Woven Power/Stunned by Beauty Package

These publications were published in conjunction with the 2016 exhibition of historic pua and kain kebat selected from the remarkable, comprehensive collection of Dr. John G. Kreifeldt. In Woven Power, full color photographs are accompanied by textile biographies written by Kreifeldt documenting each textile in the exhibition. Curator Dr. Susan Rodgers, emerita anthropologist from Holy Cross, offers anthropological essays in the companion volume Stunned by Beauty. These magnificent, intricately dyed, hand-loomed cotton ikat textiles were once woven in longhouses as religious objects par excellence for the Iban and the related Dayak women who wove them in Malaysia’s Sarawak, and in nearby Kalimantan, Indonesia. Pua kumbu blankets and the closely connected kain kebat ceremonial skirts were designed to be extraordinarily beautiful – to attract the attention of the gods and invite them to longhouse rituals.