Living Threads - 17 March

In transit now in Singapore, on my way back to The Netherlands, I think of my first meeting with Pung and Frog in the dye studio of the research foundation arm (YPBB) of Threads of Life. They were showing me how to make red dye using the roots of the Morinda citrifolia tree because I had never had the opportunity to see it done in the Batak area. The Batak stopped using that natural dye decades ago.



Ingredients in one of the red dye recipes




Frog working on a Morinda dye bath in the YPBB studio

Pung and Frog are seasoned field workers. They love to go into the villages and speak with the weavers. They are quiet and both are good listeners, respectful of local dynamics, styles and traditions. They like to get close enough to the weavers to become the recipients of stories about their youth. Often it takes awhile before a dye recipe bubbles up in their memory. (We noticed this with Ompu Okta. It emerges gradually. They need to have the opportunity and the encouragement to re-open memories of past weaving practices.) Rarely do Frog and Pung need to teach a dye recipe because they are unable to recover/uncover the local one. And, out of respect for local traditions, they never share a recipe if it has been given to them in confidence.
Pung’s and Frog’s knowledge is rich and varied. They know the trees and plants, the composition of the soils and the waters and the chemical reactions when all the components come together. With their knowledge, they could fill tracts and tomes and contribute so richly to the academic library on Indonesian weaving (including dyeing) traditions. But “writing up findings” is not their thing. Their first love is being in the field, experimenting with the recipes they learn about, assisting the weavers and making beautiful natural colours. They showed me the results of their failed experiments with a laugh. How much work it took to learn the basic proportions needed for a good dye and the factors that influence the variations!

Ever the academic, I felt regretful that this information and their stories were not being pegged down in writing and disseminated. But there is another side to it all. I am also aware that they are preserving knowledge in a different way. When I think about it, I believe it to be a more valuable way. The West would not need or have museums if indigenous worlds were not disappearing. Many of the activities of ethnographic museum flow from the understanding that it is important and possible to “preserve” indigenous traditions in storerooms and documentation systems, the academic formaldehyde for posterity, so that when the traditions disappear forever, there is at least a record of them. Pung and Frog, on the other hand, are reviving traditions. The dye recipes that they have discovered are not being pickled and described for a rarified Western audience, they are being cultivated once again in their cultures of origin. Dissemination happens when a mother teaches them to her daughter. They are dynamic traditions susceptible to change and renewal. I recall haviong felt a little confused when I realized that the successes of YPBB were taking the urgency out of the necessity to record everything for posterity.

I am an anthropologist who has been shaped by museums and steeped in their history – yet I was curiously elated when I realized that Pung and Frog were making part of the museum endeavour redundant. How brilliantly liberating! If cultural dye traditions were to live as vibrantly as Balinese orchestras in the face of modernity, if they were available for researchers to visit at any time, if indigenous traditions were not threatened but there was room for them and respect for them in the world…it is difficult to even contemplate… the world would be transformed into a living museum and the otherwise redundant buildings called “museums” could perhaps adopt a different interactive role in support of indigenous traditions. How invigorating, satisfying...

On the day that I left Bali (16 March), Frog and Pung left as well. They were heading for the Batak area carrying with them a bag of Morinda citrifolia root, their arsenal of knowledge and their sensitivity to culture. How I wish I could be the proverbial fly on the wall as they work among the Batak. I am impatient to see their results, but they tell me the process is slow and I will have to wait for years. Impatience has no role in this process. If and when they succeed, Batak dye recipes will again be firmly rooted in a few communities, and the weavers will have Threads of Life as their market outlet making their efforts financially worth their while.

...As I post this blog from my office in The Netherlands (in the meantime, I have arrived back home) I have just received a message from Goodman Ompusunggu on Facebook telling me that the weavers in Muara have met Frog and Pung and are excitedly participating in a workshop with them. There is plenty of energy around this renewal of their weaving tradition....How I wish I could be the proverbial fly on the wall....

...A week later, now. Jean Howe has sent me an email telling me about the findings and successes of Frog and Pung. Not surprisingly, the Batak have their own unique recipes with regional variations, and apparently the Morinda root in the Batak area is of high quality. There is great anticipation that soon a natural-dyed Batak textiles will enter the collection of Threads of Life.

Closer to Threads of Life

In March 2009, I gave the first copy of Legacy in cloth, Batak textiles of Indonesia to Threads of Life. At the time, I had not yet met them. I had only heard about their work and read about them on their website. I was excited about their cause and felt that my book, while academic, was written in the spirit of their own very practical work keeping Indonesian weaving traditions alive. I wanted to use the public occasion of my book launch to highlight what they do. It is now two years later. I have now met Threads of Life and learned first hand about what they do.

It has all been sparked by Legacy in cloth. They found that the book offered potential as a foundation for working in the Batak area. Until now, they have always worked in Eastern Indonesia. When I was in the Batak region last October/November, some members of the YPBB Foundation, the research arm of Threads of Life, joined me. They wanted to pinpoint places where they could begin to work.


The men in the photograph, from left to right, are Daud, Pung, Nashir and Frog.
The women are former weavers in Sianjur MulaMula



I enjoyed Jean Howe's company alot during those travels. (Photo MJA Nashir)

Phase two of our collaborative plan is happening now, in Bali. I am being given the opportunity to explore what they do and how they do it. The visit is touching me in the very marrow of my anthropological soul. In the first place it is fun to renew my acquaintance with Pung, Frog and Jean Howe, who visited North Sumatra. They shared openly and alot at that time. Now I am seeing them on their home turf. Threads of Life is a beehive of activity. What they do is careful, thoughtful, and complex. I am discovering that I have been given an opportunity to be privy to what I will not hesitate to call one of the most extraordinary experiments in the textile world. My respect and admiration for this organization grows with each passing day.
I have seen their natural dye laboratory/studio, poked my way through their shop, gone behind the scenes in their offices to see their data banks, day-to-day operations and textile stores, and visited field sites in Timor and Bali. All the while, I have been able to talk with them endlessly about what they do and why they do it that way.


Examining one of Ompu Okta's mother's textiles in the Threads of Life office.
Frog is to the left, Jean Howe is pointing thoughtfully to the beadwork in the cloth,
and Pung is to the right. These three had joined me in North Sumatra in November.

Central to their work, and the reason why I find their work excellent, is their sensitivity to the cultures in which they operate and their intense awareness (and learning) of the role that textiles play in those cultures. The revival of textiles often (if not inevitably) resides at the heart of cultural revival. Jean Howe told me yesterday that cultural revival was perhaps their most important goal when they started their business more than a decade ago. And this is what clearly excites the members. Pung, Frog and Sujata, the dye team, have told me many tales about the discovery of natural dye recipes. They do not enter a new area with the tried and true recipes that they know, but facilitate the remembrance of the local recipes and colours. This is a sensitive process that may take years. During the process, the team works like a partner, noting (what is remembered of) the recipe, going back to the lab to try it out, returning to the people to compare results, assisting and troubleshooting aided by their knowledge of the chemistry of the dyes… until they finally get the results they are looking for. In this way, they revive not just the natural dyes, but also local recipes and colours (each dye yields a vast array of colour and each region has its own recipes and preferred tints and tones) and stimulate the revival/retention of that exciting diversity that characterizes Indonesian culture.
Colour is just one facet of the process of textile renewal. Ancient textiles may be “replicated” in appearance, but when they are revived in this cultural sense, including songs, techniques and equipment, associated rituals and so on, this is what is truly exciting and laudable. And this is what Threads of Life does.

On the first day of my visit here in Bali, I saw some “revival textiles” in the Threads of Life storage area that filled me with such emotion that I later had to sit down and try to figure out what was going on inside me. It is hard to explain. At first I described it as akin to the first time I saw impressionist paintings in Paris after having learned to love them in books and postcards. But the wellspring of my emotion was much deeper  than that. I love the quality of the ancient textiles of Indonesia but for so long they have also been the source of a dull, sad ache because I know they represent a past era. Modern products are different. They are not as fine, they are more standardized so that the weaver’s hand is virtually absent as a signature, the materials from which they are made are usually inferior, and so on. In my writings, I have described and analyzed the kinds of changes that have taken place and the social and economic reasons for these changes. Seeing revived textiles has moved me to tears. It is like witnessing a miracle.

 Oh Shoppers, when you go to the Threads of Life shop in Bali, know what you buy! Your purchase is supporting indigenous Indonesian culture, making a tiny bit of room for it in this world.