Balinese Textiles [Paperback]

 

 

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Balinese Textiles is a shiny, colorful coffee table oeuvre with full-page, glossy photos of eight different textile styles and materials: endek, songket, perada, bebali, keling, poleng, cepuk, and geringsing. The natural beauty and grace of the Balinese people and the lavishly hand-crafted beauty of their elaborate weavings complement each other on every rice paddy-green and sunset yellow page. Travelers to Bali cannot help but notice the highly decorative traditional fabrics worn by the Balinese and the mysterious bolts of colored cloth wrapped around tree trunks, stone temple guardians, statues of divinities, holy books, and family altars. Nearly every suitcase clearing Ngurah Rai airport harbors a sample purchase of intricately detailed ikat cloth (endek) in the form of a sarong, scarf, or wall hanging scooped up during a tour bus stop at a Bali Aga village. The authors (cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnologists) take you beyond this visible, physical realm of elaborate materials and souvenir trophies to reveal the vital role that these cloths and banners play in the rich cultural and religious life of Bali.
Balinese Textiles enables the lay reader to understand and appreciate yarns and textiles as not only works of art, but as sacred objects through which the Balinese express their reverence and adoration for the divine nature of the universe. Deeply embedded in the cultural matrix of Bali, ritually significant cloths are prized both as ceremonial ornamentation and as special offerings for the gods. Prada cloth (painted with gold) is used to adorn temple pavilions, make parasols, and as appropriate dress for important rites of passage such as toothfiling ceremonies and weddings. The color of a particular cloth is laden with additional religious import: sacrificial animals are draped in dyed fabric indicating the god to which they are dedicated (red for Brahma, black for Vishnu). An entire chapter is devoted to the omnipresent, black and white checked poleng cloth which symbolizes the polarity of opposing positive and negative (yin-yang) forces. The principle of duality ("Ruwa bhineda") is crucial to the Balinese mindset, represented here by the contrasting black and white squares of the pattern: they must co- exist together to comprise a balanced, harmonious, stable cosmos.
This study takes a peak at the widespread Indonesian custom of incorporating occult meanings and spells into cloth-carefully encoded in ancient, complex design motifs. The most magical fabric in Bali is the rare, black and orange geringsing cloth of Tenganan, woven with the laborious, double ikat technique (the pattern is dyed into both the warp and weft threads). Other textiles express the highly stratified social hierarchy and caste system of traditional Bali. Gold is the reserved color of kings: songket clothing (woven with gold thread) was formerly restricted to princely courts and aristocratic families as a sign of privilege and wealth. Full of historical nuggets and surprises, Balinese Textiles is the seminal book for fashion and fine art devotees, readers interested in Bali, and for the people of Bali themselves. This is the only reference work covering the depth and breadth of their indigenous textiles-from raw materials to local village production to finished processional splendor.

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