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Old 19th October 2006, 04:16 PM   #29
DAHenkel
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Greetings to all after my long absence – I confess I have not had much time to participate in the forum what with work and life and all but I have a few things I wanted to add to this discussion which I hope will be of some use to all involved – so thanks to Kai Wee for drawing my attention to it.

First of all – I am more or less convinced that the piece in question is Sumatran (though with a remote possibility of a Sulawesi origin but I doubt it) of the variety which I prefer to call the "Straits keris" – this is an amorphous and broad area that for much of the 16th through 19th centuries was highly unsettled with a very mobile community. It had a highly diverse population of more or less ethnic “Malays” as well as Bugis, Minang, Orang Laut and Javanese not to mention dashes of just about everything else. As such identifying keris from this area and pinning them to any one place is extremely tough to do. That said the Strait region extends more or less from North of Palembang to Deli on the Sumatran side as well as selected areas of the Peninsula – Kedah, Perak, Selangor and Muar (all more or less controlled by Malay/Bugis polities for the period of time when most extant kerises were produced). (Also note the conspicuous absence of the Negeri Sembilan which was a Minangkabau enclave and note further the very confused state of Siak which was hotly contested between Bugis, Malay and Minang forces and is as such even more confused.)

Given this state of affairs it is highly suspect to even begin to think of a classification system for the blades of the region – smiths from all over everywhere appear to have worked there and I have seen blades that look Bugis, Malay, Minang and Javanese (and all/or none of the above) but all dressed in more or less similar styles. Dress forms also comply to the above admixture of forms and styles. Trade blades, immigrant smiths and keris bearers and a lack of a strong “courtly style” to model on mean that this area is a mess for people who hope to identify the accurate provenance of a piece based on art historical analysis alone. Lampung, Palembang, Minangkabau, Aceh-Gayo (where keris are very rare), Pattani (w/Kelantan as a border/buffer with Terengganu) and Johor-Riau (inclusive of Terengganu and Pahang, on again, off again satellites) all have more or less identifiable characteristics. The Straits on the other hand are a fascinatingly bewildering mess.

Anyway, as for tangguhing, anyone who has read my comments in previous posts will recall my inherent mistrust in the methodology outside of Java (well even in Java frankly but I won’t go there – I’m not an expert on that particular subject). It is very difficult to classify kerises according to tangguh in the Malay world because of the confused political economic situation there and because of a seeming lack of “court style” as a model for more common examples. While the archetypical piece is more or less easy to place there are just too many examples of borderline cases where it could be one or the other. Besides really the fuzzy edges is what makes these things so darned interesting to begin with!

p.s. One more note to my good friend Alam Shah regarding the so called “keris kapak China" – never trust anything from the collection of the institution (which I cannot name in good professional conscience) in which the aforementioned keris was photographed. That hilt may be Banjar but God only knows where that blade came from.

Thanks and good night!

Last edited by DAHenkel; 19th October 2006 at 04:35 PM.
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