Afterword

Miguel Angel Gardatti, Director of the Sustainable Textile Centre in Buenos Aires, whom I have met through the Research Collective for Decoloniality and Fashion (RCDF), paid me the huge honour of inviting me to write the 'Afterword' for his forthcoming book,  Florecencia y Defashion: Desmantelande la violencía de la moda. In part, this was an acknowledgement of my having coined the term 'defashion', a word that we desperately need to indicate the radical and total change in the way fashion is perpetrated in the world. My response to Dr. Gardatti's invitation is now translated into Spanish and accompanies the other chapters on the publisher's desk, due to arrive on the market in April 2026. Stay tuned for more information about the events that will surround the launch of this significant book, and how you will be able to purchase it.

In the meantime, I am sharing my Afterword for English language readership. 

Afterword

 

By the end of COP30, it was still impossible for all the parties to agree to a reduction of oil and gas. The industry and its associated governments were recalcitrant. The willing were profoundly frustrated and signed the final text with reluctance. The urgent burden of building a world without fossil hydrocarbons felt heavier and more daunting than ever. And then something remarkable happened. Leading political figures from Colombia and The Netherlands, with the full support of the President of COP30, began to prepare the way for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels to be held in Colombia in April 2026.[1] If the roadmap to a fossil-free world could not be drawn on the formal stage, by dint of the will of the members it would be drawn nevertheless.  

 

Progressive and ambitious fashion community, take note! COP30 presents us with a model! It has become clear that the growth of industrial fashion, ever since its inception, has been a function of fossil fuels: as fuel, as synthetic fibres, and as bedmate and glamourous promoter, directly and implicitly, of high fossil carbon lifestyles. We will never cease to love and long for beautiful ways to adorn the body -- nor do we have to -- but the industry of fashion has exceeded its ‘best before’ date. Growth in the industry is sacrificing the planet. This is indefensible. It is clear that the industry of fashion must go. It is time for the radical concepts of Defashion and Florecencia to be made normal.[2]

 

The Roadmap 

 

Normalization is a process. Vision and goals are laid out in this volume, but there is no roadmap, only steps. The road will be made collectively and iteratively, by walking.[3] The good news is, we are already stepping out. 

 

This we know: a milestone will be reached when the industry of fashion is no longer recognized as having a leading role to play. Like the fossil fuel industry, it is unable to lead; it is entrenched in business as usual to expand profits. It is unrealistic to expect the industry to hang out a new north star. Collectively, we must build an alternative fashion world outside it, from the ground up. Decolonized, the road will be a coalescence of plural and multilateral paths. Those paths will bring us from centralized, industrial fashion dominance to the diversity of the pluriverse. Except intuitively and abstractly, most of us are unfamiliar with a fashion pluriverse. Aside from members of some relatively independent tribal communities, everyone alive today knows only the dominance of the industry of fashion. And yet we must assume the challenge of building the pluriverse of alternatives.[4]  

 

Industrial fashion has encouraged consumption addiction through many forms of social compulsion. This raises questions: What is fashion when it is not a pathology? When advertising is not a condoned pusher? When styles are not dictated from above? When cultivating shame is no longer part of the game? When the sell is not sexualized? When enslaved millions, especially women and especially in the Global South, are free to make clothes in their own traditions? When clothes are treasured and not squandered? The end of the extractive and predatory fashion industry may be as difficult to envision as the end of capitalism, but it also offers new latitudes for our creative powers. We can step into that world. Homo sapiens created the original fashion pluriverse; collectively, we can do so again. 

 

Initiatives ‘from below’ are already leading and building momentum: mending, second-hand, farm to fashion[5], earth-friendly fibres[6], reshoring and localizing clothing production[7], reduction[8], and recycling[9]. Central – though too often ignored – is the obligation to treasure what still remains of the fashion pluriverse that existed before the erosive industry emerged.[10] We are already in transition. But mending and sharing clothing are no silver bullets to reduce fashion consumption. Like research into earth-friendly materials, they are steps along the way. Early road construction. Lagos Fashion Week, recipient of the 2025 Earthshot prize for building a waste-free world[11], is another step. The prize sent the message that overproduction and overconsumption are complex problems that need to be tackled from multiple angles, in this case circularity, craft-driven innovation, and community empowerment. Indirectly, the message is that strategies from the Global South are innovative and indispensable. Notably, however, Lagos Fashion Week still operates within the idiom of the conventional fashion system.

 

How can the ante be upped? What should be the next steps, proportional to the current urgency, to call a halt to fashion’s sacrifice zones, including waste, toxins, unfair labour practices, erosion of alternative and indigenous systems of dress, insidious fashion advertising, and fashion’s support for fossil-heavy lifestyles?

 

There is a need to call the parties together in an International Conference to Design the Pluriverse of Fashion, to transition away from the Industry of Fashion. The behemoth must be superseded consciously and systematically. This volume, sharing visions for a fashion pluriverse, is a flagstone in the groundwork for a multilateral conference. A roadmap can be drawn to assemble the willing, to note and track, COP-style, their contributions to reduce dependence on the industry, as well as their heightened ambitions as time progresses.  This is an indispensable step to be embarked on immediately. However, the frustrations and failures of COPs also warn of its limitations.

 

Fashion as Ecosystems

 

The more profound transition is ontological shifting. For this, there is no roadmap. Without it, fashion can be reined in, but not replaced. Shifting from where we are now to where we need to be, will be iterative because it is transformative. Walking that road into existence will change the players as much as the landscape. Alarmingly, current trajectories of climate, soils, water, and species diversity, in short, physical landscapes, will be steadily degrading en route, and this will require unprecedented adaptation in the process of building fashion systems in synch with planetary boundaries. The possibilities available to us dwindle as we dawdle.

 

Dress in the pluriverse will be plural because it is cued to local circumstances, expressions of local genius rooted in unique historical and cultural relationships. Dress is not just a series of objects, but material expressions of relationships with the many environments in which those items are embedded. Recently Agus Ismoyo, batik maker in Yogyakarta, Indonesia invited an American audience to “look beyond batik as a finished product and instead experience it as a living process — one shaped by ecological rhythms, philosophical inquiry and spiritual intention.”[12] An ecological perspective would generate a different, more holistic definition of fashion. It is instructive to compare fashion to a flower. The conventional point of view is focused on the flower. An ecological perspective will see that the quality of the flower depends on the whole plant: leaves, stem and roots. The health of those parts requires rain and sunlight and an enabling climate. The quality of the soil is also at issue, with all of the minerals, fungi and micro-organisms that are requisite for plant growth. In addition, there are insects that visit the flower, without which the plant cannot reproduce, and the insects cannot survive[13]. To adapt the question posed by ecologist, Rex Weyler[14], where are the boundaries of the flower – ergo fashion? The latter intersects fully with history, technology, the physical environment, culture, economy, politics, and people from makers to wearers. To limit the focus to the flower is to miss the fullness of the phenomenon of fashion. Ismoyo’s holistic insights echo a recently-penned definition of fashion (Niessen 2023) that emphasizes its ecological connections in the broadest sense.[15] The current pathology of fashion is systemic and not to be cured through any single component or intervention, but rather a collective shift in ways of being on our planet. 

 

Ismoyo may be a harbinger of this kind of change. “I am part of nature,” he explains, “I grow within it. I am not separate from it.”[16] He is quick to note that his process of learning the spiritual depths of batik cannot be steered because control and domination are antithetical to living within planetary boundaries. His path is iterative and made by listening care-fully to his natural and cultural environments. 

 

Christiana Figueres, Chief Negotiator of the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015, now chair of the Earthshot Prize, has consistently assumed the burden of goading and guiding the globe’s dominant economic and political players towards a fossil-free world. Now, ten years after the agreement was endorsed by the parties, she expresses concern about the failures on the part of those same players to step up to ensure the future health of the planet. In her ever-optimistic struggle to find a way out of the impasse, she, too, has recently (2026) underscored the need to ‘shift our worldview’: to recognize belonging within the entire web of life, rather than dominance; to replace short or long-term thinking with continuity; and to move away from extraction and toward relationships and reciprocity. She expresses her debt to Indigenous wisdom, “grounded in care and balance, harvesting only with intention and always giving back in recognition of what has been received…this wisdom is not optional, it is fundamental.”[17]

 

The concept of defashion was conceived in the awareness that the indigenous dress systems – although currently being sacrificed by the growth and dominance of the industry of fashion -- need to be recognized as signposts on potential paths towards planet-friendly ways of dressing. They are proof of how the task of dressing in harmony with cultural and natural surroundings has been accomplished many times, in every culture, throughout history. Learning to read and understand the wisdom inscribed in these traditions is as urgent as the need to reclaim our clothing from the dominance of the fashion industry. 

 

If fashion represents ecologies of being, not just a succession of styles (as the industry is advantaged by having us believe), then conclusions must be drawn. Then shifting from fossil-based clothing is of no trifling significance. Dressing the body is a cultural universal; it is culturally ubiquitous, deeply rooted in the history and culture of every society throughout time. Ingredients of dress are prominent in histories of the earliest trade; textile idiom has informed thought and language; textile-related techniques have shaped human capacity through engineering, medicine, farming, shipping, the list is long. Currently, the monetary wealth and CO2 footprint of the industry is ballooning. Coming off fossil fashion would contribute significantly to lowering the temperature of the climate crisis. But more than that, the conceptual ecosystems of fashion, developed since it was industrialized, must not be underestimated. Fashion’s role in proliferating conceptions of modernity and linear time is an example. Taking back not just our physical items of clothing, but also the conceptualizations of fashion, is an enormous and daunting challenge. Sustainability will not come with new fibres, linking with craft production, reductions in production and consumption, nor mending and recycling. It will come from all of that, in addition to a process of learning to live gently on our planet, with respect and care. Changing the way we do fashion has the potential to alter the very fabric of our existence. How profoundly reclaiming our clothing from industrial reliance on fossil fuels can shape the trajectory of getting off oil and gas is difficult to say, but it has significant potential. The urgency to kick our fossil addiction weighs heavily. Let us endorse the onus to reclaim our clothing from fossil hydrocarbons and thereby assume a significant role on the path towards a healthy planet. 

 

Let us call together the parties to liberate our clothing from the industry of fashion and (re-)build the Pluriverse of Dress. Let us defashion and flourish. 

 

Selected Sources

 

Figueres, Christiana and Rivett-Carnac, Tom. – The Future We Choose: Surviving the climate Crisis. Manilla Press. 2020.

 

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970.

 

Interbeing  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbeing

Ismoyo, Agus, personal communication, 2 january, 2026.

 

Machado, Antonio. Campos de Castilla, 1912.

 

Niessen, Sandra. ‘Violence by Definition’. In Pierre-Antoine Vettorello (ed), The Yarn [Zine] Issue 1. Antwerp, Belgium. 2023.                  

 

Niessen, Sandra. ‘Fashion, its Sacrifice Zone, and Sustainability’. In Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture 24:6.  pp. 859-877.  2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2020.1800984

 

 

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[1]The roadmap proposal https://fossilfueltreaty.org/first-international-conferencewas the initiative of the Minister of Environment of Colombia, Irene Vélez Torres, and the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Climate Policy of the Netherlands, Sophie Hermans. They worked with the support of the COP30 president, André Aranha Corrêa do Lago https://cop30.br/en/brazilian-presidency

[2] The US Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont argues repeatedly that extreme wealth in the hands of the few is what is radical, not moves to reduce disparity in wealth, which are often what are deemed ‘radical’. The claim being made here is parallel: a clothing industry that sacrifices the planet is radical in the extreme, and begs for reform. In this light, the sanity of doing away with the industry must be normalized.

[3] ‘The road is made by walking’ has been inspired by Paolo Freire, (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed) who may have taken it from Antonio Machado’s Campos de Castilla (1912): “Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking one makes the road, and upon glancing behind one sees the path that never will be trod again. Wanderer, there is no road– Only wakes upon the sea..“ https://brianmclaren.net/we-make-the-road-by-walking-where-did-the-title-come-from/

[4] The conclusions to The Future we Choose (2020), an inspiring work by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, written after the Paris Agreement to set out the steps that must be taken to get off fossil fuels, concludes with a chapter entitled, ‘The New Story’. It starts with two premises:

“First, even at this late hour we still have a choice about our future, and therefore every action we take from this moment forward counts.

Second, we are capable about making the right choices about our own destiny. We are not doomed to a devastating future, and humanity is not flawed and incapable of responding to big problems if we act.” (p. 163)

[5] Many exciting initiatives are happening here, including increased adherence to bioregionalism. Liflad https://liflad.substack.com  and Fibershed https://fibershed.org are initiatives to watch. 

[6] Earth-friendly fibres – A tremendous amount of successful and productive research is being devoted to this theme, but this focus is often, narrowly and erroneously, perceived as being synonymous with ‘sustainability’.

[7] Technological developments will enable the ambition to make clothing local. Fantasy Fibre Mill is an example of an initiative to invent machinery suitable to the task at a local level. https://www.fantasyfibremill.com

[8] No great successes have been booked in this regard, aside from urging individuals to change their consumption habits (e.g. https://www.sustainablyurban.ca/blog/the-10-garment-challenge-year)

[9] To date, recycling initiatives have yielded disappointing results. In the end, little clothing is ultimately recycled, only 1% becoming new clothes due to issues with technology, finance, and fibres. There are expectations that technologies will improve and, with time, the other conditions as well. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20201208STO93327/fast-fashion-eu-laws-for-sustainable-textile-consumption

[10] Our Common Market highlights alternatives https://www.ourcommon.market

[11] https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/lagos-fashion-week/

[12] Agus Ismoyo, together with his wife, Nia Fliam, and son, Desmond, recently invited an audience in Washington, D.C. to “look beyond batik as a finished product and instead experience it as a living process — one shaped by ecological rhythms, philosophical inquiry and spiritual intention.” https://museum.gwu.edu/artist-talk-and-trunk-show-batik-character-cosmos-and-creation

[13] Credit is due the notion of ‘interbeing’ given profile by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Coincidentally, he used the figure of a flower in one of his explanations of interbeing: “When we look deeply into a flower, we have the impression that the flower is full of everything. There is sunshine inside, there’s cloud inside, there is earth, minerals – even our consciousness is in the flower. Time, space, everything… It looks like everything in the cosmos has come together to help the flower to manifest as a wonder. So the fact is, the flower is full of the cosmos.” (2021) be’https://plumvillage.app/to-be-means-to-inter-be/ July 12, 2021.

[14] Rex Weyler, one of the founders of Greenpeace, during an interview with Nate Hagens (Roundtable #2, Deep(er) Ecology: William Rees, Nora Bateson, Rex Weyler, 2024, 22.00 – 24.08) posed the question, ‘when does the nitrogen of an apple being eaten cease to be of the apple and started to be of the person eating the apple?’ He argued that individuals are integral expressions of entire ecosystems, and emphasized the importance of species diversity for the success of the entire ecosystem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

[15] “Fashion is ecologies of dress and bodily adornment through which we express our relationships with our environments.” (Niessen 2003)

[16] Agus Ismoyo, personal communication, 2 January 2026.

[17] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christianafigueres_we-need-to-shift-our-worldview-i-am-grateful-activity-7412550087803064320-z4HZ?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAJGuAkB-h499M31pzAQwxs8ulGxnqUeEoQ

 

 

Gather and Resist

 Today I face the challenge of describing, in Indonesian, an extinct Karo Batak ‘tritik’ technique. This technique was practised on white cloth, to which, in past centuries, the Karo had relatively easy access because of their proximity to the trade on Sumatra’s East Coast. They brought the cloth back to their villages further inland where the women dyed it. In the cloth they called ‘Batu Jala’, the women would insert a basting stitch and then pull on it to gather the cloth tightly. Along these basted, gathered lines, the cloth would resist the dye, and the finished cloth would have white lines. I watched Nande Peringitten do this in 1986, but I regret that I did not record the vocabulary that she used.

Batu Jala

The translator of my English text used the Indonesian word ‘kumpul’ for the English word ‘gather’. I did not know whether to trust this translation. Was it google giving the common translation for groups of people or things, or was it a technical term for gathering cloth? It seemed just too much of a coincidence for the word ‘gather’ to be used by both Indonesian and English for this description!

 

I turned to an Australian friend in Jakarta, a textile aficionado, who has resided a long time in Indonesia. I showed her pictures of the Karo technique and compared it with 'smocking'. She comes back with: ‘Tarikan benang supaya bentuk kerut2 kecil dan rata di kain’. Gathering is described as ‘pulling on the thread so that little, even pleats are formed in the fabric.’ I am very excited, because this very practical, feet-on-the-ground translation makes sense, but my excitement recedes. I see that the making of ‘little even pleats’ describes smocking more than tritik. Where did she get her answer? She laughs and says, ‘Google’. 

I decide that it is time to cross-check with tritik practitioners. One small problem: I don’t know any!

 

But I know a very enthusiastic batik student, mas Huda, in Yogyakarta, and I send him the images of the Karo technique. He immediately labels it ‘jumputan’ and says that he will consult his student notes for more information. 

 

Via-via, I then get in touch with the lovely tie-dye artist, Caroline Rika, who examines the photographs and points out that the Karo practised a stitch technique (‘teknik jahit’). She knows it as one of the techniques that belong to the larger category of ‘ikat celup’, literally, ‘tie dye’, or ‘jumputan’.

The enthusiastic student gets back to me quickly with a citation from his student notes:

‘The tritik technique is done by basting a pattern on cloth, pulling the stitches very tight, dyeing the cloth, then removing the stitches so that the motif appears. The steps are inserting the basting stitch, pulling, then dyeing.’ (‘Teknik tritik dilakukan dengan menjelujur pola pada kain, menarik jahitan erat-erat, mencelupkan kain, lalu melepaskan benang untuk memunculkan motif. Tahapannya meliputi penjahitan jelujur, penarikan/pengerutan, dan pencelupan.’) This is very helpful. In the first place, I have it from student notes, and probably the way it was told to him by his teacher, so neither google nor my question, which might influence an answer, is involved. I assume his description is idiomatic. Second, he has taught me that the expression for ‘basting stitch’ is ‘jahitan jelujur’, or ‘menjelujur’. Third, I have confirmation that ‘gathering’ is ‘pulling’ in Indonesian (tarik). In fact, one of them tells me that the word ‘tritik’ may derive from the word ‘tarik’. If that is the case, a more solid confirmation could not be had! One cannot help but feel elated when one can emerge from a rabbit hole.

 

But I am still stuck down there a bit longer. Caroline has sent me two references to publications, which give insight and also pause. The first[1] uses the concept of ‘jahit celup,’ literally ‘stitch dye’, but apparently the equivalent of the English ‘stitch resist’. It encompasses ‘tritik’, and ‘sasirangan’ (stitch resist in Kalimantan) -- and undoubtedly the Karo technique, too, although it is hardly known except in early Dutch textile literature (e.g. Loebèr). I am now satisfied that I know an official Indonesian way to describe the Karo technique: 'jahit celup', and 'jumputan'. 

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[1] Titisari, Bintan & Kahdar, Kahfiati & Mutiaz, Intan. (2014). Pengembangan Teknik Jahit Celup (Tritik) dengan Pola Geometris. ITB Journal of Visual Art and Design. 6. 130-142. 10.5614/itbj.vad.2014.6.2.4.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286191784_Pengembangan_Teknik_Jahit_Celup_Tritik_dengan_Pola_Geometris/citation/download

 

But things are more complicated than this. I am also learning how much the Indonesian literature has been influenced by Western discussions of 'resist ’dye'.  This is interesting because the concepts used in the Western textile literature originate from Asia. The words ‘ikat’, ‘batik’ and ‘tritik’ were introduced into Dutch at the turn of the 19^th Century and into English not long afterward. Nian S. Djoemena’s well-known Batik dan Mitra: Batik and its Kind, (Djambatan, 1990) depicts the different kinds of ‘resist dye techniques’ using the images found in Jack Lenor Larsen’s, splendid coffee-table book[1] documenting resist-dyed textiles around the world, is probably the best-known reference on the topic. The section on ‘The Classification of Resist Techniques’ (p. 15) has become the standard in academic literature. The source is Alfred Bühler (1946).[2] I would have to do more research to find out where Alfred Bühler obtained his knowledge, and whether and how Dutch scholarship (sourced from Indonesia) was incorporated. Suffice it to say that this appears to be an area of conceptual syncretism in technical terminology and classification. It is beyond the scope of my translation work to explore that. 

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[1] The Dyer’s Art: ikat, batik, plangi, 1976 (Van Nostrand Reinhold)

[2] See also Buhler, Alfred. 1972. Ikat Batik Plangi: Reservemusterungen auf Garn und Stoff aus Verderasien, Zentralasiën, Südosteuropa und Nordafrika. 3 vols. Basel: Pharos-Verlag Hansrudolf Schwabe. 1972

There is another step that needs to be taken. How is the technique described in a Batak language? I contact Lasma, my Simalungun Batak ‘daughter’ to ask if she knows if there is a Simalungun Batak word for ‘menjelujur’. Lasma is always very clear-headed and knows a lot. She fell in love with the Batu Jala when she learned of it, and contacted an elderly woman in her village who once made it, thus teaching me that it was also once a Simalungun cloth. “Mejjelujur’, she answers, but I strongly suspect that this is just the Simalungun pronunciation of the Indonesian word. I suspect that a Batak term would relate to the word ‘jahit’. I have no more access to the Karo Batak traditional vocabulary. Nobody makes these resist textiles anymore and Nande Peringitten has passed away. Has this terminology been lost, so that we must rely on the Javanese-Indonesian-Western terminological merger? Has the merger also meant the end of Javanese traditional knowledge about resist dyes? What about the indigenous knowledge in Kalimantan and S. Sumatra? Does indigenous knowledge and vocabulary related to resist dye techniques exist any longer in Indonesia? If it does, it is fading rapidly.

 

 

For my translation purposes, I have found the following words and they are enough for now:

Perintang warna - resist dye

Tekstil kelompok celup rintang – class of resist dye textiles

Jahit celup – stitch resist, including tritik, sasirangan and the Karo variant

Jahitan ditarik – said for ‘the cloth is gathered’

Kerut-kerut kecil – the little folds or pleats that result from gathering the cloth along the line of stitching

Jumputan – plangi, tie-dye

 

Thanks to Mara, Nia, Huda, Caroline Rika, Nashir and Lasma. I wish we could gather and talk shop. We are scattered all over the globe, but we form a community in a shared search for a few words.

How 'Weft wrapping' became 'Wrapping the Warp': An Exploration of Weaving Terminology

My challenge, today, is in translating the Batak technical weaving terms, manirat and bonggit lilit, into Indonesian.  

The Batak have their own language, as well as a unique way of understanding the weaving arts. This is reflected in their weaving vocabulary. Academic English makes use of a 'standard vocabulary' that Irene Emery and others have developed over decades to make it possible to discuss weaving techniques across cultural boundaries. Indonesian is the language that will be used in the weaving text that I am translating from English. As far as I am aware, there is no standard weaving vocabulary in Indonesian. Indonesian takes from the indigenous vocabularies found in the archipelago, and has also incorporated many terms and perspectives from Dutch and English. My task is to translate from English to Indonesian in a way that makes sense within the Batak weaving world because the Batak will be my primary audience. They are the practitioners of the weaving tradition that I am trying to describe. It would be thoughtless to make translations that alienate Batak readers from their own art! The text that I am translating has already done that; it was written in English academese. I know, because I wrote it! I observed the Batak techniques and then scoured the literature to figure out how to label them correctly in academic idiom.

My task, now, is to search for the Indonesian words for these Batak terms, and if they exist, discern whether they convey what the Batak understand by their terms. If there is no ‘official’ translation, or if the translations do not accurately represent the Batak way of understanding their techniques, I must search for words that are more appropriate. I do not want Batak readers, upon reading my translation, to be led toward a Western way of seeing their craft tradition. This does mean, however, that I must understand the point of view offered by the Indonesian translation in addition to the Batak point of view that I am trying to achieve. Translating is not a simple matter of substituting Indonesian words for the Batak or English words. I need to understand the 'way of seeing' wrapped up in all of the words.

In short, my task is challenging, if not impossible. But I do my best to approach my target. I hope not only to assist in building an Indonesian weaving vocabulary, but to point to the logic and value of different vocabularies and embedded perspectives. 

Manirat

The Batak word, manirat, translates into academic English as ‘weft twining’. Batak ‘twiners’ practice this technique to decorate the fringe ends of their weavings. It is an off-loom technique. In academic English, the horizontal element, understood as ‘weft’, is twined around the vertical element, understood as ‘warp’, hence ‘weft twining’. 

A twined edge in the Siimalungun Batak cloth called 'Bulang' (Collection Author) 

Twining or winding is a concept that is held in common in Indonesian and Batak, and is indicated with the same word, lilit. However, for Batak twiners, the words ‘warp’ and ‘weft’ are not applicable. Because manirat is performed off-loom, Batak twiners speak of ‘twining yarn’ and ‘fringes’ but not ‘weft’ and ‘warp’. In addition, the word ‘lilit’ emphasizes what is being wound rather than what is doing the winding, whereas the element doing the winding receives more emphasis in English. As a result, the translation of the English expression ‘weft twining’ becomes ‘fringe-twining’ in Indonesian to represent the Batak term, manirat: pelilitan rumbai dengan benang lilit. 

 

Batak	English	Indonesian
Manirat – to make the sirat	Weft-twining - twining  (the fringes) with weft	Pelilitan rumbai dengan benang sirat (wrapping the fringes with the yarn used to make the sirat)
Bonggit lilit – patterning in a cloth made by wrapping the warp	Weft-wrapping – wrapping (the warp) with weft	Pelilitan benang lungsin dengan benang pakan (wrapping warp yarns with weft yarns)

Bonggit Lilit

The technique that the Batak call bonggit lilit means the bonggit pattern achieved by wrapping. This is weft-wrapping in academic English. (Readers may be familiar with this technique as ‘kilim’ because the weft of kilim rugs is wrapped around the warp.) In Tarutung, one of the Batak areas where the technique is practised, when weavers wish to make the weft-wrapped pattern, they stop shooting regular weft through the warp with a shuttle, and instead wrap thicker weft, of various colours, by hand, around the warp yarns to create patterns. Because they are working in the loom, both 'warp' and 'weft' are at play. Because the warp yarn is being wrapped, the word ‘lilit’ is again applicable, in both Indonesian and Batak. Once again, the word emphasizes the element that is being wrapped rather than the element that is doing the wrapping. ‘Weft-wrapping’ in English must become ‘wrapping of warp’ in the Indonesian translation, pelilitan benang lungsin. What that conveys makes sense both in Indonesian and to Batak readers. (My translator made a simple google-type translation without knowing the weaving background, and translated 'wrapping' as 'packaging'!)

 

Weft wrapping (bonggit lilit) in the Toba Batak 'sadum' cloth

The way the two techniques are presented in English has them in the same conceptual arena: a horizontal element winding around a vertical element. This essential similarity is not disturbed by 'manirat' being off-loom and 'bonggit lilit. on-loom. For Batak weavers, however, precisely this difference puts them in different conceptual camps. How the techniques are executed is much more prominent in the Batak vocabulary. The English standard vocabulary emphasizes the result rather than the process.

 

It is notable that all the elements implied in the two vocabularies are the same: warp and weft, on- and off-loom, and twining/winding/wrapping. What differs is the conceptual framework. If English has been geared to expressing universals through generalizations, such as ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ elements, and Batak technical descriptions are wrapped up (if I may) in the specifics of the process, Indonesian zig-zags between the two, with many terms that are cognates to the Batak terms even while many perspectives are built on Western academic orientations. The Indonesian terms/explanations that I opt for must be understandable and accurate for an Indonesian reader at the same time not doing violence to the Batak way of seeing the processes.

 

It can take a lot of time to translate a single word because it can send me down a variety of rabbit holes, such as searching for the implications of the words warp and weft, on-loom and off-loom, wrapping and weaving, universal and specific. Each rabbit hole offers a tiny glimpse into another worldview, each piece of weaving vocabulary contributing to a larger pattern that will only gradually emerge. Patience, persistence, and holding one’s (pre-)conceptions in abeyance are required to get to the nub of the differences. The process is exciting because it offers a doorway into the unknown. I can imagine weaving techniques being compared not just at the level of what transpires in the weavers’ hands, but also how she frames them in her mind. 

 

For decades I have worked within the academic framework of building a universal, standardized weaving vocabulary. Having now realized how profoundly techniques are culturally-embedded and not 'neutral', I have also to recognize that my focus on a universal vocabulary has been an exercise in cultural erasure. A putatively universal prism has offered only a narrow, ethnocentric way of understanding Batak weaving. Seeing the Batak world through their weaving vocabulary is the more exciting project. Sometimes I lose sight of the value of the ‘universal’ project. What was it, again, and why was it valid? Who does it serve?

A twined edge in a Toba Batak cloth called 'Bolean' (Private Collection Pangururan)

Emery, Irene. The Primary Structures of Fabrics: an illustrated classification.  

 

New York : Watson-Guptill Publications/Whitney Library of Design ; Washington, D.C. : Textile Museum. 1995.

The face of a cloth: searching for the weavers' perspective

 Frequently it is difficult to ask questions in another language because basic concepts are understood differently. I wanted to find the Batak word for the surface of a cloth that is visible to the weaver while she is weaving, and for the underside of the cloth that is not visible while she is at work. The question sent me down a rabbit hole into a maze that is taking me a few days to find my way out of. Truly a maze. Several times I have set off on a path only to bump into a wall. I have turned around and set off again only to bump into another wall. Eventually, though, it has all added up and some dark spots on my mental map of the Batak loom have been filling in.

 

While I have spent a long time in North Sumatra gathering weaving words, I still  encounter gaps in my knowledge and then I am grateful for WhatsApp. It is a brilliant tool for the anthropologist far away. Most Batak weavers nowadays have mobile phones and are familiar with the app. It allows me to parachute into their world, where I interrupt them and take up their time. I know that I am an imposition and ask ‘stupid questions’ about ways of seeing. Just as I am confused by their answers, they are confused by my questions. But how generous, gracious and patient they are with me! 

 

In my quest to find the Batak word for the part of the cloth that the weaver sees while weaving, I decided to contact a weaver in Silindung with whom I had spent time two years ago and who understood my work. She immediately answered my What’sApps. We conferred mostly in Indonesian, and a bit in Batak. I launched in by asking her, in Indonesian, the Batak word for the ‘face’ of the cloth, the part that is visible while she is weaving. I assumed that the use of the word ‘face’ would be a concept that we shared and we would be able to build a cultural bridge starting with that word. “Bohi” was her immediate response, the Batak word for ‘face’. I was delighted! Easy! A direct translation! The face of the cloth. “Thank you! Precisely what I am looking for,” I wrote back. 

Ompu Elsa weaving a Simalungun head cloth called 'Bulang'
The slope of the loom is evident as well as the circularity of the warp. The warp beam is the horizontal beam furthest from her, while the cloth beam is on her lap. The top layer of the warp is 'split' by the heddles to facilitate weaving.

 

“And what is the back called?” I asked. “Panutup,” she said, a word that denotes ‘closing’ or 'finish'.  My elation ended abruptly. How could ‘a closing’ be the opposite of the ‘face’? How could 'a closing' be the ‘underside’ of a cloth? An unbidden image of a loom rose up in my mind, with thread ‘endings’ dangling down like something a cat had fought with. “I think we might have a misunderstanding, here” I wrote. “I am looking for the word for ‘below’, the opposite side of ‘bohi’.” 

 

Then she told me that a cloth has a ‘face’ (bohi) if it contains ikat. Now I was truly confused. What could ikat have to do with the front and back of a cloth in the loom? “Ikat appears the same on both the front and the back of the cloth,” I wrote in return, indicating that I knew that there would be no visible difference between the two sides of an ikat cloth. “Ikat also has a face/bohi,” she wrote. “It has an upper and a lower part.”  Now the image of a dangling hank of ikat-patterned yarn rose up in my mind and I tried valiantly – and unsuccessfully -- to understand where its ‘face’ or ‘upper part’ might be located.

 

I decided to give it a rest. This wasn’t working. We were using the same words, but we were not communicating. There was a lingering misunderstanding. Had I not explained it well? Was it my choice of words? In Indonesian, neither of us was communicating in our mother tongue. Is that where the problem lay? Was I failing to understand the Batak word bohi?  Was I not understanding her conception of beginning and end? Was she not understanding my conception of front and back? I thanked her for her trouble and tried to make sense of it all, but I needed more help.

 

Awhile later, I contacted a weaver who makes the kind of cloth called ‘Sadum’, the only Batak cloth where the back side of the cloth faces upward, toward the weaver while she weaves (because of the way they execute the supplementary weft technique). I thought she would be very sensitive to the notions of underside and upside of the cloth since she worked in the inversion. We exchanged pleasantries and then I mentioned that the Sadum’s underside was what was visible in the loom. “Yes,” she said, “the inside is what shows.” The inside? Yes, I could imagine the underside of the cloth being referred to as ‘the inside’ because it is worn next to the body. It is also 'inside' when the cloth is in the loom. I looked for confirmation, “You say ‘the inside’ and not ‘the underside’ or ‘the lower side’?  Is this the 'bohi' of the cloth? 

 

“The 'bohi' is the first part. The ‘inside’ is the part that is not visible when weaving, but when the weaving is finished and the cloth is being worn, it is the ‘outside’. That is, in the case of the Sadum.” Hmmm. She had explained it perfectly, as I was to discern later, but at the time I was still fixated on finding the word for the ‘face’ of the cloth (in my world) and I was convinced there had been a misunderstanding.

 

“If you say ‘bohi’, I went on doggedly, then there must also be a ‘back side’? What is the word for that?”

 

“What is certain is that the ‘bohi’ is the first part,” she said in response. “That is the word used most often.”

 

I was beginning to get the idea that the ‘bohi’ of the cloth was not perceived by her as a surface. “So, the word relates to time!” I said, thinking I had made a significant conceptual leap. 

 

“No, she said, it is the first part that is woven.” Dashed again. How did that not relate to time? What was I not getting?

 

I thought of how the Batak use the word ‘ulu’ or ‘head’ for a pattern that appears in the 'end' of a cloth. Maybe it was a spatial reference. If a cloth has a head, why not a face? “Is it like the ‘head’ of a cloth?” I asked.

 

“No, it is the beginning,” she said.

 

“Maybe I am having trouble understanding,” I responded. “We have different cultures. How do you describe the ‘beginning’?” I asked.

 

“It is the first part that we weave,” she responded.

 

“The first weft?” I asked

 

“Yes,” she said. “Only, the first part.”

 

Ok, so the 'bohi' was neither a temporal concept nor a spatial concept. It seems to be the collapsing of the two, the spacetime of the process of weaving: the beginning. As one might say about a project: "I've only just begun". Interesting! I was clearly using the wrong word ('face') to elicit the Batak word for the upside of a cloth in the loom! 

 

I plagued the poor weaver with another question. “In that case, what do you call the part of the cloth that faces you while you are weaving,” I asked.

 

“I am singing in a choir right now,” she said, “and cannot concentrate. Maybe later?” I was most certainly driving her mad.

 

I screwed up my courage and contacted another weaver who has a good grasp of English and tried again to pose my question clearly. “What do you call the ‘above’ part of a weaving in the loom and the ‘below’ part?” Her answer, in Indonesian, was clear, ‘depan’ (front) and ‘belakang' (back). Well, it wasn’t that difficult after all! At least I had the terms in Indonesian, and they expressed the same thing as the English. All I still had to do was obtain the Batak words. I asked for the translation.

“Tu jolo tu pudi” was her response. Oh no! Not again! Once more I was thrown into confusion. I knew the Batak words ‘jolo' and ‘pudi’; I translate them as ‘forward’ and ‘backward’. ‘Jolo’, as it pertains to the loom, means ‘towards the weaver’ and ‘pudi’ means ‘away from the weaver’ along the plane of the cloth in the loom. Clearly, the Indonesian words for ‘front’ (‘depan’) and ‘back’ (‘belakang’) were not the words that I was searching for. They were good translations of the English words ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ but they were not translations for the Batak ‘front’ and ‘back’ of the cloth. I had to let it go again and sleep on it for a night.

 

This morning I have renewed courage. Nothing like a good night's sleep and the penny seems to be dropping. The weavers had all been referencing the circular warp, which shifts in the loom in front of them while they work, and which has a beginning and an end, and is situated at an incline, while I had been referring to a surface, the part facing the weaver and the backside of that, as perceived by an onlooker. The Sadum weaver had told me that to refer to the ‘front’ of a cloth I had to think in terms not of direction but of clothing! The ‘underside’ (from my perspective) when the cloth was in the loom was, was for them the 'inside’, the surface of the cloth that is next to the body when the cloth is being worn, and the part that the weaver can see as she weaves is the 'outside’, the part that is visible when the cloth is being worn (except in the case of the Sadum). For them the directional words ‘above’ and ‘below’ related to the angle of the loom. And ‘face’, in their world, was a word that related to the process of weaving.

 

When I contacted the Simalungun weaver, Mak Sandi, this morning to obtain the words in the Simalungun language, it all fell into place and she was crystal clear. She understood it in the same way as the Toba weavers, although she used Simalungun words.

 

The words that I had been searching for were ‘inside’ (habbagas in Simalungun / ‘dalam’ in Indonesian) and ‘outside’ (haddarat in Simalungun / 'luar' in Indonesian), the concepts that relate to the use of the cloth as clothing. The ‘outside’ is what the weaver sees when she is weaving (except in the case of the Sadum) and the ‘inside’ is what the weaver does not see when the cloth is being worn. But I still don’t know the Toba words. The search isn't over yet.

This vocabulary reminded me that the Batak weavers' words relate to their embodied experience, strapped in the loom, their way of seeing things as they go through the process of weaving a cloth. My own (scientist's/ foreigner's) vocabulary is that of an outsider observing, and carrying the baggage of my own culture. The word 'textile' is another example of that. Batak weavers don't weave 'textiles'; they make clothes on looms that are extensions of their own bodies! This perspective permeates their vocabulary. My need, as it turns out, had not just been to get the right word, but to understand the way weavers understand their craft.

Postscript

It is months later: As I go through the vocabulary that I have been collecting, I see the word 'balikbalikna' a Toba word for the back of a cloth, something akin to 'the reverse side' or 'other side'. 

Thanks to the following kind, generous and patient weavers:

Renny br. Manurung, Nai Tiara br.Siahaan, Lasma br. Sitanggang, br. Tobing, Duma br. Tobing, Ester br. Simorangkir.