BOOK REVIEW She had a dream Surviving against the Odds by S Ann Dunham
Reviewed by Dinesh Sharma
Almost 20 years after she completed her doctoral dissertation and 15 years
after she prematurely passed away due to cancer, S Ann Dunham's dream to
publish her life's work has finally been realized.
Due partly to the efforts of an esteemed group of economic and cultural
anthropologists, who worked with her for more than 30 years, and in no small
measure to the new-found fame of her
children, Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro-Ng, her research in the remote villages
of Java has found a growing audience that even she could not have imagined.
Caught between the Beat generation and the hippies, Dunham was a product of the
radical ideals of the 1960s and raised her children with the same idealism and
values, recalled Alice Dewey, professor of anthropology at the University of
Hawaii, who was a mentor and friend of Dunham.
When
US President Barack Obama accepted the Noble Peace Prize, he fulfilled one of
the cherished dreams of his mother to be a peacemaker. "She would be so proud
of him right now," said Alice Dewey as she became tearful. "Ann Dunham was
becoming well known in her own right and getting recognized for her development
work before she passed away.
"She worked until her very last days from the sick bed, calling and e-mailing
Bank Rakyat Indonesia in Jakarta, to ensure her projects were on track," said
Dewey. Almost a year before her death, Dunham had prepared her organization to
attend the United Nations' conference on women in Beijing. She did not make it
to the conference - where Hillary Clinton, then first lady, was the keynote
speaker - as she was struggling with the last bouts of cancer,
Her book, Surviving against the Odds, is a testament to her lifelong
passion for working for the development of rural populations around the world.
The book, which consists of only half of her dissertation, has six densely
packed chapters. The introduction presents a review of the economic
anthropology of rural Indonesia.
Against the backdrop of top-down Asian development programs of the 1970s, on
the one hand, and academic anthropology focused exclusively on low-wetland rice
production, on the other, she outlines the scope of the non-agricultural
sector, specifically, blacksmithing in six different villages.
While she documents the rise of blacksmithing as a cottage industry, her focus
is on the special craft of sword making or keris, which carries great
symbolic importance in Indonesian society.
Chapter two presents the socioeconomic organization of metalworking industries,
examining the clusters of enterprise units and how manufacturing, service and
repair are organized among them. Dunham corrects the broad-stroke
characterization of the Javanese economy as backward, tradition-bound and
irrational or not driven by the basic principles of economics, a view
propagated by leading academics. She demonstrates that even the rural
hinterlands of Java were driven by "capital as the engine of stratification".
Chapter three presents a relatively detailed view of a blacksmithing village,
Kajar, in Yogyakarta. Kajar is a large and well-stratified village, located in
a dry agricultural region and thus relies on cassava as opposed to rice as its
principal crop.
Dunham spent almost 15 years intermittently collecting data in this village.
She documents in painstaking detail some of the sociocultural and demographic
changes that have occurred during the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The
agricultural resource base continued to shrink due to population growth, which
drove villagers to non-agricultural occupations.
The subsistence economy shifted towards a mixed production mode due to
endogenous as well as external government pressures. Due to financial support
from development agencies and the arrival electricity and automobiles,
blacksmithing continued to expand. Dunham documents change in the basic
technology of blacksmithing as smiths acquired new machinery for metal blowing
and finishing. Some of the villagers become savvy about selling their products
and how best to market their skills through local cooperatives.
Chapter four considers the future of metalworking industries in Indonesia with
special emphasis on development planning and aid agencies. Dunham makes it
clear that villagers are not passive participants in the development projects.
They pick and chose development projects based on cost-benefit analysis to suit
their needs and goals. While this chapter is full of macro-level census data,
it presents several time-series trends that document a shift away from
agriculture towards household cottage industries, especially, metalworking.
Metalworking is more capital intensive and delivers a greater return on
investment. Thus, Dunham in interested in the role of micro-credits as a
successful government intervention in supporting local entrepreneurs.
Chapter five explores the history of government interventions, the export and
import protections, and their impact on local industries, especially,
metalworking. Dunham comes down on the side of greater protections for local
industries against the competition from East Asian and other economies. This is
the most policy-oriented chapter in the book and provides a glimpse of how well
versed Dunham was in the operations of the Indonesian political economy.
Like her mother, Madelyn Dunham, who was a vice president of escrow accounts at
the Bank of Hawaii, Dunham had developed a keen interest in tariffs, banking
and regulation policy while working at the Bank Rakyat Indonesia in Jakarta.
In the final chapter, Dunham challenges the notion of "economic dualism" then
prevalent in academic anthropology, which suggests that the natives are somehow
incapable of imagining their world in economic terms, driven by capital and
"the profit motive".
Dunham takes on the writings of J H Boeke and Clifford Geertz, along with the
historical founders of economic anthropology. She claims "the small and
household metalworking industries coexist within the same villages and form a
single socioeconomic and cultural complex".
On a more personal note, the book contains a preface by Maya Soetoro-Ng,
Obama's sister, which contains nuggets of insights about her mother's life and
work. She states, "I had a marvelous time as a child, surrounded by pictures of
anvils and forges, and stories about the magic of fire. My mother taught me to
differentiate between truly fine keris blade with its many layers subtly
interwoven, and a sloppily crafted unrefined blade." The immediate sense that
Dunham truly respected and understood Javanese village communities comes
through her daughter's testimonials.
The editor's note by professors Alice Dewey and Nancy Cooper places Dunham's
work in the larger context of economic anthropology of Indonesia. Both portray
Dunham as a humanist and not just an armchair theoretician or an academic; she
deeply cared about local people and was driven to make a difference in the
daily lives of populations around the world. This is a theme that consistently
runs through Barack Obama's life as well.
When I spoke with another one of her colleagues, Kay Ikranagara, at the Academy
of Educational Development in Jakarta about Dunham's cultural and literary
heroes, she said Dunham was really a social activist and a peacenik influenced
by the philosophies of Indian pacifist Mahatma Gandhi and American activist Dr
Martin Luther King. Both Ann and Kay married Indonesian men and worked together
in Jakarta in the early 1970s. Eventually, both became applied anthropologists
for international development agencies and remained friends over three decades.
The link between Gandhi and King is well known in the history of the civil
rights movement, but how it has played out in the life of the first black
president through early socialization is not well understood. This unique
mother-son relationship highlights how the revolutionary ideals of the 1960s
were generationally transmitted by a peace-corps-loving liberal white woman
from the Midwest, who came of age in Seattle and Hawaii but spent most of her
adult life in the villages of Indonesia. As she used to joke with her friends,
a little girl from Kansas was not supposed to be such a path-breaker, but in
her own way Dunham charted her own course.
Dunham's interest in the small-scale local development projects was influenced
by Gandhi's philosophy of supporting small-scale cottage industries against the
onslaught of large-scale industrialization. Gandhi's popular image of spinning
the homespun cotton was not just a photo opportunity for Life magazine; it was
a lifestyle. Likewise, Dunham was a weaver and a collector of batik textiles;
she believed in supporting local artisans, craftsmen and blacksmiths. E F
Schumacher's Buddhist economic mantra, "small is beautiful", described her
mission statement perfectly.
Robert Hefner, an anthropologist at Boston University, who has written an
afterward to the book, remembers Dunham's work fondly. At her book launch, held
at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in December 2009,
he said, "She was documenting small facts to tell the larger truths" about the
lives of Indonesian villagers.
Her passion for working with the rural poor in Indonesia was founded on her
belief in equality, King, and the civil rights movement; her choices in life
partners were a reflection of this commitment. Barack Obama literally grew up
in the field; when Dunham traveled around the islands of Indonesia and to other
cultures both Barack and his sister Maya often accompanied her.
In a recent interview, Dewey bluntly told me that Barack Obama deserved the
Nobel Peace Prize for putting an end to the policies that pitted America in a
"stupid" death match with other cultures. She said his mother above all was a
humanist before she was an anthropologist; not a little Margaret Mead, but
perhaps a junior Dorothy Day.
"He learned from her that if you did the right things in the local cultures
with everyday people that over time you could a make positive difference in
people's lives," Dewey said.
Dunham would often work on a dozen or more development projects at a time,
ranging from helping women's literacy development to working with local
artisans to secure micro-credits or modest loans. This was long before micro
lending to the poor became the hot trend in global economics and probably
shortly after Muhammad Yunus, the Noble laureate economist, began his work in
Bangladesh.
An Australian art historian and curator at the University of Hawaii, Bronwen
Solyom, who also worked in Indonesia with Dunham and provided most of the
photographs displayed in the book, suggested that she did not have any
particular theory of social and economic justice. She was really interested in
people; she was a humanitarian. While she wrote a 1,000-page dissertation on
economic anthropology, reformers like Gandhi and King, the archetypes of
non-violent social change, inspired her.
After reviewing Dunham's book and speaking with her circle of friends and
colleagues, it dawned on me that the role of the peacemaker, with a heightened
ability to deploy soft power as a political tool, is not just an abstract idea
or a strategy for President Obama. It seems to be neither a clever gimmick nor
a hopefully naive, idealistic and doomed-to-fail policy designed by White House
analysts.
This runs deeper; it is in his DNA. Part and parcel of an inheritance that
harkens back to his mother's early socialization, the role of the peacemaker is
a product of a transmuted, intergenerational dream of changing the world one
village at a time. His mother's unfinished dreams, albeit tenuously, still bind
the elements of Obama's foreign and domestic policies with his political
identity.
Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia by S Ann
Dunham. Duke University Press (December 2009). ISBN-10: 0822346877. Price
US$27.95, 368 pages.
Dinesh Sharma is a marketing science consultant with a doctorate in
psychology from Harvard University. He is currently a fellow at the Institute
for International and Cross Cultural Research, St Francis College, NY.
(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about
sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road,
Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
When
US President Barack Obama accepted the Noble Peace Prize, he fulfilled one of
the cherished dreams of his mother to be a peacemaker. "She would be so proud
of him right now," said Alice Dewey as she became tearful. "Ann Dunham was
becoming well known in her own right and getting recognized for her development
work before she passed away.
