Traditional Sumba Textiles: Living Archives, Women’s Work, and Resonances with Tboli Tnalak

This article offers an autoethnographic reflection on East Sumba ikat as a living cultural inheritance and a women-centred creative economy shaped by ritual obligation, shifting markets, and intergenerational change. Writing from the position of a Sumbanese woman raised in proximity to weaving villages and later living abroad as a collector, researcher, and cultural advocate, I trace the social life of cloth in East Sumba, from the architecture of kampung adat and the ceremonial centrality of stone graves to the role of textiles in negotiation, burial, and the transmission of oral history through motifs. The article draws on participatory research conducted between 2021 and 2023 with weavers in five village centres and considers how East Sumba cloth is being reconfigured through changes in structure, motif repertoires, and dye practices in response to heritage tourism and global demand, even as it faces urgent challenges including ageing weaver populations, counterfeit production, limited local archives, and the absence of community institutions for quality control and weaver recognition. Interwoven throughout is a comparative thread developed through my participation in the 8th Annual Philippine Studies Symposium at SOAS University of London, “Translocating Textiles: Cross-border Perspectives on Traditional Weaving Practices from the Philippines and Southeast Asia,” where encountering Tboli tnalak offered a powerful mirror for thinking about how different textile traditions encode knowledge, value women’s labour, and negotiate the tensions between continuity and innovation. While East Sumba ikat and Tboli tnalak share technical affinities such as resist dyeing and backstrap loom weaving and occupy parallel ceremonial worlds, their differences in fibre base, colour cosmology, and the epistemic origins of motifs illuminate distinct ways that cloth becomes archive, authority, and inheritance.