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.

Keywords: memetics, ornamentation, batik, Indonesian textile patterns, phylomemetic tree