CONTEXTEXHIBITION

SACREDCLOTHS

An exhibition in Fukuoka City brings us face to face with a mysterious tradition of death rituals and magically imbued imagery.Much of the credit for this indepth exploration of Toraja cloth, says Thomas Murray,is due to Japanese researcher/collector Keiko-San, whose passion and commitment have yielded remarkable results.

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED KEIKO KUSAKABE about ten years ago in Borneo at an ikat conference in Kuching. A friend told me of a Japanese lady who was a very serious student of Toraja textiles, and would I like to meet her? I was delighted at the prospect. During our initial conversation, I was struck by her deep and sincere commitment to documenting the cloth tradition of central Sulawesi. She was just starting out and understandably anxious about beginning her research at such a late date. Understandably she felt a bit intimidated by the work of the giants of the field who had come before her, among them the Swiss missionary Kryut in the early 20th century, and later the Dutch anthropologist Hetty Nooy-Palm, Professor K. Yoshimoto. and the Holmgren/ Spertus team in the 1970s and 1980s. But Keiko-san persevered, taking early retirement from her job as a teacher and spending half of each year for the nextdecade in the mountains, interviewing weavers and collecting textiles. Nice work if you can get it! There is nowhere more beautiful in Indonesia than the peaks and valleys of highland Tana Toraja, the ‘Land of the People’, where brilliant green rice paddies dot the landscape and the justly famous cliff burials are dug out of the living rock. Still remote, even with the advent of paved roads and the incursion of limited tourism, there remain many isolated Toraja villages with clusters of tonkangan, the traditional adathouse. These large boat-shaped buildings with sloping roofs have their sides decorated with curvilinear patterns and, at the front, a giant pole ascending to the roof peak covered with buffalo horns. These sacred animals are slaughtered only at funerals, with death rituals being the high point of a Torajan life, as observed by aluk to dolo, the way of the ancestors. Accessible only on horseback or by foot, it is to these far reaches that Keiko-san pressed on. She overcame many obstacles, from learning the language to raiding her pension to make it possible financially, not to mention the resistance of a conservative community back home, including a doubting

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husband who thought she had gone quite mad. Keiko Kusakabe has now answered these sceptics with an exhibition and catalogue, ‘Textiles from Sulawesi in Indonesia, Genealogy of Sacred Cloths’ held at the Fukuoka Art Museum from 1 November27 December 2006. Astonishing in sophistication of selection and authoritative in scholarship, it establishes her as a true expert in this rarefied field. It also cements the reputation of Etsuko Iwanaga, co-curator of the exhibition andprimary author of the catalogue, as one of the leading Southeast Asian textile scholar-advocates active today. As curator of textiles at Fukuoka, Etsuko-san has three previous exhibitions, with catalogues – on Sumatran, Outer Island Indonesian and Cambodian textiles – under her belt, and more ideas in development. Layout for exhibition and book primarily followed textile patterning techniques, although Keiko-san and Etsuko-san each

brought a somewhat different perception of what was important thematically. Captions were written by one or the other, with their negotiation as cocurators adding strength to the final presentation. Most researchers and Western market collectors have pursued the bold and powerfully graphic Toraja funerary ikats, the sekomandiand the porisitutu, both of which were included in the show. But as these were already largely fished out of the market more than twenty years ago, for Keiko-san this was less a problem than an opportunity. By working around this limitation, she avoided being distracted by their pursuit. She could focus on other types and styles of resist-dyed cloth, including ikats in the form of ancient ceremonial sarongs; tie-dyed (plangi)banners known as pori roto;indigenous batiked and painted ritual cloths, saritaand maa’, including both a seamless maa’3and a very rare mud-dyed maa’/ saritatransitional piece. She also uncovered a previously unidentified possible source of resist material, damar, the sap of a tree that gives a sharper edge than the soft fuzzy edge of a rice paste or beeswax resist that can crack, explaining some of the great variation in fineness of technique observed in sarita. Also included was a bark cloth siga(head wrap) patterned with painted talismanic designs indicating a successful head-hunter’s status. The grouping of the siga, maa’s and saritasmay not be coincidental; all are created by painting with sticks, whether with pigments or in a resist material, and have a likely common origin in the desire to transfer magically imbued iconography to a transportable medium. Indian trade cloths, perceived as coming from the gods and also known as maa’ 5, were on view to offer a more comprehensive view of the inspiration for indigenous weaving. Keiko-san’s personal interest runs more to woven structures than to the dyeing side of textile manufacture; indeed one of her research conclusions is that ikat was probably introduced after the mastery of weaving, as a quicker, less labour intensive way to achieve a beautiful result and expedite cloth production. To this end her collection emphasises seldom seen costume and ritual cloths, often quite early,with

138HALI ISSUE 151
CONTEXTEXHIBITION

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1Rongkong Toraja cere

monial cloth, tali tau

batu, Sulawesi. 0.30 x

3.35m (1'0" x 11'0")

2Sa’dan Toraja ceremo

nial loinclothpio sunghki’

(detail),Sulawesi, 0.47 x

5.55m (1'61⁄2" x 18'21⁄2")

3Sa’dan or Mamasa

Toraja ceremonial cloth,

maa’,Sulawesi, 0.41

x 1.30m (1'4" x 4'3")

4Mamasan Toraja dan

cer’sblouse, bayu pa’r

anding,Sulawesi. 0.86

x 0.50m (2'10" x 1'71⁄2")

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primary patterning achieved in the weaving itself. Fine examples of patchwork, appliqué and embroidered costume included two lyrical women’s’ blouses from different regions showing just how strong an art form this really can be 6, 7. A dancer’s blouse from Mamasa 4achieves its beauty in a magnificent parallel to the most compelling of all Bolivian weavings, the Caroma ‘Primary-Color Tunic’ in an American private collection (Adelson & Tracht, Aymara Weavings, 1983, p.59). Beadwork is often a speciality craft of local communities in Torajaland, and Keiko-san’s ceremonial hanging/ woman’s accessory, kandaure,is perhaps the oldest unrestored example I have ever encountered. A fine supplementary-weft chief’s loincloth 2 displays human and buffalo imagery in the particularly charming style specific to Toraja, most often seen on maa’. Another area of exceptional weaving explored in depth are pote, women’s funerary hoods that employ a complex system of plainweaveopenwork with inserted spiral wefts, weft-twining, tablet-weaving, and braiding. Indeed, as her research advanced, Keiko-san became fascinated by the little-known and all too often overlooked tradition of tablet-weaving. She began with the better documented weavings of the coastal Buginese, who are known for sword belts with Islamic inscriptions that sometimes make their way into the mountains to be used as talismans, even by non-Muslim Toraja people. Local production is often equally brilliant, the technique often being used to generate bi- or tri-chromatic strips, and bands used to decorate edges of ritual shirts also serve as sword belts or as straps for ceremonial bags. Traditionally made of wood or buffalo horn, but now plastic, multiple ‘cards’ have four holes through which the warps pass, while wefts are passed through sheds created by turning the cards to generate shifting patterns, often reciprocal but in some cases visible on one side only. Both exhibition and catalogue offer a penetrating examination of this virtuoso weaving technique, including many fine examples. Beyond that, Keiko-san has discovered a novel variation of double-face weave called the ‘Mamasan’ method, after the region where she found it still in use. It was especially gratifying to her when this was confirmed as a significant find by the dean of scholarship in this field, Peter Collingwood of England, whom she credits as her sensei, or master. Something I had not seen before was a stylistically related but structurally

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