Betel Nut Bag, supplementary weft, vintage, heirlooms, West Timor, Indonesia

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Betel Nut Bag, supplementary weft, vintage, heirlooms, West Timor, Indonesia:
$375.00

Betel Nut Bag, supplementary weft textile, late 19th-century Headhunter Heirlooms

Collection of artifacts from the former Kingdom of Fatuleu in West Timor, Highland Atoni People.

Description: 9.5\" long, 8\" wide, no strap; textile using striking technique, characteristic of West Timor, know as \"Buna,\" a discontinuous supplementary weft aka Brocade Weave; supplementary weft means that in addition to the warp and weft yarnsan additional set of yarns is worked in as weft to create the pattern; meaning of discontinuous is that more than one individual colored weft thread is used.

About \"Headhunting\" and the former Fatuleu Kingdom in West Timor, Eastern Nusa Tenggara Islands, Indonesia:

Items in this collection were worn by the members of the royalty during ceremonies that took place before and after the actual headhunting outing; the headhunting didn\'t take place out of spite, hatred or similar reasons, but was in fact part of fertility ceremonies, or belief in propitiation of spirits of the ancestors, preservation of the clan, family etc.

The actual act of taking of head of another being entailed gaining his power, thus enriching oneself and clan with more spiritual as well as physical strength, thus indirectly assuring survival of the clan and family.

Descendents of the Fatuleu royal family members passed the items from generation to the next as heirlooms. Traditionally they were rarely if ever sold, however, in modern era, when the members of the former royalty no longer enjoyed the wealth nor the prestige, and as other members of the Timor population were faced with the realities of life in contemporary Indonesia, often a time they decided to sell their heirlooms when in need of money.