Powerful connections: Cloth, identity, and global links in East Sumba, Indonesia

People in the eastern portion of the island of Sumba, Indonesia have produced strikingly pictorial and technically complex textiles for centuries. Images within these fabrics vividly portray symbolic elements of the animist conceptual system of the island. Such textiles have long been important in local social and ritual contexts, as well as within a system of trade that has frequently involved people from regions of the world distant from Sumba's shores. In addition to local iconography, fabrics produced on the island throughout the past relate visually, through motifs, the diverse influences from the outside world that Sumbanese people have experienced. These influences include Chinese trade, Indian prestige goods, and the colonial presence of the Dutch.;Notions of social status and prestige are integral not only to the caste-based, animist belief system of East Sumba, but also extend to the attitudes of Sumbanese people toward connections with outsiders. In recent decades, Sumba's fabrics have been increasingly prized within a growing "ethnic art" market in Indonesia. Although the textiles of the region have long been valued in international collections, the modern development of international tourism in Indonesia has greatly stimulated demand for them. Simultaneously, this demand facilitates an increasing interaction between East Sumbanese people and foreign consumers.;This dissertation examines how the production, use, and trade of East Sumba's textiles within this expanded market provide insights into how local people are negotiating power, identity, and meaning in the current world. Such negotiations involve issues of class, gender, and ethnicity. I argue that concerns of prestige and identity are basic, motivating forces in Sumba, which become visible through the creativity involved in local fabrics. This inventiveness goes beyond the artistry involved in textiles to include the social strategies, behaviors, and identities which surround them. Such creativity plays off of the local and the foreign, providing an ongoing flux within Sumbanese "traditions.";Through the chapters of the dissertation, I consider the region of my research in historical as well as in specific social and cultural contexts. My scope involves a network of villages and their connections, through the trade of textiles, with cosmopolitan regions of Bali and Java (islands several hundred miles to the west of Sumba in the Indonesian archipelago).;The study enters several village domains and follows a number of lives in East Sumba, elucidating the ways that social power, gendered roles, and aesthetic sensibilities intersect in local communities. I pay particular attention to the role of the emotions and of the imagination in affecting people's decisions and actions, and impelling creative responses to the dilemmas they encounter.;As the region's textiles have throughout history functioned as vehicles of identity, power, and social connections, I demonstrate that they can provide a window into the realities and transformations currently taking place within a region experiencing the expanded social realities of modernity.