Between the Folds: Stories of Cloth, Lives, and Travels from Sumba

Chapter 1: Introduction

his book is a wide-ranging ethnographic journey, contoured by people who create and trade a kind of cloth through which they interweave and convolute the traditional and the modern, blurring such definitions. I will trace how engagements with cloth motivate, facilitate, and implicate people in far-reaching connections with one another and how these links affect lives and the fabrics that surround them. In Cloth and Human Experience, Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner (1989) emphasize that the human actions that make cloth politically and socially salient are as important as the material properties and symbolic potentialities contained in fabrics. As a social, economic, and aesthetic medium— an art1—cloth is a channel for passions that underlie people’s endeavors. Cloth in Sumba, moreover, excites elusive realms of the imagination. In current times, designs in fabrics reveal profound shifts in the perspectives of those who create them. Vital Designs of East Sumba In eastern Sumba, movements of cloth—through designs and exchanges—colorfully map processes of cosmopolitanism and of conservatism , shaping historical and recently shifting divisions in the worlds of men and women. The stories surrounding this cloth are varied and include those of animists, Christians, and Moslems; Sumbanese, Indonesian Chinese, and Westerners; inventive geniuses, master artisans, and exploited weavers; rogues, entrepreneurs, nobles, and slaves. This is not an account of an all-encompassing globalization or a culturally neutralizing modernity, nor is it an exhaustive ethnographic study of a discrete locale. Rather, it explores moments of possibility in the lives of some people as they respond to choices in their environments —in the last decade of the twentieth century, in a peculiar textile economy. I present something of the nature of personal ambitions and entanglements (cf. Thomas 1991) with wider worlds in a region of Indonesia that has been studied generally in terms of internal social organization. I do not set out to diminish these tremendously important analyses, which largely have made my own work possible. But I will shift the emphases, from kinship, local exchange relations, and (largely malecentered ) public ritual acts to include alternate routes of identity in eastern Sumbanese life. Accenting recent phenomena in the provenance of textiles, my study incorporates those who comply with and those who elude or challenge Chapter 1 Introduction T traditional modes of practice and exchange. While ethnographic accounts of eastern Indonesia generally have considered the basis of social organization to be in the out-marriage of women between clans—a “flow of life” (Clamagirand 1980; Fox 1980a) that continues to form cores of alliance in this region—there are notable pauses and swerves in this flow in eastern Sumba. New forms of commerce, education, and social interaction are facilitating broadened spheres of exchange and circulation involving men and women. People now envision themselves in the world in ways not possible a decade ago.2 Sometimes, as we will see, their visions produce visible, lyrical moments, as they re-create imagery to reorder their places in the world. Art culminates in form, which reveals something of the conditions of its own discovery. That tradition is not static is no longer a revelation in anthropology. However, little has been written of the recursive effects of people knowingly exploiting others’ illusions of their “timeless pasts.”3 In international contexts, eastern Sumbanese concoct traditionality and re-create archaisms to fit the cultural stereotypes of outsiders. A spirited tension between models of traditional forms and the schemes of those who produce and trade them is a recurrent theme in this book.4 Cloth in Times and Places In the eastern coastal portion of Sumba, vibrantly pictorial cloth (hemba maramba) long has been a medium for identification, marking social rank through motifs and colors. Textiles historically have identified clan groups in the alliances indexed by their circles of exchange. In the caste-based communities of the region, cloth is one element in a centuries-old system of conspicuous consumption that visibly communicates authority and place—through high-peaked ancestral homes, funerary megaliths, and elaborate fabrics. The quantity and quality of local textiles enfolding the dead upon burial or accompanying a bride as she settles in her husband’s village assert social status in a persistent and strikingly visible aesthetics5 of power and identity. Susan Rodgers notes that history often has a physical, tactile form in Southeast Asia (1995:27), and this is eminently so in eastern Sumba, as history is enfolded in cloth. Through time, the region’s textiles have been transformed consistently in their designs...