Women's Networks in Cloth Production and Exchange in Flores

Production or prestigious cloth for wear and for gift exchange is today still an important task for women in many rural households in Indonesia as a way of supplementing their income. In Java (Antlöv and Svensson 1991) and in some parts of Bali (Ramseyer 1988) the manufacture of hand-made cloth is more industrialized and the producers have often lost control over their products. In the outer Indonesian islands such as Flores, however, production is still principally domestic, with the weavers themselves being petty entrepreneurs. ¹ In contrast to symbolic studies about textiles, research on the economic, sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of cloth producers and of cloth-producing households in Indonesia and elsewhere is still scant.