Lawiti luluk is the paired ritual speech unique to the Marapu Indigenous religion of East Sumba. The Kamberan language is the indigenous language of East Sumba. Each utterance is a lawiti, a couplet whose two halves hold a single image in tension: two parallel phrases that together name a thing more exactly than either alone could. In Umbu Hina Kapita's compendium Lawiti Luluk, many couplets turn on the names of ikat motifs—njara (horse), manu (chicken), kurangu (shrimp), kakatua (cockatoo)—so the cloth and the spoken word share a single vocabulary. The motif woven into a hinggi and the word spoken during ritual are not two separate things pointing at the same culture: they are iterations of the same concept in two registers.
This page presents the textile terminology of the tradition alongside the couplets that invoke it —reading the cloth with the culture rather than through external interpretation. Couplets are drawn verbatim from a collection of Sumbanese researcher Oemboe Hina Kapita, in his book Lawiti Luluk Humba (1987)
English translations render Kapita's Indonesian glosses in Lawiti Luluku Humba (1987).
The named ikat motifs (njara, ruha, mandu, kaka, kurangu, tau, patola ratu) are treated in full on the Motifs page.
Kambera spellings follow the source documents; several await confirmation against Kapita's Kamus Kambera–Indonesia (1982).
The paired man's cloth (hinggi) and woman's skirt (lau) stand for father/mother, and for the protection the wife-givers (yera) extend to the wife-takers (anakawini). The womb-like fold of the cloth and its sheltering/protective qualities are recurring themes.
The loom's comb (wunangu) and beater (ngodahu) are the emblem of the wunangu — the ritual spokesperson who "orders the threads" of an affair; cf. Onvlee's wunangu lii marapu, the reciter of ritual speech is named after the loom heddle.
Indigo (wora) is the women's blue-black dye; loba and kombu give red. The dye-plants and their liquids carry their own ritual weight — planted, stirred, and sometimes invoked as a curse.