CUISINE AND TRADITIONAL DRESS
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face of modern pressures. This applies to all aspects of cultures but becomes visible and individual through manners of dress. Clothing throughout the archipelago historically derived from local plants and barks. Thus, cloth, dyes, and looms intricately connected with indigenous ecologies and cosmologies. Manners of dress long have signified people’s identities, their comings and goings, what they regard as meaningful, and diverse social interactions with outside peoples throughout the past. Traditional dress also reflects ongoing tensions between the past and the present. In recent times, customary dress interweaves and convolutes the traditional and the modern, blurring these categories. As surviving traditions are never inert, so it goes with Indonesian clothing. Most customary Indonesian dress bases upon a sarung or a kain. Sarungs are cloths sewn together at either end to form a tube. People then step into, pull
Girls in West Timor stand before a “beehive” house, wearing finely woven buna sarungs. Buna is a unique, painstaking weaving method resembling embroidery, mastered by women in certain regions of West Timor. 1999. Courtesy of Jill Forshee.