Death blanket in the living room

Browsing the dry goods section of the Baguio market for abel or Ilocano cotton blankets, I often eavesdrop on other shoppers. I observe how they haggle and look at what they buy and why. Tourists and lowland Christians shop here for interior décor; they come in search of “ethnic” pieces to add color or an “ethnic” accent to their urban homes. Many people are attracted by the bold colors and the “primitive” or “folk” designs that adorn, say, an Ifugao blanket that carries stylized human figures, lizards, snakes, etc. If they do not know the context of the cloth they are buying, they would most likely not recognize the essential elements on a “death blanket” and use the blanket as a bedspread or wall hanging. One must know the original or ritual purpose of an object before adapting it into their homes. Once in a rather chichi dinner our host proudly declared that the soup was being served from a “Queen Anne” china she had bought from an antique shop. Nobody seemed to mind that the expensive “Queen Anne soup tureen” was actually a chamber or piss pot.

People interested in traditional Philippine textiles once had to go to a library to consult two standard works: “Sinaunang Habi: Philippine Ancestral Weave” by Marian Pastor Roces; or “From the Rainbow’s Varied Hue: Textiles of the Southern Philippines,” by Roy W. Hamilton, which forms part of the University of California Los Angeles’ Fowler Museum of Cultural History Textile Series. The pictures in both are worth the trouble especially if you are not up for the challenging texts. Fortunately, the Philippine Textile Council has recently published “HABI: A Journey Through Philippine Handwoven Textiles,” edited by Rene Guatlo. This provides a handy, readable and affordable primer on various textiles from Aparri to Jolo. With this book on hand, you can charge into the Baguio market and differentiate Ifugao from Ilocano blankets by design, color, weave and material. Knowing the contexts and stories behind the textiles will save you from using a death blanket on your dining table.

The oldest known piece of cloth in the Philippines is the Banton Burial Cloth, which is preserved in the National Museum. Found in a wooden coffin in Banton, Romblon, together with associated early blue and white ceramics, this piece of ikat-dyed abaca cloth, made sometime in the 13th or 14th century, is the oldest known warp ikat textile in Southeast Asia. Surely, there were other pieces of cloth much older than the Banton cloth, but these have not survived up to our time. Or at least they await discovery in some pre-Spanish Philippine grave. Cloth weaving in the Philippines is an ancient art, and the long complicated process is best summarized by art critic Alice Guillermo as follows:

“Traditionally, the entire process of weaving cloth, for daily use or for ritual, has been the work of women. The production of a piece of cloth entails a number of stages. It begins with the cultivation of the plant—such as cotton, abaca, and pineapple—the fibers of which will be used for weaving. The fibers are extracted from the leaves of these plants and prepared by carding, twisting, spinning, and winding by means of a spindle into thread. Warp threads are carefully counted and measured before they are attached to the beam of the loom, and weft threads are evenly wound into bobbins. Also part of the preliminaries is the gathering and preparing of natural dyes. After the threads are soaked in dye and dried in the sun, weaving on a loom can begin. Weaving may follow decorative dyeing techniques, decorative weaving techniques or supplementary thread techniques…”

Cloth is something common that we often see but barely notice. Cloth is a marker of culture and identity; it expresses social class, beliefs and customs, etc. Of the Northern Luzon textiles still available today, the most decorative are those made by the Itneg of Abra, particularly the dinapat with stylized human figures and the famous binakael  (meaning, “spherical”) pieces of op-art that confuse the eye. The binakael may be old but it actually looks like a piece of modern art antedating the work of the 1970s European artist Vasarely. Unfortunately, some of the products of Itneg looms are mistaken for Ilocano work because they are found in Ilocano markets or peddled by Ilocanos. Adding to the confusion is the fact that this ethnic community is known both as Itneg and Tinguian. The terms are used interchangeably, but the Itneg see themselves as Itneg. The difference lies with outsiders who divide the group into Itneg (from iti uneg, meaning, “the interior”) or those who live in the interior highlands; and the Tinguian or those who live closer to the lowland Christian Ilocos and Abra. Tinguian are thus the more acculturated or modern Itneg.

The first Itneg blankets I owned were modern reproductions—in cotton, not polyester—of the binakael or “whirlwind.” My first antique piece was of white cotton with a double-headed eagle in blue and red that was a throwback to the Spanish period, where this was used either as an

emblem of the Augustinian Order that did missionary work in North Luzon, or simply as the Hapsburg eagle I recognized from my textbook history. From these two blankets I built a study collection of all designs: fruits, flowers, stars, horses (with or without riders), fish, python scales, etc. Once everyday objects to Itneg, they now lie in museum and private collections far removed from their original ritual use.

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