becomes short, they may always solicit orders for execution with borrowed material and predetermined patterns.
Endek home weaving, on the other hand, is not encountered among households from every social class. Only families with no other means of income will try to borrow a bulky ATBM loom to enable the women to earn money by weaving at home. Since the homeworker receives the' loom and the material on loan, she is highly dependent on her employer. Precisely because she cannot concentrate on her work for any length of time without being disturbed, her quality is often below that of cloths produced in the manufactory. At the same time, depending on her domestic commitments, she is far less dependable when it comes to meeting delivery dates. Factors that can be clearly calculated and foreseen in the manufactory are often much vaguer in the home. These pressures often impose suffering on the home weaver.
A SIDEMEN MANUFACTORY
Let us consider two examples more closely, taking a manufactory first. The entrepreneur, a man of initiative who is receptive to new ideas, has set up a production unit in the precincts of his house compound. He bought the land and built on it with the aid of a bank loan in the 1970s. The layout (Fig. 2.14) has characteristic Balinese features: it is enclosed by a wall with an entrance gate affording access to the lower compound. The sanctuary is located in the northeast—a direction considered particularly pure and divine. Opposite it, to the southwest, are the kitchen and bathroom. This direction is regarded as ritually more "polluted" and is set aside for physical needs. The dwelling and sleeping quarters are also built on the preferred northern side.
Figure 2.14: A weaving manufactory in a compound. 1) Sanctuary with abodes of the gods; 2) Open reception area for customers/employees; 3) Dwelling house; 4) Production hall (19.5 x 8 m.); 5) Storage sheds; 6) Kitchen bath; 7) Experimental corner for new patterns; 8) Veranda with workplace for entrepreneur's wife; 9) Sales shop; 10) Fountain with small garden; 11) Drying frame for dyed yarn.
The manufactory sits in the northwest corner. There as many as 26 people, mainly women, weave, prepare warp and weft, and reel. The southeastern corner is for experiments; there men are busy tying and dyeing bundles of yarn to develop novel patterns. The sales shop is on the southern side, facing the street. In the inner courtyard is a fountain (the compound is, however, supplied with running water), a small flower and herb garden, and a drying frame for the dyed strands of yarn. The actual dyehouse is about 100 meters away from the compound and is annexed to the house of the entrepreneur's second wife. There, two people are engaged in dyeing the warp and the tied sets of weft threads (Fig. 2.5); as many as nine young men are busy dabbing on the additional dyes (Fig. 2.6). The workers, male and female, all come from the lower social classes and are between 14 and 26 years of age. Some have been there since the business began; they started at the age of 15 or 16 and still hold the same jobs today. The looms are operated almost exclusively by women (Fig. 2.10). Men work on the warping and reeling devices (Fig. 2.8) and all the dyers and tyers are also men.
Of the 33 men and women on the payroll of the manufactory, three are from a neighboring village and three from Gianyar. In earlier years, when the owner was starting up, he brought over a number of women endek weavers from Gianyar who were already experienced in using ATBM looms. But now there are enough women from the village who, with a knowledge of songkèt weaving on the cagcag loom, have been retrained on ATBM looms in a free conversion course which takes only a few days. Meanwhile they have given proof of their skill. Fourteen women still work at home in Gianyar for the entrepreneur, likewise four men apply the tyings for pre-determined patterns at home. After the patterned weft yarn has been dyed, the tyings have to be removed before it can be woven. This removal work is contracted out as homework, usually to boys who work part-time while they are still attending school.
Figure 2.15: House compound of a family engaged in home-weaving. 1) Working and dwelling house, veranda with dining area; 2) Weaving room with ATBM loom; 3) Bedroom-cum workroom for songkèt; 4) Bedroom; 5) Sanctuary with abodes of the gods; 6) Open kitchen.
There are five women weavers working at home in Sidemen for this manufactory—married women over 25 years of age who already have large families and cannot absent themselves from home for the whole day. The manufactory has still not acquired the cold, impersonal atmosphere of a proper factory, and a great deal is still informal. One weaving woman sometimes brings her little son with her to work when she has no one to leave him with. Any worker failing to fulfill his or her quota will know about it on payday, as wages are paid per meter of woven material and according to quality.
The entrepreneur's risk and input were and are considerable, for changes on the market affect him directly. Prices have a marked tendency to plummet, and sales are dependent on the vagaries of fashion. The manufactory's production figures for 1988, for example, are only half what they were in 1983. The owner has been able to ride out the crisis by introducing new designs, particularly motifs from old Balinese and east Indonesian cloths. More recently, brightly-colored red checked fabrics without endek have been particularly successful on the market.
Thus, the entrepreneur has prospered. With no land of his own to begin with, he has been able to buy rice and vegetable fields over the course of the years, and to employ others to farm them for him. He owns two rice mills in the village, two house compounds, and a house in a suburb of Denpasar where he goes in his car on business or to visit his older children, who are receiving higher education there. However, as we have noted, the manufactories shave their prices very finely and competition between them is fierce. A single mistake in color, pattern or material, and all that he possesses could be at stake.
HOME-WORK: FAMILY AND COMMISSION WEAVING
The second example deals with a family where the mother is engaged in home-work. The house compound of this particular family is a small complex standing on leased land which belongs to the village temple (see Fig. 2.15). The married couple pay off the lease by working for the temple. They live together with their six children in a house where they also work, and which they built themselves with help from neighbors. They are members of the lower class (like 95 percent of the Balinese population, although the modern money economy with its new opportunities of accumulating wealth is bringing about changes in the previously rigid hierarchic order). One of the three rooms in the house is set aside for endek work, and the ATBM loom occupies almost the entire room. In the middle room the 15-year-old daughter and the mother weave songkèt. The cagcag looms occupy a relatively small space.
The father has leased small plots of land, on which he plants maize and vegetables. If there is no work to do in the fields, he does occasional work in the market, helping to load and unload goods and running errands. He regularly takes his two cows to graze along a grassy roadside or on a tiny pasture. He also looks after the goat and tends to the small-scale gardens within the compound. The oldest child, a son, is already employed part-time as a tyer in an endek workshop although he is still attending school.
Before her family became so large, the mother worked for seven-and-a-half years in a small workshop. For the past two-and-a-half years she has had an ATBM loom at home on loan from
