Yes Kai-Wee, what you say is true, however, although a person who has very detailed knowledge in this area of motif form and application may be able to broadly identify certain motifs as belonging to certain areas, there can be enormous differences from craftsman to craftsman within an area, thus to take the work of, say, ten or 15 craftsmen from one major grouping and then identify the work of all as belonging to that major grouping can sometimes be more than just a little difficult.
As I write this, I am not thinking in terms of hilt forms, or wrongko forms:- these seem to be fairly well known, and although we get the occasional variation upon which we are unclear, it is probably possible to group these things fairly accurately.
I am thinking in terms of motifs only, which may be applied to a very broad range of objects, and applied by all levels of craftsmen, from palace employees to housewives.Motifs which can appear in fabrics, in household decorative items, in items of personal adornment.
Certainly, here we tend to focus on a single form of cultural artifact, the keris, but that artifact does not stand separate to all other items within a culture, nor to the culture itself.Thus, if we are to use motif as an identifier of place of origin, we need a better than encyclopedic knowledge of all variations throughout a broad area.
I for one do not have the knowledge to come to a supportable conclusion on origin of this particular hilt form, using only the tool of analysis.
My approach and focus is far more simple:- physical evidence.
Pre-1900 photographs of people wearing keris with this type of hilt, Cirebon kraton records of this type of hilt, early collected examples with providence of this type of hilt ---this type of thing. Something we can accept as evidence that these hilts did indeed belong to the Cirebon administrative area.
Because we tend to see certain specific forms of dress being prescribed for wear in a kraton environment, it would be reasonable to expect that if this form is indeed a Cirebon form, records, either physical or documentary would exist within the Cirebon heritage.
If the evidence cannot be found in kraton records, but we still suspect that it could be Cirebon, then perhaps we are looking at a folk variation. The North Coast of Jawa has had a very strong Malay component to its population for many hundreds of years. It could be that this hilt form is a variation of a Malay form, which has adopted or adapted the tightly packed foliate embellishment of Madura and the indigenous north coast to its own basically Malay form.
We could hypothesise about this matter till the cows come home, and here I am hypothesising as freely as any, however, what we need here is solid evidence, rather than guesses. I do not believe we can answer this question by application of logical analysis.
|