Weaving Voices

Episode 6

Threads of Life; A Visual Map of Indonesian Island Communities

[00:00:00] Rebecca Burgess: Supporting the continuation of Indonesian textile and natural dye systems is the life's work of a husband and wife team, their collaborators and is the mission of the organization that they founded, Threads of Life.

[00:00:31] Rebecca Burgess: This is Weaving Voices, a podcast that stitches textile tradition, economic philosophy, and climate science into a quilt of understanding. Designed to transform our thinking and actions, both as citizens and material culture makers and users. I'm Rebecca Burgess, the host of this Whetstone Collective series, which explores the nexus of modern day economic design and the history of textiles.[00:01:00] 

[00:01:00] Rebecca Burgess: In this episode, William Ingram shares the work that he and his wife Jean have been undertaking since the late 1990s when they founded Threads of Life. At this time, Southeast Asia was going through an economic crisis, and these traditions were becoming endangered. The commercial crops people had been selling for years were becoming worthless.

[00:01:21] Rebecca Burgess: If the weavers can't afford to make something, they don't do it. People have to put food on the plate. Hence, threads of Life was born to try and assist people to figure out a way to continue their textile traditions economically. The organization was exposed to huge issues early on that ended up defining their approach.

[00:01:42] Rebecca Burgess: One was the transmission of knowledge between generations. William says, the government had already been pushing the use of synthetic dyes, which were deemed more affordable for people. At that time, natural dye traditions were not being passed on. 

[00:01:59] William Ingram: The other thing that [00:02:00] we realized was that we were also at a moment of seeing a change of the landscapes.

[00:02:06] William Ingram: People were going from having diverse subsistence, agri forestry gardens, agri forestry, meaning it's basically you are growing food within woodland and so you have multiple species with multiple uses. You have food plants and building materials and dye plants and medicine plants, all kinds of things there.

[00:02:29] William Ingram: These were being to cash crops. So they all began with sort of a "c"; there was cocoa, coffee, cloves, cashews. These plants were, were changing the landscape, so the access to the dye plants was disappearing as well. 

[00:02:47] Rebecca Burgess: That transition to commodity products was destabilizing to the natural dye systems.

[00:02:53] Rebecca Burgess: They started threads of life as a business but realized early on their work required more systemic [00:03:00] interventions. So they started a nonprofit called the Babali Foundation, and they got a lot of support over time. They worked with world class Ethnobotanists and were able to document 300 or so dye plants that are used in the dye processes.

[00:03:18] Rebecca Burgess: This is how they came to realize how complex and deep the textile culture is and how much it needed support and protection. He says there's clear evidence from academics that the textile tradition itself goes back to mainland Asia starting approximately 4,500 years ago. I wanted to know more about the color blue in this conversation and the variety of indigo traditions that William has seen in these Indonesian island communities.

[00:03:49] Rebecca Burgess: The chemistry of indigo basically means that there's not a great deal of variety in how you make it. It's made in Indonesia with slaked lime, which is used to [00:04:00] create a paste. 

[00:04:02] William Ingram: The interesting thing from a dyer's point of view is that, They don't allow the paste to settle. Normally what you try and do is dye in the supernatant liquid, the liquid that's above the paste.

[00:04:15] William Ingram: It's all stirred up, and you dye basically directly into the reduced paste. This produces a rapid dark color. You have issues with having lime in your yarn, so you have to wash it out again. But everyone's going for a dark blue. There's no idea of lighter shades. It's like a dark blue. Basically, in many of these traditions, the colors that we would call blue and black are denoted by the same word.

[00:04:43] William Ingram: So there isn't a difference in the language between dark blue and black. They're considered shades of the same color. 

[00:04:50] Rebecca Burgess: To break down this process, imagine yarn bound in certain increments in the spacing of that yarns length. That would be used as a resist so that the dye [00:05:00] can't permeate under the bound areas. Then once woven, these blank spots that have no dye support the development of a dynamic motif weaving process.

[00:05:11] Rebecca Burgess: You can manage this motif in a woven structure, but you literally start to design for the motif at the stage you are dying the yarn. It's an incredible mathematical process.

[00:05:25] Rebecca Burgess: William says, the islands have different abilities to grow indigo for certain durations during the year. The process of growing is now done on small agricultural plots. It used to be wild harvested prior to colonization. 

[00:05:41] William Ingram: On the island of soba, it's cultivated because there has been sort of commercial production for the Dutch market back then, all the way back to the 20s and 30s.

[00:05:51] William Ingram: So they have cultivated, but very few other places outside Java actually cultivate the indigo. So in order [00:06:00] for there to be some specialization to help the economics of this work, like I talked about earlier, We have been trying to encourage some specialization, so farmers in some areas grow this and here's how to make the paste and you can sell this paste to this network of weavers that we work with on this island.

[00:06:21] William Ingram: For years, we tried to get the weavers to do it, to do the cultivation, but really that was like we were working against this stream there because they're putting their energy into what produces the most money for them, which is the weaving process. So eventually we realized we had to go to neighboring communities and get farmers there to become suppliers.

[00:06:43] Rebecca Burgess: In that process, it sounds like some agreement setting took place about who will specialize in, what. Was it those who were already growing The Indigo who are interested in this. He cites one example in Timor, which was part of a large research project that they were a part of. [00:07:00] 

[00:07:00] William Ingram: It happened to be in a village that the name of the village,

[00:07:04] William Ingram: taum, actually means indigo. So it's like, okay. There was clearly an indigo tradition here. The, the weavers hadn't been using indigo for a long time, but the village head, at the time that the project started, he had a background as an agricultural extension worker for the government, and so he immediately got onto this.

[00:07:24] William Ingram: It was like, you gotta find your champion. You gotta find the person who's going to take the idea and run with it. And he was interested in this. It sort of ticked all the boxes of what he was passionate about and he's run with this. So now he's growing Indigo, he's making the paste. I mean, he's really excited to get like five or 10 kilograms of paste and it's like we wanna get up to hundreds of kilograms so that we can really start to supply some of these dyers.

[00:07:52] William Ingram: But he's excited even at that level. 

[00:07:55] Rebecca Burgess: William says he's the grower and the pastemaker, while the dyer and [00:08:00] Weaver tend to be the same person. 

[00:08:02] William Ingram: Traditionally the whole textile process was produced by a single family. On some islands, the making of a textile was intergenerational. Some of these dyes, the longer you keep them, particularly for the red process, the slower you allow that to generate, to develop, the better the color will be.

[00:08:23] William Ingram: So a dye log would be done by one woman, and potentially it wouldn't be woven until her granddaughter. In many places, that tradition has broken down, and so you have one woman making it from beginning to end. In places where it has become more commercialized, like in Java or in somewhere, as I was mentioning, then you have specialist Indigo dyers.

[00:08:44] William Ingram: I say that, but in some places in Timor, it's often also places where the culture is still very strong. So where you have a lot of the rituals and taboos around the indigo work mean that not every woman or every household wants to be [00:09:00] involved in doing that ritual process. So the ritual strength can also leads to specialization as well.

[00:09:06] William Ingram: You only have a couple of weavers in a community, a couple of dyers in the community who are willing to perform all those rituals and they're getting paid by the other dyers and so it makes it economically viable for them to do so. 

[00:09:23] Rebecca Burgess: Delving deeper into what exactly ritual means in this context. Each person has a particular specialization.

[00:09:30] Rebecca Burgess: He mentions a master weaver he works with who is totally willing to share everything about the process, including with the neighbors. She once told him that the really important component of the work is the offering she makes in places underneath her home. She divulged that when she made the building, they did a ceremony and that's really the secret of her family's lineage.

[00:09:53] Rebecca Burgess: That's why they get such a good blue, she says. William also mentions that his wife, Jean [00:10:00] was doing some work in Timor where she was trying to help a community facilitate the passing down of knowledge from an elderly dyer to her daughter. 

[00:10:09] William Ingram: She is willing to pass on the knowledge. But then there is a ritual that she describes how when she was a child, her mother took her to an indigo dyer way, way, wait, like there was like 30 kilometers away.

[00:10:22] William Ingram: It was like a two day walk. And after the ceremony there, which was basically an initiation ceremony for her as a dyer, they came back with two indigo pots, one that had the paste in it and one that had the dye water in. And these became their mother pots in their dyer studio. And so it is that that lineage, that ritual connection to the ancestors, the whole idea that there's much more going on than the physical process, that there is a spiritual tradition connected with this.[00:11:00] 

[00:11:00] William Ingram: I have come to look at this, is that the whole material culture is a pedagogical process. It's a way of teaching, a way of passing or knowledge between generations. And so a master is not just one who has mastered the technical aspects. A master is considered someone who has mastered these spiritual aspects, these symbolic language of these textiles and the traditions around them.

[00:11:27] William Ingram: The whole material culture and their ability to understand what has been passed on to them and to communicate it to other. 

[00:11:36] Rebecca Burgess: In the passing down of information about indigo fermentation and how to make dye, holistic forms of information are coming through about other aspects of life. William says he's come to understand that you can't really extract anything and try to understand it in isolation.

[00:11:54] William Ingram: There's a real tendency to want to say, what does this motif mean? What's the name of [00:12:00] this? We quickly realized that the motif was the least important part. You've got to look at the structure of the cloth. You get these bands, these registers of motifs along the cloth. That's a really important thing. You gotta understand what the names of those registers are, what motifs can go into those registers.

[00:12:21] William Ingram: The names that are used for that, where else are those words being used? Where is this sort of pattern of structured relationship between things also being expressed? So you go and look at the house. Tell me about the structure of the house. Tell me about the plants being used in the house. Where are they from?

[00:12:39] William Ingram: Why is the breast beam or the warp beam or the, the weavers sword, the beater? What are the plants being used for that? Where do they come from? What are the myths and stories associated with these objects, with these plant materials, with the places that they come from? And as this whole picture starts to develop, linkages [00:13:00] start to be made. 

[00:13:02] Rebecca Burgess: He tells a story in a village in East Bali where a unique and extraordinary process is done,

[00:13:07] Rebecca Burgess: that's only done in a few other places in the world. In the 1990s, he was writing an article about this village and was told by one of the villagers that there's a pattern in really everything that they do. 

[00:13:20] William Ingram: This pattern in the way the houses are laid out in the village, the way the buildings are laid out in the house, the way we sit in a meeting, organize ourselves in a procession, the way we make our offerings, where we set our offerings out, the way the paths go around the landscape, the way the hills are around this village, the way the village is placed in the land, the way the river passes through the land.

[00:13:41] William Ingram: He said all of this patterning, if you study it long enough that there can be a sudden moment of awakening and understanding. He described it like, and then you can become a medium or a healer or the charisma of a dancer and it certainly sounds like something out of a Dan Brown novel, a Da Vinci code kind of thing.[00:14:00] 

[00:14:00] Rebecca Burgess: It actually sounds deeply human to be that integrated with that we're made up of. Quantum physics would say we're just a bunch of vibrating particles and there's really no separation between us and everything around us. So between you and the tools you're using to weave, there's no separation. But all these things take three dimensional structure to have a system that is so in tune, it's really incredible. To think about a society that has that kind of resonance between all aspects of its existence.

[00:14:33] Rebecca Burgess: It's inspiring. This immersion and the pattern that people are living in is not an incredibly esoteric thing. The values of your society are embodied in the way you live and in your material culture. And this is true for our material culture in the West as well. He says that there's two ways of transmitting those values between generations.

[00:14:58] William Ingram: You do what our culture [00:15:00] does, which you sit our children down and we fill their head full of stuff, and we hope that that filters down into their heart and informs the way they live their lives. Or you can devotionally follow a way of life until you start to recognize the underlying values that have informed that way of life.

[00:15:20] William Ingram: And that the intellectual understanding emerges out of living that lifestyle. And so this is the opposite way of passing on information, and this is the way that these traditions continue to do so. And so the material culture is the pneumonic, is the reminder, is the system of encoding. Each object has got so many stories and meanings and myths associated with it that the object itself becomes, ah, this reminds me of these stories.

[00:15:53] Rebecca Burgess: Connecting the intangible culture to the material world becomes a way of passing it all forward to [00:16:00] the next generation. The passing on of knowledge in these communities is like a hologram. First, you have this idea expressed at different scales. So in the old way that a hologram was made on a glass plate, when you shatter that hologram, each part of the hologram has the entire image of it just at a lower resolution.

[00:16:22] William Ingram: So what we have with material culture is when you break the culture, when you separate the parts, Then each remaining part still contains the whole, but at less and less resolution and its ability to transmit knowledge between generations becomes poorer and poorer. So this is where I feel it's important to, like all aspects of these cultures are transmitting to us or to themselves, ways of living in the world

[00:16:53] William Ingram: that are respectful of the environment and respectful of the ancestors. Our [00:17:00] ancestors worked out ways for us to be able to live in this place, and we've been here for hundreds, thousands of years. So it's been working. So change it at your peril. 

[00:17:10] Rebecca Burgess: They're very resistant to new ideas and change because this is what's worked.

[00:17:14] Rebecca Burgess: This is what's kept them alive. In the face of economic change, how do you see these communities maintaining the wholeism of their culture? As you start to tease this out a little bit so that these traditions will survive, what kinds of struggles does he see in how to uphold what is passed down? 

[00:17:34] William Ingram: We have been purists and some people see us as like overly fanatic in the way we sort of like cling to these traditions.

[00:17:43] William Ingram: People have said to us, you're keeping these people sort of back in. You gotta let them grow and become part of the broader economic growth. It's like, no, we need to learn from them, not the other way around. So yes, I feel like participating in helping these people [00:18:00] maintain their traditions. We work with over a thousand weavers in 50 communities.

[00:18:04] William Ingram: There's only a, like a couple of dozen of us, there's 30 of us working for this organization. We spend a couple of days a year in each community with each weaver. So our impact, our ability to shape what they're doing is limited. 

[00:18:20] Rebecca Burgess: What we can do is try and support them in empowering them to make their own decisions about where their traditions go.

[00:18:28] Rebecca Burgess: This has always been the value right from the beginning. It's not about the outsiders helping. There's hubris in that. And it's not about the outside deciding how people should live. So how do they create a system where they empower people? He says it's about putting themselves as students. It's about supporting the decisions that are coming forward

[00:18:50] Rebecca Burgess: out of the complexity of this culture, adjusting to the influences of globalization and the pressures that that is putting on the system. [00:19:00] 

[00:19:00] William Ingram: Perhaps in sort of an illustrative way is when we saw that there were problems with the transmission of knowledge and that bits of knowledge of the dye process had broken down,

[00:19:11] William Ingram: the method we developed was not to go in and say, Hey, you're doing this wrong. You've missed this bit out. It was for our dyers and what we did is we, we'd go and document a dye process, come back and then do sort of like structured experiments. It's like, what happens if we vary this ingredient? What happens if we vary this ingredient to see what, what the impact of each part was, and try and work out what the optimal recipe was.

[00:19:34] William Ingram: And so we then go back to a village and say, okay, let's do a red dyeing day. And so, okay, so they would do their red dye, our guys would do our red dye, and then they would look and they'd realize that we've got a much better color quicker. And then they'd say, how'd you do that? Then you've got the in and then you explain it, and they can choose to go back to this way or not.

[00:19:57] Rebecca Burgess: William also shared with me the very [00:20:00] complex and months long process of how the color red is achieved in the natural dye system. It principally comes from the bark of the root of a tree and involves a process involving oil and metallic salts. We won't get into the minutiae of the process here, but knowing that it's very involved makes you wonder how the ancestors were able to figure this out in the first place.

[00:20:22] Rebecca Burgess: There's not any origin stories out there about creating the red dye. But he recalls one story about harvesting the roots. 

[00:20:31] William Ingram: The woman goes out and she sits at the base of the tree with her back to the tree and her feet straight out in front of her, and she bangs on the tree over her head and says, husband, husband, I've come to get some dye plant, some dye roots.

[00:20:42] William Ingram: And then she'll dig no further away than her feet and no deeper than a foot depth and will dig out roots from there. Now, when you look at the morphology of the plant. The roots, the main tap route goes down, the secondary roots go down about a meter, and then they come up and hit the [00:21:00] surface and run away from the tree about two meters away from the tree.

[00:21:04] William Ingram: So the smaller roots are in that space, a leg length away from the base of the tree. And so this mythology and this ritual practice has created a way of harvesting the roots without damaging the main roots of the tree. So it can be done sustainably. This year, you dig on this side of the tree. Next year, you dig on the other side of the tree and then you come back again, back and forth, and it's the small fine roots that produce the best color, so you don't wanna dig up the big ones anyway.

[00:21:31] William Ingram: So there's lots of stories like that.

[00:21:38] Rebecca Burgess: I wanted to know about some of the projects that Threads of Life has taken on over the years, and while I'm sure there's many that spark a lot of good memory and excitement, I wanted to know if there were any particular projects that William has watched to transpire into something that's very fulfilling. Among the projects he mentioned during our conversation,

[00:21:59] Rebecca Burgess: was a project he and [00:22:00] his wife Jean had been working on with a professional film production company in which a series of films are being created called Tradition Keepers. 

[00:22:09] William Ingram: We're visiting people around the archipelago and getting documentary stories about how they're maintaining traditions, and we're trying to tell it more in sort of a storytelling form so that it's trying to honor the way that knowledge is passed on by these communities in some way.

[00:22:28] William Ingram: So it's our way of looking at these traditions and what Jean is finding in going and asking people to talk about their traditions in these ways is that it's making them mindful and value their heritage in a whole new way. So a couple of times she's had people say, this is really interesting, and what she's doing is she's bringing together a weaver and her daughter and having them have an explicit conversation about their traditions.

[00:22:56] William Ingram: And it's like, we've never done this before. It makes it so [00:23:00] much more powerful for me to become conscious of this is what they're saying. And so I think that is something we've really strived to do over time is to create a context where that kind of valuing happens. Where the outside world can be something that just provides values and a round of applause and saying, you're doing good work and this is beautiful stuff that you are making.

[00:23:25] Rebecca Burgess: It's a way of providing encouragement and this knowledge that you are holding is important. It's valuable. Please keep it up. This motivates people in a different way and gives a different context.

[00:23:41] Rebecca Burgess: When we look at the effects of globalization and the violence and devastation that came with colonization, we've all seen dominant forces suppress and eradicate through economic and physical genocide. Communities that have been holding traditions for millennia, we know that we have a lot of repair [00:24:00] work to do because of this history.

[00:24:03] Rebecca Burgess: To think that we can be encouraging and supportive and hold space and ask questions, that's why I'm grateful that William and Threads of life are showing the way for other westerners as to how we can be in the learning seat. Now that's our job to be listeners, to be caring and thoughtful and to put forward a few tools here and there when they're asked for and or needed.

[00:24:27] Rebecca Burgess: It's a very elegant approach. I asked William if there's a critical piece of importance of what these cultures are offering that he'd like people to really understand. He was quick to say that we're messing up this planet and destroying life. 

[00:24:42] William Ingram: These traditions are not trying to like valorize these people as saintly. They're no different from the rest of us in terms of their desires and their failings and their greatness as well.

[00:24:57] William Ingram: But they are holding [00:25:00] traditions that I think have keys for how our society can find its way back to being more responsible, more integrated into the life systems of the planet. And they are carrying a social, spiritual technology that is about a way of being and my interest, it's not in like we can't all become like a team or is person.

[00:25:31] William Ingram: No one would want to do that, and that's cultural appropriation. It's a very hard life out there, but it's like what are the key aspects of the way that this worldview works? So this is sort of something I'm interested in and haven't really worked out yet how to articulate it beyond this kind of conversation in a way that becomes something that could be integrated back into my own society.

[00:25:55] William Ingram: I feel in some ways I still have a job to do a debt to these [00:26:00] cultures in terms of I've taken this understanding and now I feel that there's still something to do with it, something beyond what we're doing with Threads of Life that works out how to share this, how to help my own culture. This hasn't been about helping these traditions.

[00:26:19] William Ingram: This has been about my culture is the one that's in crisis. We're the ones that need to learn how to change. 

[00:26:27] Rebecca Burgess: We don't have a lot of time. Our culture has created problems and hurdles to all of humanity's existence. We have this short amount of time to generate a paradigm shift because so many of the solutions that our culture is coming up with in the western industrialized nations are extensions of thinking that perpetuates very similar externalities.

[00:26:51] Rebecca Burgess: We externalize the cost of human disease that comes from all of the new molecules. We're constantly creating. All of which to create our material culture. [00:27:00] We've damaged DNA in many cases. We create this sense of permanence, this idea that we can't really adjust to the real deep understanding of our own mortality.

[00:27:10] Rebecca Burgess: So everything we make has this deep impermanence; the plastic clothing, the synthetic dyes. We want everything to last forever. There seems to be an issue we have with our own mortality. As William states, no one is going to figure this out alone. This is a very shared journey. 

[00:27:32] William Ingram: I think one of the starting points, and this is what encounters with other cultures is really important about, is to realize that this growth model, it's not the only way to be in the world.

[00:27:44] William Ingram: We sort of have this idea that there's no other possible solution, there's no other way to live, and we get stuck in what we are doing because we can't see any other way of doing it. So encounters with other cultures are important I think to [00:28:00] break that bubble, to burst that bubble for ourselves. 

[00:28:03] Rebecca Burgess: We are such social creatures that when we see something and sense it with all of our sense organs, we can start to emulate it.

[00:28:15] Rebecca Burgess: Given that William and Jean come from another place, I wanted to know how threads of life operates within the community. From a very functional perspective. He notes that his wife, Jean, has a very good eye for bringing something to. And beyond that, it is the Indonesian community, which lifts up the organization.

[00:28:33] William Ingram: We have two local staff. We have a part-time staff in Timor and a full-time staff in Kalimantan, in Borneo. But otherwise, all our field staff are Balinese. We have a Timor staff here as well. But the accident of starting this in Bali with Balinese field staff was that their conversations with people initially are about their culture and about the ceremonies they do.

[00:28:57] William Ingram: And I would hear someone in the community talk [00:29:00] about a ritual. I didn't recognize it at all, but the end of it, Paul would go, we do that ceremony. And I thought, no, you don't. You don't do anything like that. But I realized after a while what he was saying was, we do something with the same intention. And it was this connection on the foundational level of culture that gave them access.

[00:29:22] William Ingram: And Bali is sort of looked up to by many places as an example of being able to grow economically and keep your culture. And there's a whole debate we could have about whether that's true or not, but largely it's true. And so the Balinese staff are who are the most effective in the field. And Jean and William come in either at the initial stage or problem solving or when something needs to be directed in a different way. But largely we found ourselves had to take ourselves out of the work. We initially started, we initially started this in order to do, which was to go out and be in the field, but ultimately we [00:30:00] found we're often the least effective people to be in the field.

[00:30:06] Rebecca Burgess: Understanding that you're the least effective person in the field and focusing on where your work starts and where it stops so that the community is leading, is an essential approach. Threads of life's way of engaging, focuses on how to bring resources to the table that are being asked for, and then how to step out of the way to empower the growers, the pastemakers, weavers and dyers, to define and execute their cultural practices as they see fit.

[00:30:37] Rebecca Burgess: Like the community's highlighted by William today, may you leave here with a bit of agency, a bit of creativity in finding solutions to problems and a sense of possibility. Please join us again for future weaving voices episodes.[00:31:00] 

[00:31:09] Rebecca Burgess: This episode is made possible because of all the people who work behind the scenes on it. I'd like to thank my producer, Jennifer O'Neil, audio editor, Bethany Sands, and intern, Maha Sanad. I'd also like to thank Whetstone founder Stephen Satterfield, Whetstone head of podcasts, Celine Glasier, sound engineer Max Kotelchuck, music director Catherine Yang,

[00:31:34] Rebecca Burgess: associate Producer Quentin Lebeau, production assistant Shabnam Ferdwosi, and sound intern Simon Lavender, the Cover Art by Whetstone art director Alex Bowman. You can learn more about this podcast at WhetstoneRadio.com, on Instagram and Twitter @WhetstoneRadio, and subscribe to our YouTube channel, Whetstone Radio Collective.

[00:31:55] Rebecca Burgess: For more podcast video content, you can learn more about all [00:32:00] things happening at Whetstone, at WhetstoneMagazine.com.