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Old 3rd June 2013, 02:33 PM   #45
A. G. Maisey
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Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 6,704
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The sash that you wear around your waist. A sarung is just held at your waist by rolling it over, you kink it a bit on one end maybe, but it still comes loose and if there's not something holding it at your waist it continually comes loose.

It can be held by a heavy leather belt, which seems to be what blokes from Madura and some manual labourers in Jawa use---often has pockets in it to hold money or tobacco --- it can be held by a cloth belt --- sabuk--- or it can be held by a setagen, which is particularly so for formal wear.

If you wind a setagen right it acts a bit like a corset and supports your back, which is pretty handy for court wear where the abdi dalem spend hours sitting on the floor cross legged. Not easy.

The setagen is held in place by a sabuk, the cloth belt, for formal wear, and sometimes for non-formal wear.

Anyway, the setagen is wound around the waist and in Jawa the keris is slipped down between specific folds of the setagen at the back, when it becomes a wangkingan, but if one of the folds of the setagen was passed through the toli2 before the winding around the waist was complete, that single passing of the setagen through the toli2 would anchor the wrongko so it could not come free until you took the setagen off.

You could maybe do the same or similar with a belt, particularly a cloth belt.

Women wear a setagen too, and they often wear it wound very tight from the top of the hips to the bottom of the ribs, this helps them a lot to carry those incredible weights they can carry on their heads.

Years ago I saw a woman in Bali carry a board loaded with bricks that were stacked on it by two other women. That board was nearly 3 feet square and the bricks were piled maybe 6 or 8 high. I didn't count them, but my memory tells me there were a lot of them. She carried those bricks from a truck, across rough ground to a building job, maybe 200 yards. In rural Bali and Jawa its mostly women who do the heavy work, not men.

Our society could learn a lot from traditional Balinese society.
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