THE TAUSUG TREE OF LIFE AND THE SEA
BARMM ARTIFACTS
The continuous, deliberately unsegmented, sinuous lines forming a vertically symmetrical tree is known to art everywhere as the tree of life." The antique models for this Tausug burrás involved virtuoso continuous cutwork of the elaborate tree, which was then fastidiously sewn onto a seamless ground. The same arboreal motif appears to be an archetype universally shared by all human beings. However, its materialization in Tausug material culture has a clear historical context: the immense flow of people, goods, and ideas through the Sulu Archipelago involving South Asian, Middle Eastern. Chinese, Southeast Asian, and indeed Philippine maritime travelers. This multi-directional, translocal flows were intensifying around in the midpoint of the last millennium when lausug speakers consolidated power under its sultanate based in Sulu. The tree belongs to an iconographie repertoire employed in Tausug textiles that exhibit an early globalized sense of place.