download - OATG. Oxford Asian Textile Group

9
THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF TEXTILE STUDIES IN EASTERN INDONESIA
- A Personal View
My first book, which records textile weaving in an eastern Indonesian community,
starts with the following sentences:
At the very beginning of this study in textiles stood a prohibition on weaving. In 1969 I accompanied
my husband, who is a social anthropologist, on his fieldwork to eastern Indonesia. We had chosen to
stay in Kedang, in the eastern part of Lembata, an island and an area which we had decided on almost
entirely for its obscurity and for the reason that it had been largely ignored by foreign visitors. Lembata
also interested me because it was known to have a developed ikat tradition. I was looking forward to two
years in an isolated mountain community, [where] I was hoping to deepen my understanding and
appreciation of the local version of an impressive textile art. I was bitterly disappointed, [...as there]
exists a strict prohibition on weaving in the so-called old village, leu tuan, which is the focal point of
each community. No cotton is grown in these traditional sites, either.
And yet the people of Kedang did not go naked, nor could they recall having done so in the
past. Furthermore, women’s sarongs of a prescribed colour (dark-blue indigo-dyed) and with
ikat bands in the border were, and are, part of the required gift exchanges that occur with
every marriage. They are offered by the bride’s clan to the lineage of the groom, in exchange
for gongs or elephant tusks, the former made in Java, the latter imported some centuries ago
from India, Sri Lanka, or even East Africa. The textiles required locally, both for everyday
wear and for ritual or ceremonial purposes, were traded either from the neighbouring Hé Apé
region or from Kalikur, a trading village in Kedang, but established by Muslim settlers from
elsewhere. He Ape is not more than 60 km to the west but inhabited by people who speak a
different language. He Ape women are prolific weavers and produce outstandingly
accomplished ikat textiles, among them finely worked cloths used for marriage gifts. For their
own use these cloths have numerous ikat bands against a solid dark red ground; when
producing marriage cloths for the Kedang market they have to change the colour to dark blue,
as a red cloth is not acceptable in Kedang.
My first encounter with Indonesian textiles therefore confronted me with a set of
questions that I had not anticipated. Eventually I found answers for some, but others
continue to puzzle me. First of all, there was the prohibition on weaving. I discovered that
absence of weaving was not uncommon in the region, although a downright restriction was not
always associated with it. Eastern Indonesia’s population is mainly Austronesian in language
and culture, but there are some parts where non-Austronesian languages are spoken, with
close affinity to western New Guinea (the Indonesian province of Papua). Textiles may be
used as imported prestige objects, but in Papuan cultures they are not produced locally. An
additional factor is that the former use of bark cloth is still recalled in parts of eastern
Indonesia, as on Alor and Pantar, just east of Lembata, and on certain ritual occasions it may
still be required. I now think that the weaving prohibition that I found in Kedang has to be
seen as part of a patchwork distribution of weaving and non-weaving cultures in the wider
region. The rejection of weaving in the most traditional part of the community, the “old
village”, comes out of the desire to keep it similar to the environment the ancestors knew, as