HIDDEN THREADS: STRUCTURE AND STATUS IN CHIN TEXTILES
Speaker: Barbara and David Fraser

The two themes developed in the paper both derive from the importance in Chin society of textiles as markers of status in this life and the next.

The first theme is that in several important types of Chin textiles, including the highest status textile (vai puan) of the Northern Chin, structures in which one set of yarns (warps, structural wefts or supplementary wefts) are hidden by another set create a readily recognizable badge of status.

The second theme is that the distribution of culturally important textile structures and motifs can be better understood by consideration of the threads of migration history and cultural diffusion.

Introducing
BARBARA AND DAVID FRASER

Barbara and David Fraser have been studying Chin textiles for the last five years. They published an article (The Textiles of the Northern Chin) in Arts of Asia in 2003 and a book on Chin textiles (Mantles of Merit: Chin Textiles from Myanmar, India and Bangladesh) to be published by River Books is expected to be released early in 2005. They also have a chapter on Chin textiles in the catalogue of the collection of Denison University that will be published by Singapore University Press in late 2005 or 2006.

This year, Barbara and David Fraser are curating with Alexandra Green an exhibition (Textiles from the Burma Hills) of the textiles of minority groups in Myanmar; venues of the exhibition will be the University of Pennsylvania and Denison University.

David Fraser is a Research Associate both at The Textile Museum (Washington, DC) and in the Asian Section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (Philadelphia). He wrote A Guide to Weft Twining and Related Structures with Interacting Wefts (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), as well as articles on textile structure.