Yeah---well, as already agreed, the sequence can change. I reckon Pak Djeno worked the same as all of us do, he had a goal in mind and shifted things around , dependent on circumstances, to allow him to achieve that goal in the easiest way. Or maybe he did what many of us do when we get asked questions that the asker does not really understand:- he gave an answer that he hoped would satisfy the person who asked.
Pak Boedhi, keris have always been a commodity. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were being exported from Jawa to the rest of SE Asia. We have pictures showing keris sellers in the markets in Batavia.
Keris at one level have always been a commodity.For many hundreds of years keris have been made to produce a living for somebody. They are an expensive thing to produce, always were, and nobody produces items that require high resource usage unless they intend to make money out of them.
Similarly with production of a single blade by a group of workers. Except in very early days and in the case of small village workers, group production has always been the norm. The extent to which group production was applied, and the role of the master might have varied a bit, but the objective was always the same:- produce the best quality at an affordable price. People tend to get lost in their imagination when it comes to keris production. Old time Jawa was not some primitive society, it was highly organised and highly stratified.Back when they were having a good solid whack at the Dutch, it took them about five minutes to copy the Dutch weapons and perhaps improve on them.
What we see in Madura today is simply a continuation of tradition, and if there were just a touch more realism around, we would recognise that the idea of exclusive authorship of keris, even old ones, is a very limited concept. It probably may be able to be considered as applicable to very low quality keris, and some (but we can never know which) very high quality keris.The vast bulk of keris have always been produced by more than a single person.You cannot call the current Madura production "mass production". It is not. It lacks the essential elements of mass production. But it is group production, where some people will sometimes do one job efficiently, and others do another job efficiently. In this way it is no different to the way in which keris, and many other complex items have always been produced , not only in Jawa, but in other places as well.It pretty much comes down to what the market wants, and what the market can afford to pay.
Look at the number of people that were used to produce a keris, that are listed in the texts , and the work allocated to those workers. Nobody but the boss (the Empu) knew the complete process, or how one piece of work fitted with another, but he was like the conductor, the music was played by other people with various instruments.
So, what we see today is really no different to what it has always been---on one level.
But we also have people who are capable of producing a keris as a work of art from the beginning to the end. These people are the true artists. Sometimes they may produce commercially orientated items, but so do all other artists in all fields:- artists must live too, you know. What I would like to see is this current commercial competition dumped, and the institution of a true competition for those people who are entitled to be called "pandai keris", or "empu". And there are not very many of these people.
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