SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Portable, malleable, absorbent, and textured, often with colored patterns that attract or repel the mind, cloth the world over is essential for all manner of fastenings and constructions that give form to the social relations that are conceived as dependent upon the actions of the body. Pacific societies are unique in expressing, perhaps more fervently than observed elsewhere, the centrality of cloth to identities of kinship and political authority, as cloth is harnessed and transformed into surfaces that allow for the binding and dissolving of connections in the social world. Whether cloth comes in the form of mats woven from the leaves of the pandanus plant, of quilts stitched from cotton, or of printed sheets of finely beaten bark, Pacific cultures use the symbolic potentialities of cloth, present in its material capacity to be bound and wrapped, to transform the common into the unknown and unknowable, to make visible spiritual processes and the power conferred onto initiates or ritual specialists. This transformative function of cloth and the processes it evokes are not only applied to objects such as plants or statues, which are consecrated through the act of wrapping in cloth, but to human beings in general, especially to human manifestations of gods and ancestors, as well as to ritual specialists.