Segeri village’s bissu priests led a three-day rice-planting ceremony in November, climaxing with the ma’giri ritual in which dancers drove daggers into their necks without bleeding.
The self-stabbing display is meant to win the gods’ blessings before planting season and to demonstrate the spiritual power long associated with the bissu.
Sulawesi’s bissu are revered as religious figures who embody both male and female traits, part of the Bugis understanding of five genders and a bridge between earthly and celestial realms.
For more than 1,000 years, they have been called on for weddings, births and deaths, making the annual Segeri procession both an agricultural rite and a public affirmation of gender fluidity.