tribaltextiles.info

Hello,

Please take a look at the attached photo and see if you can help me identify it. Interesting that it's still on the loom. I'm thinking Indonesian, but Mindanao, Philippines is also a possibility. The weave may offer clues, but the loom may hold some as well. Any input would be welcome. Thanks in advance.

Best,
Marbel

Welcome to the forum. What you have is an abaca, warp ikat textile from the Mandaya ethnic group of Mindanao, Philippines. Abaca textiles are not generally found in Indonesia but are the fiber of choice of many ethnic groups in Mindanao. This textile can be identified from the figure in the lower center part of the cloth. This figure, sometimes described as a frog, appears in almost all Mandaya textiles in a very consistent form and is a hallmark of the Mandaya. It does not appear in the abaca textiles of other groups in Mindanao although they may also use figures which appear more human like.

The frog is seen as a fertility symbol in many SE Asian ethnic groups as it is associated with the coming of the rains and the beginning of the agricultural cycle. It represents cyclic renewal and prosperity in the form of wet rice cultivation and is found on many Dong Son bronze drums dating back 2,000 years or more. It is rare to find an unfinished cloth still on the loom. Somewhere on the forum Chris and I have posted Mandaya textiles and if Pamela would be so kind as to provide us with a link to that post you can compare the figures to yours.

Best regards

Hi MAC

This may the thread that you are thinking about. Here is page 3 but there are other examples of Mandaya textiles on previousl pages: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=65&p=5673#p5507

Your request to find the thread has thrown up a very worrying result for me. When I used the 'search' function it would only throw up results from this thread and not any previous posts/threads. I found the thread/link above by going to your profile, MAC, and then requesting all your posts and then working through them to find references to Mandaya (or even Mindanao which had also fallen at my first search attempt). This must be something that has gone wrong since the recent forum software upgrade. Just to check this again I have used another browser and not looked at current thread in case that was influencing the search. I still only got results from this thread. Oh dear..............!

_________________
Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource

Just an update re the search function:

I am very pleased to report that the search problems reported in my post above have now been sorted!!! The forum data file has now been re-indexed (following the recent major software upgrade) and seems to be working well going back to the launch of the forum at the end of June 2003. I was amazed when checking to find that the forum has now been live and storing information from all our posts for over a decade!

Thank you to everyone who has input to this information bank! Please keep up the good work!

_________________
Pamela

http://www.tribaltextiles.info
on-line tribal textiles resource