From clay to civic icon: Menong craft, heritage-making, and place branding in Purwakarta, Indonesia

This dissertation investigates how Menong, a ceramic craft from Plered, Purwakarta, becomes and endures as a regional icon through an ethnographic lens on material culture, heritage making, and craft livelihoods. Multi-sited fieldwork across workshops, sales spaces, and promotional sites shows that Menong’s recognizability rests on a stable formal repertoire, a stylized female figure with an enlarged head, simplified proportions, and an ornate crown, typically produced through molding and refined through finishing and ornamentation. Meanings are socially produced through motifs and narratives that link Menong to refinement, purity, and local pride, and, at times, to moral messaging, such as family planning ideals. Artisans sustain Menong through quality control, selective innovation, informal apprenticeship and family labor, participation in exhibitions, network building with retailers and intermediaries, digital promotion, and early efforts at design protection. The study reframes preservation as adaptive work that negotiates esthetics, economic viability, and cultural legitimacy.