The Role of Indonesian Women in Internalizing the Values of Traditional Fabrics

Abstract

Indonesian women play an important role as culture performer of fashion design, one of which is to preserve Indonesia’s traditional fabrics. Since women are natural educators, they get pregnant, give birth, nurture, and educate their children; they can transform knowledge and culture through their daily activities as their expression of love to their children and family. This is reflected from the way they communicate their love through traditional fabrics as a part of lifestyle. The existence of studies on Indonesia’s traditional fabrics proves the the roles of women as as wife, a mother, and a part of the society are importantly big. The use of the traditional fabrics function and mean, based on etnographical studies, a lot in several activities of Indonesian women’s life cycle. Those fabrics have several characters either in design such as size, pattern, color, and aesthetic values, or in their manufacturing technology so that they are interesting as well as important to study. The results of the study show that the existence of Indonesia’ traditional fabrics in either external and internal environment of Indonesian women is believed to be a medium of value internalization through the processes of knowing, doing, and being as an expression of meaning establishing and nation character building.

Keywords: Internalizing values, Indonesia’s traditional fabrics, nation characters, roles of women.