Textile Commerce and Songket Creativity: The Role of Heritage Entrepreneurs in Contemporary Gold-thread Weaving in Sumatra

Abstract

The weaving and marketing of “traditional textiles” today in places like Indonesia often involve not only thread markets, weavers, customers, and ritual wearers but also savvy heritage entrepreneurs who conceptualize and promote such cloths as important icons of ethnic peoplehood. This article explores the key role of such heritage entrepreneurs in the contemporary design and production of metal-thread songket textiles in Pandai Sikek, West Sumatra, and in Palembang in South Sumatra. Drawing on fieldwork interviews with indigenous cloth heritage brokers and the weavers they mentor, the article focuses on specific cloths to illuminate dimensions of songket's striking resiliency and artistic creativity today. Long a cloth of the Asian marketplace, Sumatran songket today is emerging as a textile of social class mobility, a transition yielding new weaving styles “within tradition.”

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