In the Realm of the Indigo Queen

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Jun 20, 2007 - opposite is true: ideas of supernatural influence and magic are .... of women, and so dyeing is part of a folk tradition that also dabbles in men- .... with merchants who were trying to develop new markets in tribal art shops.
four | janet hoskins

In the Realm of the Indigo Queen Dyeing, Exchange Magic, and the Elusive Tourist Dollar on Sumba

Textiles are one of the most developed art forms in eastern Indonesia, but they are also deeply enmeshed in traditional culture — steeped in ideas of mystical powers, poisons, and witchcraft, as well as healing, midwifery, and ancestral blessings. On Sumba, an island between Bali and Timor at the southeast edge of the archipelago, the craft of indigo dyeing is one of the “blue arts,” related to herbalism, abortion, and the managing of female sexuality and reproduction.1 The occult powers of “tradition” are often opposed to the supposedly “rational” new forms of power of modernity. I argue that at least on Sumba, the opposite is true: ideas of supernatural influence and magic are employed as strategies for understanding modern changes, new forms of inequality, and gendered shifts in agency. Textile production has long been a female cult of secrets from which men are excluded, and it has been used for the discipline and control of the sexual behavior of younger women by their seniors. In the last two decades, the increasing commercialization of textile production for a tourist market has upset some of these gendered divisions and created new fears and resentments as well as new financial opportunities. Women have emerged as textile entrepreneurs in ways that threaten to transform parts of the domestic economy, and their access to money is incorporated into “traditional” images of “spirit wives” and/or “demonic patronesses.” How do dark rumors of supernatural influence affect everyday relations in the daylight world? I explore these themes in relation to the life of a single woman, Marta Mete, without a doubt the most successful textile entrepreneur in Kodi, the domain at the island’s western tip, and someone occasionally referred to as the “indigo queen” (Rato kanabu) of the realm. The youngest wife of the last colonial raja, she was the teenage bride of a man almost sixty. Now a forceful woman of about sixty herself, she is seen by some women as an

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aristocratic spokeswoman and leader and by others as a schemer and poisoner who used her magical powers (mangu marapu) to dupe the old raja and gain control of his vast household. While many studies of art and artists have stressed the biographical dimension of artistic expression, the field of textiles is one where there are few signed works of art, and the distinctive craftsmanship and personal touches of each cloth’s creator are usually obscured by the anonymity of the marketplace. Jill Forshee’s recent study of textile production in East Sumba is innovative in its attempt to show the meanings that are hidden “between the folds” of cloth, interpreting each design as in some way revealing the personality of its creator.2 This chapter is an effort to follow in the same direction, looking at a cloth producer as someone who has not only crafted her own “biographical objects” but has also struggled to market them successfully in the uncertain world of the new twenty-first century. In earlier writings about Kodi textiles, I focused on the motifs of men’s cloths, which are the largest and most prestigious and the ones most obviously filled with symbolic meaning.3 The most valuable men’s cloth depicts a reticulated python, whose scaled skin is represented in an apparently geometrical motif that stretches the full length of several meters of cloth (hanggi kraha kaboko). Women’s sarungs have smaller motifs, and the cloth that Marta Mete is most adept at producing — one with an indigo-striped body and a crab design at the borders (lawo gundu pa wolo) — is more modest and apparently unassuming. But the crab is itself a potent symbol of female cunning, craftiness, sexual power, and (as I will argue) economic assertiveness. Her story will help us understand new ways in which the occult powers of cloth are realized in the modern world of commerce. The ways textiles are used by their creators relate not only to this volume’s theme of the utility of art objects in context, but also to Alfred Gell’s provocative exploration of their agency.4 Gell argues that an object acts as an agent when the artist’s skill is so great that the viewer simply cannot comprehend it and its therefore captivated by the image. This notion of captivation asserts that an object is art on the basis of what it does, not what it is. Gell’s approach allows him to sidestep the problematic distinction between Western and non-Western art and to present a theory about the efficacy of an object’s appearance — about cross-cultural visuality, in other words — rather than specifically about art. Objects which are often treated as material culture or crafts rather than art (like textiles, betel bags, etc.) therefore deserve equal attention, since their making is a “particularly salient feature of their agency.”5 Anthropological theories of art objects, Gell notes, have to be primarily

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concerned with social relations over the time frame of biographies. By rejecting the linguistic analogies of semiotic theories (the different “languages of art” or forms of “indigenous aesthetics”) and insisting that art is about doing things, Gell argues that art can be part of a system of social action, focused on how people act through objects by distributing parts of their personhood into things. These things have agency because they produce effects: they cause us to feel happy, angry, fearful, or lustful. They have an impact, and we as artists produce them as ways of distributing elements of our own efficacy in the form of things. Art objects use formal complexity and a technical virtuosity to create “a certain cognitive indecipherability” that may tantalize and frustrate the viewer in trying to recognize wholes and parts, continuity and discontinuity, synchrony and succession.6 He analyzes involuted designs intended to entrance and ward off dangerous spirits, tattoos and shields in Polynesia, and idols that are animated in variety of ways and able to bestow fertility, sickness, cures, or misfortunes. I will come back to this argument at the end, trying to show how apparently cryptic textile designs in Kodi are full of hidden biographical significance.

Indigo Dyeing, Female Bleeding, and the Occult Kodi cloth is distinctive on the island of Sumba because it makes the most extensive use of indigo dyes in both men’s and women’s textiles.7 The famous men’s cloths of East Sumba have large pictorial panels that are dyed in mixtures of indigo and rust (for aristocrats) or indigo and white (for commoners). Women’s tubular sarungs in East Sumba are primarily mud-dyed in black and often ornamented with a stripe design and inset embroidery with a supplementary warp technique. In Kodi, in contrast, the man’s cloth is an indigo plaid (hanggi gyundul), with occasional border designs, while the woman’s sarung has apparently geometrical motifs that refer to the goods exchanged in bridewealth (buffalo eyes, horses’ tails, gold omega pendants). These designs can be spread across the surface of the cloth or concentrated along the borders, with a gundu stripe pattern crossing the body horizontally. In the past quarter-century, more recent designs that include stripes of commercial colors in floating weave (lambeleko) and supplementary weft embroidery (pahumbi) on a black background have also become popular for women’s wear.8 Commercial threads and dyes are frequently used, but the most prestigious cloths remain those dyed with indigo — especially ones with the time-consuming ikat designs. Indigo is associated with a cult of secrets managed by older women, who in

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Figure 4.1. An older woman dips the threads in the indigo mixture, 1985. Photo by Laura Whitney.

addition to being dye specialists are also often involved in herbalism, reproductive medicine, and abortion (fig. 4.1). These links exist because some of the same ingredients are used to control the “bleeding” of cloth and the bleeding of women, and so dyeing is part of a folk tradition that also dabbles in menstrual regulation and fertility control. There are three terms to describe indigo at different stages, much as we have three separate words for grapes, wine, and raisins. The indigo plant, collected along the coastline at the beginning of the rainy season, is called kanabu. The fermented dye, which ranges from pale brown to pale green before it oxidizes in the sun as the threads dry, is called nggilingo. And the finished color of indigo, which is a deeply saturated dark blue, is called moro or sometimes moro mete (blue black). Moro is a color term that covers both blue and green and also has the literal meaning of “raw” or “unprocessed.” It is also the term used for medicines, both local herbal preparations (moro kodi) and imported chemical ones (moro dawa). Indigo dyeing is seen as kind of medicine that involves knowledge of the complex interactions of a series of ingredients — indigo leaves, rice, straw, wildflower roots, and stems of a number of coastal plants — and the precise

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Figure 4.2. The elements of the indigo dye mixture, labeled in Kodi, 1988.

combination of these elements is determined by each craftswoman, who tastes, feels, smells, and examines her materials at each stage of the process (fig. 4.2). The best traditional dyers have their own techniques and materials, which become guarded secrets passed on only to a single designated successor. Like medieval alchemists, indigo dyers are also believed to harbor secrets about poisons, special potions, and the roots used to induce menstruation and stanch bleeding after childbirth. This knowledge is sometimes said to border that of witches, who are called “people who handle blue substances” (tou morongo). Witchcraft in Kodi is passed down the matriline (walla) and is a particular characteristic of people of very low rank whose ancestors were slaves. Their resentment is said to create a kind of poison in their bodies that has to be “let out,” so it is extremely dangerous to accept food in the household of a witch family. Matrilines are strictly exogamous and are based on relationships of blood, while patrilines order the transmission of property and ritual office. Witch women are reputed to be especially beautiful and alluring, but men are afraid to marry them because their dabbling in love magic, herbalism, and poisons makes them master manipulators of their vulnerable spouses. Indigo dye is believed to be dangerous to all men and to women of reproductive age. For this reason, the dye shack (kareka nggilingo) is always located in a remote spot and is not visible from Kodi garden hamlets or ancestral villages (much like the menstrual huts I once frequented in the Seram, the Mo-

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luccas). Men are not allowed to approach the dye shack, nor can anyone approach the shack carrying freshly slaughtered meat or with a bleeding wound or sore. Indigo dyers explained that this was because the “dead black blood” of indigo (ruto mate) is threatened by the flow of fresh red blood (ruto rara). For the same reason, menstruating women may not approach the dye shack. For pregnant women, whose blood has “collected” into a fetus (manuho) the threat works in the opposite direction: Their wombs are vulnerable to contact with indigo fluids. The sight of the churning, dark liquids in the dye bath is believed to provoke a miscarriage, and it is believed that a woman’s pregnancy can be damaged by secretly slipping indigo dye into her coffee.9 Kodi theories of reproduction are worked out through a metaphoric parallel with the process of fermentation involved in indigo dyeing: The cloth “child” is created in the womb-like pot and brought to life by the addition of lime — made from crushed seashells or baked limestone — as the “quickener” or the “husband” of the reddish mud bath, which “brings the indigo to life,” as a fetus is a blood clot (manuho) “brought to life” by an infusion of semen. Female blood provides the flesh of the newly formed child, and the “flowering” (walla) of female blood lines determines personality and vulnerability to disease. The male contribution of sperm provides the structure of the body, the hard skeleton on which the flesh is arrayed, and will also form the more enduring ancestral identity (ndewa). Once women stop bleeding on a monthly basis, they can manipulate the “blue powers” of witchcraft and indigo with less risk, so they can dare to combine dangerous substances in new ways that may both help and hurt others. The most regular dyers often have blue arms and hands (both from tattoos and from handling the dyes), so they wear the insignia of their craft proudly and publicly. Indigo designs are also imprinted upon the skin through the process of tattooing. As soon as a girl begins to menstruate, she may get her first tattoos as a badge of sexual maturity, usually the same motifs (cassava leaves, crabs, butterflies, etc.) that she wears on her sarungs. The forearms are the first area to be tattooed, followed by the calves (of a young woman who has married and had a child). Elaborate tattoos are painful, but they are appreciated as a sign of reproductive achievement — and also a source of great erotic speculation. The special designs hidden high on the upper thighs, where no one but the husband is supposed to see them, are the ones that provoke the most aesthetic attention and care in execution. Tattoo designs applied to the skin might well have been a form of body ornamentation once found all over Indonesia. Anthony Reid notes that although there is no historical record of tattooing on Java, the word batik is

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the most common word for tattoo in the eastern Indonesia and Philippine languages, and “both in its motifs and in is ritual functions the Javanese batik evoked the tattooing of other peoples.”10 The primary functions he identifies are as a talisman and status marker, since powerful beasts and esoteric patterns could confer special powers such as invulnerability on the body. For a young man on Sumba, the marks might be associated with success in headhunting, while for a woman they suggest aristocratic rank and secret erotic powers.11

Historical Shifts in Textile Production While the associations between indigo dyeing and witchcraft appear to go back far in ancestral tradition, cloth production on Sumba has always been part of a complex regional system (fig. 4.3). Indigo dyeing is concentrated at the eastern and western tips of the island, in coastal regions where indigo plants grow well. Coastal dwellers traded indigo and dyed threads with the people of the interior, who had a longer rainy season and better year-round food production. Regional trade involved coastal dwellers bringing cloth, lime, and salt to the interior, where they would exchange them for tubers, corn, vegetables, and chickens. When the first Dutch administrators and missionaries came to the island, they reported that the people of the interior wore only plain black cloth or white cloths with decorated borders, while ikat was produced only in Kodi and in the eastern domains of Kapunduk, Rindi, Kaliurang, and Pau.12 A taboo on tying threads and dyeing them was enforced for the domains of Napu, Anakalang, Memboro, Wanukaka, Laura, Loli, and Wewewa.13 Today, however, virtually all Sumbanese women and girls learn how to weave and tie threads into designs even though imported, Western-style clothing is readily available at even the most remote rural markets. Hand-woven sarungs and loincloths are necessary for ceremonial dress and traditional exchanges, and it seems that local production has never been stronger. The introduction of new materials and designs has influenced local fashions to create a series of new looks that have developed in the past four decades. Kodi produces the greatest variety of different cloths on the island of Sumba,14 but until recently, tourist dollars have gone almost exclusively to the larger, more representational cloths of East Sumba. Collectors I have spoken to and websites that sell cloths have occasionally included one or two identified as kain kodi, but rarely any from other parts of West Sumba. Tourists who travel to the island, even if they stay in the new luxury resorts at Nihiwatu or Newa Sumba (both located in West Sumba), are generally more interested in the representational cloths of the eastern part of the island. Recent fashions

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Figure 4.3. Winding dyed threads on the veranda.

for supplementary weft (pa humbi) and floating weave (lambeleko) are almost exclusively for the domestic market, and since they are time-consuming, they can fetch high prices. Most of them are done entirely with commercial threads and use bright, store-bought threads, although in Kodi the bright colors are always against a dark background (fig. 4.4) — unlike the gaudy new combinations now seen in Loli and Wewewa, which were not traditional textileproducing areas. Concerns of quality and speed of production also enter into the distinction between time-consuming traditional crafts and speedier commercial production. The Muslim village in Kodi, Pero, is the site of the highest recorded commercial production of cloth in the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur.15 In 1982, a study of communities that relied on weaving for their income recorded that the six hundred inhabitants of Pero produced eight thousand cloths a year, or about 100 to 120 per household. But in Pero, cloth is produced in a secular atmosphere, without using traditional indigo or sacrificing a piglet to the indigo spirit, and Pero cloths are of such poor quality that they are usually not appropriate for ceremonial exchanges within Kodi. They are purchased, however, to fulfill minor ceremonial obligations and as gestures of mourning at a funeral.

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Figure 4.4. Marta Mete setting up the threads on her loom.

In the 1980s, a local textile cooperative was established in Kodi under the leadership of Marta Mete, the fifth and youngest wife of Hermanus Rangga Horo, the last Dutch appointed raja in the area (fig. 4.5). She worked in collaboration with her co-wife, Mama Lina, the raja’s fourth wife, and about half a dozen other women in the Bondo Kodi area. Marta Mete traveled to Java and Bali to exhibit Kodi textiles at fabric shows, and she was in contact with merchants who were trying to develop new markets in tribal art shops for clothing designers of ikat fabric backpacks, jackets, and purses and for an emerging number of backpacker tourists who traveled into Kodi villages to buy textiles directly from the villagers who produce them. The modest boom in tourism in the 1990s16 greatly increased the amount of cash flowing into remote villages, but it also increased the tensions and conflicts surrounding commercial activity.

Marta Mete: A Personality Expressed in Textile Design Marta Mete had been one of my finest informants during the first period of my fieldwork (1978–1981), when her husband was still alive and she was the

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Figure 4.5. Marta Mete sitting with her husband behind her house.

favored wife in a household made up of more than fifty people. Raja Horo had had five wives, but two of them had left him, so three were currently living in his compound. He had four children from his first wife, nine from his second, five from his third, seven from his fourth, and four from his fifth. When I first met him in 1979, sixteen children were still living at home with his three resident wives in a series of small thatched bungalows behind a single larger wooden house with a corrugated iron roof. The eldest wife, Mina Notoloksono (her father had been Javanese), had her own room in the main house, while the others lived with their children in the thatched bungalows but came to spend the night with Raja Horo on a rotation system. Raja Horo told me that he tried to be fair to all his wives, but he allowed Marta Mete to control his finances and all the important paperwork because she was the best educated and most competent. She was also the most outgoing of his wives and the most socially assured. She reached out to me, inviting me to accompany her to remote locations to visit the finest indigo dyers in their secluded shacks and explaining much of the process and its symbolic meanings. She was very lively and articulate, but also practically minded and not tremendously interested in the more esoteric aspects of indigo lore. She wanted to learn how to make cloths that would have a modern appeal to foreign visitors,17 and she was also very interested in looking at catalogues of older cloth with designs that could be copied or reinterpreted.

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While the eldest wife did not participate in textile production, both Marta Mete and Korilina, the fourth wife, were very active cloth designers. They invested in store-bought thread and looms and recruited younger women to work with them in a cash-based production system. On market days, young women from the villages would come in to the household to pick up freshly dyed threads strung onto a loom, and they would take them home to weave them. With this system of divided labor, a cloth was “made up of cash” even before it was finished: The work of tying the threads to create an ikat pattern could be valued at 5,000 rupiah, dyeing the threads in the indigo bath would be 8,000 rupiah, weaving the threads on a backstrap loom would be 4,000 rupiah.18 Weaving is the most time-consuming of these stages (taking from two weeks to a month of labor), while tying in the design rarely takes more than a week and dyeing takes just four or five days once the bath is prepared. Marta specialized in designing ikat sarungs (lawo pawolo) and indigo men’s loincloths (hanggi gyundu). In the years I was able to observe her, most of them had a striped or plaid main body (what the Sumbanese call gundu) and a decorative border (fig. 4.6). Kodi women’s cloth contains apparently geometrical designs that are named, indicating their symbolic resonances. As I have argued earlier,19 many of the items are bridewealth components — parts of the animals (kiku ndara, the horse’s tail, kaloro kari, the buffalo’s rope) or gold (hamoli rara, gold pendant) exchanged by women for a counterpayment of cloth. For this reason, the cloths could be seen as “decorative receipts” that record the receipt of livestock by allowing the new bride to wear their icons spread across her hips and thighs as she dances in her new village. Other elements represent female sexuality (the butterfly, kabebo) or productive activity (kadanga kaloro, the rope winder). Marta was particularly fond of a swastikalike pattern identified as a crab (karapako). The crab is emblematic of occult female powers, since it is an animal that curls its claws inwards and conceals its weapons until the moment it attacks. “The crab is not aggressive initially. It is only after it has observed someone or something that it moves to grab them,” I was told, explaining that this was a feminine technique of controlled observation followed by a surreptitious assault. “Men are like bulls. They charge in front of everyone. But women are more like crabs. They sit hidden in the dark corners and wait for their opportunity to grab what they need.” Crabs were also associated with female acquisitiveness and calculation — a skill that came to be linked to bookkeeping and money management. When Marta was managing the Horo household, even as the most junior wife, she had books and records of all the debts and all the loans that had been made. She had custody of all the financial documents,

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Figure 4.6. Marta Mete unwinding the thread.

and thus all the family secrets. Her co-wives were seen as not capable of this level of organization. “At that time,” one of her daughters-in-law later said to me, “she was the one in control, but the others were like crabs, waiting under the rocks. They knew the old raja would die, and then they could move in and attack.” The crab can be an emblem of female sexuality, but also of female treachery. I realized during my first fieldwork that there was resentment of Marta Mete, but I had no idea how deeply it ran or how much her co-wives were simply waiting for their husband’s death to exact their revenge. I returned to Sumba in 1984 and 1985, when Raja Horo was still alive but ailing, and stayed in the Horo home for periods of several months each time. When I was a guest, I was given a bedroom adjacent to that of the senior wife, but close enough to overhear conversations in the other rooms. Raja Horo had come to call me his “long lost daughter, the one born across the seas and over the land who finally returned to him.” He told me that when I married I should have my husband come and bring buffalo and horses as bridewealth to his house, since he considered me part of his extended family. In those final visits, however, it was clear that he realized he was near the end of his life, and he was concerned about how his widows (one in her sixties, the other two in their

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forties) would fare. He asked each of them to promise him that she would not remarry, and he said to me that he hoped his investments in the education of a number of his sons would provide adequate support to their mothers. Three months after I left him in August 1985, I received word that the old raja had died at the age of eighty-four, and a huge traditional funeral was planned. In 1986, I returned to Sumba with my husband, but the old raja was not there to receive the bridewealth. I stayed in the house still occupied by his widows, but it was clear that the power dynamic had shifted. Now that the old raja was no longer there, the other wives who had been less successful at controlling him but had produced more children began to claim more authority within the household. Indonesian law allows a man to take up to five wives (the number prescribed by Islam), but only one wife can be officially registered to receive the pension given to all civil servants. Mina Notoloksono, the second wife and eldest one to survive her husband, was designated as the “official widow,” and therefore had control of the only monthly salary in the household. Once Raja Horo died, his pension was halved — a major blow to a household still supporting twelve children in school. The determinant of a woman’s continuing power in the household shifted from her influence over their shared husband to the network that she could summon among her children, especially those already grown and collecting salaries. The eldest wife, known in the family as “Mama Tua” (“oldest mother”), had two sons who had finished high school and were employed as civil servants, and two daughters who were schoolteachers. Mama Lina, the fourth wife, had three sons who were employed (fig. 4.7), while Marta Mete had just one. Her youngest son was only twelve when his father died and still had many years of schooling ahead of him. She also had one daughter, a recent high school graduate who later became the first Kodi girl to finish college, who was living at home and hoping to find funds to further her education.20 After the old raja’s death, the official head of the family was his oldest son, Samuel Horo, who was a retired attorney in Jakarta and had not visited the family for more than twenty years. He had his own serious health problems and in fact died just a few years later. His younger brother, the second son from the raja’s first marriage, John Horo, was the village headman of a remote administrative ward, where he lived with two of his three wives, also maintaining a household in the district capital of Bondokodi for another wife and all the children who attended secondary school. He came to assume leadership of the family and clashed immediately with Marta by taking control of a truck the family had purchased to build a large tombstone for Raja Horo’s grave in his ancestral village.

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Figure 4.7. Mama Lina (Marta Mete’s co-wife number four) with threads dyed in the crab pattern on a loom.

Ownership of a truck was a rarity for Sumbanese, since most vehicles on the island were owned by Chinese merchants who hired them out for public transportation and also used them to haul supplies for building projects contracted with the government. Only four other trucks were owned by Kodi families in the 1980s, but since official vehicles had been given to the local administrators and the doctor, the prestige of owning a motor vehicle was immense. When the truck was initially purchased in 1983, Marta had carried out the negotiations, meeting with the Chinese merchants and working out the terms of the loan at a local bank. Her eldest son, Niko, became the first driver of the truck, and used it not only for the work on the gravesite but also as public transportation to help pay back the massive loan. But her control of this most public and most splendid possession was always criticized. Once the old raja was gone, the truck was “requisitioned” by other family members who wanted to use it for construction projects of their own and were

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not concerned about earning money to keep up the loan payments. While Marta had signed the loan documents (secured by the pension paid out to her husband), she had no access to the pension now paid only to the oldest wife, and bank officials came to serve loan default documents against her for debts that had been assumed for the household as a whole. Police were called in to mediate a squabble about finances in one of the region’s most prominent families. The truck itself was taken back by the bank, and conditions were established for a series of repayments over a ten-year period. Marta decided to move out of the compound behind the raja’s old house, and with the assistance of her son purchased a small lot of land where she built her own thatched hut with a dirt floor. The funds for the textile cooperative were placed in other hands so they would not be taken by jealous family members, but there was so much bad blood that the oldest wife asked one of her sons to move in with his seven children to occupy the old raja’s house and assert that it really belonged to her. The situation I found on my return to the field in 2000 was astounding. The family homestead, where I had stayed for several months in 1984, 1986, and 1988, was now occupied by a separate family. Marta was said to have “poisoned the family with money” and was no longer even sharing a kitchen with her former co-wives. I also heard from the wife of one of Mina Notoloksono’s sons that he believed that Marta had tried to poison his mother, first trying to damage her fertility with “blue medicines” that could cause miscarriages and then with other occult preparations that afflicted her with anemia and weaknesses of the blood. Paradoxically, this same woman also told me she had received “an inheritance” of medicines to keep her own husband faithful and to discourage him from the polygamous unions that were almost a trademark of the Horo family. This medicine was “clean medicine” (moro hinggiro), not like the “darker medicines” (moro mete, literally “black medicines” — supposedly passed down the matriline of those, like Marta, who had the word “black” in their names).21 Disruptions in the Horo household were also linked to wider national processes in Indonesia, which caused an abrupt decline in cash incomes and rising unemployment among educated city dwellers. The fiscal crisis in 1997 came at the same time as an ecological crisis (El Niño) that produced drought and famine in 1998 and a political crisis when Suharto finally resigned after more than three decades of autocratic rule. The reformasi era began with a sudden burst of democratic freedoms and a new openness in all the media. Sumba suddenly exploded with new political parties and movements, but inflation spiraled out of control and many government jobs were cut. Agriculture began

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to recover its earlier place as the center of the local economy. Paradoxically, this had the effect of revitalizing traditional activities at the same time that the rewards of education and commerce were no longer so evident. High school graduates were not able to get the jobs in government offices that they wished, so they returned to the villages and became active in new political and social groups, as well as helping to mount ceremonial feasts. The dislocations of the fall of Suharto plunged urban Indonesia into a depression, but in remote areas they had the effect of enhancing traditional lifestyles and agricultural subsistence. With inflation rampant, the prices for coffee, coconuts, and cocoa rose, providing better markets for small-scale farmers with a few cash crops. Fewer cattle and buffalo were shipped to Java for the feast of the Islamic New Year, and more were eaten on the island at feasts dedicated to the ancestors. “You live better in the villages than in the towns now,” many people concluded, and Marta soon found her stay-at-home son the dynamic leader of a new political party, while the other one with a college education struggled to survive in the regency capital of Waingapu. Still full of life and enthusiasm, Marta decided to travel to Java in August 2000 to visit her daughter and explore new possibilities for textile marketing. She wanted to work with someone who had a store in Jakarta and would commission Sumba textiles to be recycled into patchwork garments. She left with bags full of older textiles (valued for their true colors and textures, even if they had a rip or tear) as well as a few splendid examples of her own craftsmanship in traditional indigo. “I will leave these old gossips behind and find my own way,” she assured me.

Sex in the Marketplace: Money and Its Temptations Textiles on Sumba are both clothing and the currency of traditional ceremonial exchange: Many fine folded cloths must be presented at each marriage as part of a counterpayment for a bridewealth paid in horses, buffalo, and gold, and at each funeral as a sign of mourning and later also a counterpayment for animals contributed to the slaughter. Cloth is also given to show that a contract is binding (“you sign your name when you accept the cloth”), as a kind of “interest payment” to ask for more time to discharge a debt, and as a gesture of thanks for a kindness extended long ago and never reciprocated. Cloth in this sense is counted; its value is estimated on the basis of its materials, workmanship, and design, and its relative worth in relation to the livestock traded for it. These estimations place indigo dyed cloths at higher rank than those made with commercial dyes, place hand-spun thread ahead of store-bought threads,

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and overall value labor-intensive techniques of supplementary weft and ikat dyeing over simpler and faster designs. In the marketplace, however, cloth competes with money, the currency of traditional exchanges competing with the currency of modern commercial transactions, and cloth is of course also directly exchanged for money. This has created a certain nervousness about the relation between value and the market and the ways in which those who venture into the market may compromise the traditional obligations and moral standards represented by ancestral cloth. Gender concepts are particularly destabilized, because women have had a leadership role in textile production but have generally been excluded from other forms of monetary transactions. Suzanne Brenner has written sensitively about the relation between money and sexuality on Java, where market women are known for having “slippery sarungs” and morals supposedly soiled by commerce. In spite of an official rhetoric that associates men with mysticism and control and women with the body and sensuality, there is also another view in which men are seen as “unable to control themselves” (especially regarding sex and gambling) and women are presented as more monetarily responsible. Her argument explicitly frames one side as that of “official Islam,” while the other is the “culture of the marketplace.” This material from Sumba suggests that the “culture of the marketplace” is more widespread than Islam — as indeed might be expected in an archipelago where people have been linked by trade for centuries. The efforts of noblewomen to move into commerce have become entangled in the complex new moralities of the world of money, and there is a sneaking suspicion that women are better at managing small kiosks, textile marketing, and small-scale trade. The growing importance of money on Sumba over the past twenty years has been associated with a shift in gender relations, in which women have gained some power (through receiving government salaries as teachers and office workers, and as traders) while men have lost ground. Improved communications have made men more mobile, and many of them have started to merantau, or “travel to other islands,” in a pattern of labor migration that is widespread in Indonesia but had until the twenty-first century been rare on Sumba. A preoccupation with money is “modern,” but it is also linked to low social status, on both Java and Sumba. Keane notes that people of slave descent (and, I might add, also members of the matriclans linked to hereditary witchcraft) are seen as particularly “clever at calculation” because they are unconstrained by a sense of honor.22 A nobleman must appear to disdain material consider-

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ations, even if he is privately bitter about unpaid debts, because an aristocratic disdain for haggling is part of his public persona. For these reasons, Raja Horo himself could not be seen to keep strict accounts, but he did ask his youngest wife to do so. While she was supposed to see to it that every last rupiah of the family’s money was wisely spent, her senior co-wives felt excluded from the decision-making process. “She was always sitting with the old raja and whispering over her books,” they told me once she had moved out. “She never told us what was going on. They both acted as if we were illiterate.” On Sumba, the fact that women are seen as “better at handling money” is linked to ideas that they are inherently more acquisitive and concerned with owning new clothes and jewelry to the exclusion of honoring personal relations. Marta Mete was already criticized for producing only four children, while her senior co-wives had had nine and seven apiece. “She’s too fond of dressing up and traveling to the town to stay home with a young child as we do,” they said, implying that she had controlled her own fertility with contraceptives obtained from the indigo dyers and herbalists she frequented. The image of new commercial acquisitiveness has in recent years been linked to the wild spirit mistress (yora) that most wealthy and powerful men are said to have. Raja Horo was widely known to have secret meetings with a wild “spirit wife” (ariwei marapu) who took the form of a snake and appeared most often in his bed.23 Other men met their secret lovers in the form of birds,24 wild pigs, or marine animals like crabs. The traditional wild spirit mistress appears as a sexually alluring woman who tempts her human lover with the prospect of wealth free from social obligation. She asks him to offer her private sacrifices and requires him to observe idiosyncratic taboos (avoiding a particular food or form of dress, abstaining from sexual contact with his human wives on one day of the week, etc.) in return for providing him with sudden and inexplicable wealth. In the past, this usually took the form of livestock — herds of horses and buffalo that reproduced at unusual rates — but today it is mainly money. Keane describes the version he heard of yora stories in Anakalang in the 1980s: Yora have several features in common with those presented by market, money, and government development projects. The yora is a source of antisocial wealth that cannot reproduce itself, lead to social ties, or be transmitted to one’s children. It is also associated with illicit unions between men and women, thus exemplifying unrestrained desire. Yora represent the conjunction of wealth from beyond the society with the threat of loss.

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It makes sense that such wealth is ephemeral, since it often manifests individual willfulness. The yora, like the government development project, is distinguished by the inexplicable entry of money from no comprehensible or stable source. The fact that this wealth is ultimately sterile parallels its lack of grounding in social interaction. Those who are considered most likely to deal with yora are either young, unmarried, adventurous men or, more rarely, men so rich and powerful that they can hope to enter into such dealings with impunity.25 While I think this account is roughly consistent with earlier descriptions of yora in Kodi I have published,26 I have two important modifications to suggest: The first is that the linkage of the yora to money and modernity (the government development project) is a recent one, dating to the New Order period of economic expansion in the late 1980s. The second is that describing this figure as a “demonic patroness” or “demonic familiar”27 introduces a Calvinist interpretive frame that is not shared by all Sumbanese, or even perhaps the majority of them. Since Marta Mete’s control over her husband and the family finances were explicitly linked to occult powers and the yora, these differences are also relevant to my wider argument about links between women, wealth, and modernity. Addressing historical shifts in the idea of the yora, I should note first of all that almost all wealthy older men in Kodi were said to have relations with a wild spirit, and I witnessed several divinations designed to find the cause of a man’s death where this spirit was explicitly addressed.28 The yora was a source of pride, since attracting such a spirit implied that the man concerned was not only virile and appealing, but also brave enough to confront mysterious forces and triumph over them. A prominent Sumbanese businessman, Cornelius Malo Djakababa, has provided an elaborate description of the yora who was an important part of the life of his father Yoseph Malo, who was raja of the neighboring district of Rara from 1912 to 1960: Aside from the forementioned wives, it was generally believed that Yoseph Malo had another wife, i.e. his mystical or supernatural wife . . . locally called “mavinne marapu,” whom he periodically met in romantic rendezvous. This mystical wife was said to have a strong role in Yoseph Malo’s life and fortunes. It was believed that she was responsible particularly in protecting him from harm, physical and spiritual, from natural and supernatural causes. In ritual language she was addressed by Yoseph Malo as:

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You the compartment of my betel pouch [Yo ndappeta kalukunggu] You the extension of my loin cloth [Yo kazanagata kalambonggu]29 As a child, I remember my father Yoseph Malo often mentioned her during rituals or in his talks with close family members. She was said to be very beautiful, with flowing black hair and a melodious singing voice. She was said to be very affectionate and full of concern but she could also cause him some harm. He could be mysteriously ill at times, if he displeased her, for example if he delayed their rendezvous, or if during a feast her share of a sacrificial animal was forgotten.30 He goes on to provide details about their favorite place of rendezvous, a cave with a cool natural spring inside it, where Yoseph Malo would go bringing a white rooster, white rice, and his betel bag filled with fresh sirih, betel, and tobacco. His manservant Popo would accompany him to the cave entrance, and he reported “he would hear the beautiful voice of a lady singing love songs from deep inside the cave . . . and every time Yoseph Malo reemerged from the cave, he was relaxed, happy and . . . [had] the smell of a person after a traditional herbal perfumed coconut massage.”31 His son continues with comparative notes about Nyai Roro Kidul, the goddess of the south seas who was reported to be the consort of Javanese kings, adding “such beliefs have certainly contributed to the mysteries and spiritual powers surrounding the lives of honored and respected leaders like Yoseph Malo.”32 This description suggests a female personage much closer to Western images of mermaids and water nymphs than demonesses, and it bears testimony to the fact that consorting with such a woman was a point of aristocratic distinction and political prestige. The wealth obtained from a yora was asocial, but it was certainly not unwelcome, and while it came with certain restrictions and dangers, many men were willing to assume these. In the modern era, some people have suggested to me that stories of yora might simply have been “covers” for a man sneaking off for an illicit tryst with a human lover (perhaps one married to another man), and I would imagine that such suspicions may have been around in the past as well. Calvinist teachings by Dutch missionaries on Sumba were full of references to temptations of the flesh, particularly since persuading local leaders to renounce polygamy was one of the greatest struggles the missionaries faced.33 In the summer of 2000, a former Calvinist village evangelist, Ngila Wora, whom I tried to interview about his family history, repeated a whole series of Dutch songs and proverbs he had memorized about the dangers of female sexuality. This recitation, however, only seemed to have the effect of exciting

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his narrative imagination, since he followed these verses with an account of how he himself was expelled from the church for taking a second and third wife. “I am in my seventies now, but I just married a girl of twenty one, and I ask her to share my bed along with her older co-wife,” he confessed, eager to demonstrate how unconvincing all this missionary instruction had been. The linkage of sexuality and asocial wealth was not, therefore, I would argue, a negative one for most Sumbanese, but in fact one of the attractions of these liaisons. While Dutch ministers did describe all the ancestral spirits and local spirits (marapu) as demons (setan), local people never accepted this. “How can our own dead mothers and fathers be described as demons?” one old man told me, partly to explain why he never converted. Since 1960, all the Protestant clergy have been native-born, and in the twenty-first century this is also now true of the Catholic priests. When I first came to the island in 1979, 80 percent of the people were officially marapu worshippers, but in the 1990s heavy government pressures to convert and opportunities for education and government jobs made conversion much more attractive. By the turn of the twenty-first century, 65 percent of the population had converted, but because of shifts in leadership in both the independent Christian Church of Sumba and the Catholic priesthood, Christianity had become more “Sumbanese” at the same time that more Sumbanese became Christian. Polygamous men were accepted back at the communion table, Christian graveyards had been emptied by villagers reclaiming their ancestors’ bones to bury them (underneath Christian crosses) in the traditional villages, and a spirited syncretism had replaced the stricter Calvinism of the largely unsuccessful European missionaries. The figure of the yora has, I argue, undergone a shape-shifting process that expresses Sumbanese ambivalence about their encounter with modernity, and particularly the new importance of both money and female commerce. From being a morally neutral wild spirit who provided an unorthodox path to wealth, she has become the image of an entrepreneurial woman who, like Marta Mete, holds her man in a sexual thrall in order to develop her own economic fortunes. With increasing Christian conversion, she may more often now occasionally be described as a “demon” rather than a “spirit wife,” but the first translation is still rarer, and her enticements outweigh her dangers for most Sumbanese. She is the seduction of the inexplicable and the unknown, the face of female daring in a world where women were supposed to be retiring and house-bound.

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Conclusions: The Sexualization of Commerce Marta Mete’s life offers us a parable about the dangers for women in dealing too directly with the world of money, since commerce is itself sexualized and seen as largely “illegitimate” in relation to traditional “social” sources of wealth. Because money can be secretly stored and hoarded, it is hard to enforce social practices that call for the redistribution and circulation of wealth — and those people who deal in money are inevitably suspected of being much richer than they actually are. “Art” and “commerce” are supposed to be separated, but are in fact nearly always inextricably linked. Textile artists, like all others, respond to market pressures and seek to innovate to sell their goods more successfully. Marta Mete is a woman who has suffered partially because of her role as a go-between and mediator between traditional textile weavers and modern dealers and exporters in centers like Java and Bali. Her story reveals two aspects of the “dark side” of textile production — its links to witchcraft, poisons, and supernatural influence on the one hand, and its links to money, modernity, and capitalist expansion on the other. Marta Mete’s story shows how her accomplishments were both praised and criticized in relation to new ideas of female commerce and craving, sexualizing the world of money and inscribing it within a new order of gendered power. I argue that this is a new value because the association with money itself is recent, although the idea of the spirit wife is recorded in the writings of early missionaries and others. Textile dyeing is one of the occult arts, and its present commercialization relates to the links between witchcraft and accumulation and ways in which women’s involvement in commerce has recently become inscribed in an ambivalent discourse about “modern values” and consumerism. As Geschiere has noted, the strong presence of witchcraft and sorcery in the more modern sectors of society in both Africa and Indonesia “is not an exotic curiosity. . . . It is also a language that ‘signifies’ the modern changes; it helps one to understand new inequalities, unexpected and enigmatic as they are, as seen ‘from below’; it promises unheard of chances to enrich oneself, and it can serve as a guide to find one’s way in the networks of modern society, reproduced on a much wider scale than the familial relations at home.”34 The clash between cloth as currency and money as currency has also been implicated in struggles that modern households have about control of cash and modern forms of debt (such as the bank loan for the truck). Forms of

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witchcraft in Kodi are the “dark side of kinship,” since they introduce the possibility of treason in a sheltered domestic space supposedly free of discord. Even in the interior of the family there is a frightening possibility of inequality and thus jealousy, and those people who most need to be trusted may also prove to be capable of betrayal. Because witches and sorcerers are often believed to be resentful people of lower rank, the discourse of the occult appears to confirm equality but encourages ambition and inequality at the same time. In more egalitarian contexts, witchcraft can express a deep distrust of power and also indicate a means of containing it. In traditional settings, the occult associations of indigo reminded people of certain limits that should not be transgressed. But commerce and state development projects have also reoriented gender relations. Geschiere argues that “modern transformations have tended to corrupt notions on witchcraft, so that it risks degenerating into a discourse on power and especially on disempowerment.”35 The “resistance” Gell talks about in art objects — their ability to challenge us and captivate us visually — suggests that the “magic” of indigo dyeing and the occult arts associated with it are not destroyed by a more commercial form of production but perhaps only enhanced by it. Gell asserts that things are made as a form of instrumental action: Art (and other objects) are produced to influence the thoughts and actions of others. Even those objects that seem to be without a directly identifiable function — that is, objects that have previously been theorized as simple objects of aesthetic contemplation — are in fact made to act upon the world and to act upon other persons. Material objects thus embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. The psychology of art needs to look at how patterns and perception have specific effects on viewers and are designed to arouse fear, desire, admiration, or confusion. Gell’s work suggests a more active model of an object’s biography, in which the object may not only assume a number of different identities as imported wealth, ancestral valuable, or commodity, but may also “interact” with the people who gaze upon it, use it, and try to possess it. Gendering objects in itself allocates aspects of agency and identity to things,36 and Gell’s model of the “distributed mind” which we find scattered through objects has a strong kinship with Strathern’s notion of the “partible person” who is divisible into things that circulate along specific exchange trajectories. The equivalence suggested between the agency of persons and of things calls into question the borders of individual persons and collective representations in a number of ways. It implies that we need to pay more attention to the phenomenological dimension of our interactions with the material world and

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interrogate the objects that fascinate us as well as our reasons for feeling this fascination. The magical practices associated with the indigo hut were, as I have argued earlier, both a form of protest and a form of resistance for Kodi women, although they were also riddled with female rivalry.37 More recent confrontations with the market, tourism, and commerce have shaped older concepts (such as the “spirit wife”) in terms of new temptations (money and bank credit). Unused to these new forms of economic calculation, and resisting the suspicions of family members, many female entrepreneurs have struggled, often with little success, to find their own way in a new world. This story of one textile “author” suggests that parts of her struggle were told through the medium of the crab designs she tied at the edges of hersarungs.