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

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