Evolutionary Clustering in Indonesian Ethnic Textile Motifs

Abstract

The wide varieties of Indonesian textiles could reflect the varsity that has been living with the diversity of Indonesian ethnic groups. Meme as an evolutionary modeling technique promises some conjectures to capture the innovative process of the cultural objects production in the particular collective patterns acquainted can be regarded as fitness in the large evolutionary landscape of cultural life. We have presented the correlations between memeplexes that is transformed into distances has generated the phylomemetic tree, both among some samples from Indonesian textile handicrafts and batik, the designs that have been living through generations with Javanese people, the largest ethnic group in Indonesian archipelago. The memeplexes is extracted from the geometrical shape, i.e.: fractal dimensions and the histogram analysis of the employed colorization. We draw some interesting findings from the tree and open the future anthropological development that might catch the attention further observation.

Deconstructing Bataknese Gorga

“…Discussions in [14] have shown us how ancient Javanese did similar thing with their batik. It is interesting to see how a lot of ornamentations within Indonesian complex traditional crafts [11] are made upon the acquisition of simple rules generatively, which in turn deliver us an interesting objects to be observed in the sense of fractal geometry [12].…”

Evolution of Consumers’ Preferences Due to Innovation

“…One of practical and realistic standpoint in economic problem, we can view meme being the evolutionary cultural object as the smallest unit of information by which we can identify and use to explain the evolution process [13]. This outlook gives us some progressive results, ranging from the arrival of new method to infer or estimate the evolutionary history and relationship among empirical data of cultural and economic objects [14][15][16][17][18][19], simulating the innovation of technological artifacts [20], and memetic engineering [21][22][23][24].…”