the Toraja people of the mountains of southern Sulawesi, in Central Indonesia. Together with animal sacrifices, songs were part of a whole ritual cycle of gesture, speech, dance, and music that allowed the deceased to pass from the « side of the setting sun » (the realm of death) to the « side of the rising sun » (the realm of life).

Book 1: the ethnographic narrative concerns 10 years of fieldwork in the Toraja mountains, from 1991 to 2001. Dana Rappoport shows how the Toraja represent life and death aesthetically, how fear of illness and misfortune are cured socially by singing. She reveals the great beauty of Toraja musical and poetic art.

Book 2: Florilegium Toraja gathers some of the most striking lyrical and narrative toraja sung poems. The songs reveal the movement of life, conceptions of death and emotion, the religious values, conceptions of sadness, sickness, and healing, the relation of humans to nature, conceptions of living space and architecture, and a Toraja vision of the world.

The DVD-Rom
1) The multimedia argument is an elaborate analytical and explanatory apparatus that opens a new dimension in ethnomusicological publications. the methodical reasoning is grounded in a vast audiovisual documentation, both ethnographical and musicological.
2) the multimedia musical anthology includes 40 hours of audio, 2000 photographs and 2 hours of video. the poems are available in four languages: Toraja, English, Indonesian, and French. the translators worked together many years to achieve the translations. translators: Stanislaus Sandarupa (Universitas Hasanuddin), Elizabeth Coville (Hamline University), Dana Rappoport (CNRS).