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

Chapter 11: Conclusion

“ . . . a kind of natural history of signs and symbols. An ethnography of the vehicles of meaning” —Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System” n 1996, almost two years after I left Sumba, I coiled an ikat headcloth around a Styrofoam form to be included in a glass case in an ethnographic exhibit I was curating at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. The case, labeled “Eclectic Wear,” displayed a costume once worn by Umbu Pari from Parai Mutu. Reconstructing what he had constructed of himself, I was continuing a chain of inscriptions involving images and fabrics from East Sumba. Next to the Chapter 11 Conclusion I Figure 40. Posing at the entrance to a home. ensemble—consisting of a hinggi, a headcloth, and a T-shirt with a skull tree motif on it—was an enlarged photograph of the nobleman, staring roguishly as he sat holding a cigarette, wearing an outfit similar to that in the display case. Others I had written accounts of were represented in photographs and cloth throughout the gallery, in ways that seemed to me as characteristic of them. Draped in fabrics from several villages, Ana Humba posed facing the camera proudly. Biba crouched intently over a warp she was unbinding in a photograph taken in her shop, with packets of coffee, sugar, and other sundries visible on the shelves behind her. Luka, while absent from another photograph, was evident in a complex cloth suspended from a tree, peopled with a narrative tale in its length. Umbu Taniku stood selfassuredly next to a collection of fabrics on a clothesline, his head held high. Mia, absorbed in her work on a cloth, sat in faded clothes at her loom on the ground of the courtyard of the family she served. Her shuttle was weaving the fabric of an elegant piece designed by Madai, who always stubbornly had refused to be photographed—maintaining a control over her own image as she did of her cloth. In another photo a simplified, “primitive” human form (which looked as if it might have been woven by the evangelical Martha) had been fashioned into a handbag displayed in a boutique in Bali. And an intricate pahikung and ikat cloth with finely rendered motifs by Rambu Nina—the most complex in the exhibit—hung in a case at the gallery entrance. Ethnography: An Open-ended Endeavor The museum exhibit provided interventive glimpses of moments in the lives of certain people. Yet these moments were never anyone’s to hold. At this writing, in 1998, stories of those in the photographs have continued well beyond the ones in this book and perhaps even defy some of them. I have traced conditions, exploits, and encounters involving specific people to grasp something of the unwieldy human stuff that fabrics enfold. This might include an inebriated textile vendor’s unconscious soiling of an Indonesian official’s local status or a village woman’s venting her amorous desires along trade routes of cloth. While participating in a global economic system, people continue to live in immediate terms, responding to exigencies of day-to-day worlds. Such worlds contain many sites—geographical, social, and imaginary— stirring a constant “shuttling” between them. While this shuttling might suggest a postmodern picture of fragmentation, it also compels a study that follows such movement, a condition not best understood as “post” to any former realities, but as myriad ways that people are grappling subjectively in a current world. Throughout this book I have intentionally SHUTTLING BETWEEN WORLDS 194 avoided conclusively casting people’s lives within analytical rubrics such as “modernity,” “postmodernity,” or “postcolonialism,” instead endeavoring to allow any such conditions (if indeed they are relevant to the people and places I describe) to emerge through the chapters. I also have tried to depict, tangibly, certain social processes that create and shape what might either work into or challenge tradition. In East Sumba, these processes include a consciousness of the concept of “tradition” as a value in the international market for arts. Thus the term bears manifold meanings in a recent history of eastern Sumba that involves an ongoing conversation with outside influences. There has been no typical village, villager, or outsider in my account, although patterns appear concerning them all. The cosmopolitanism affecting many from Sumba also accents specifically local beliefs and practices, throwing into relief precedents (see Fox 1997) of village environments , family histories...