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Jakarta Post

`Ibu' Ann's legacy to Indonesia

"When I get back to Indonesia I expect you to cheer me up as I am feeling rather *down' now

Julia Suryakusuma (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sun, March 21, 2010

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`Ibu' Ann's legacy to Indonesia

"When I get back to Indonesia I expect you to cheer me up as I am feeling rather *down' now. Despite 10-hour days, even on weekends, I still have two more chapters of my dissertation to finish. I do wish I had chosen a smaller topic, I would have been finished a year ago." (22 August, 1988)

That's from a letter sent to me by my one of my closest friends, Ann Soetoro, who passed away in 1995. Now she's better known to the world as S. Ann Dunham, the mother of US President Barack Obama and author of Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, published by Duke University Press in November 2009 (http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4687-6).

Surviving against the Odds is a condensed version of Ann's PhD on village industries in Java that she says she worked for almost two decades. In the end Ann decided to focus on just one of five crafts - bamboo, clay, leather, textile and blacksmithing - she had initially intended to cover in five villages she found specializing in these crafts. But even with blacksmithing as her "smaller topic", Ann ended up with a dissertation more than 1,000 pages long, finally submitted in 1992.

"Don't judge a book by its cover," they say. I'd say don't be fooled by the simple title of this one either, and even less by its table of contents. While they may appear decidedly dry and academic, it is a fascinating and important scholarly piece of work. It's also a good reminder that Ann not only had sharp intellect, but was a perfectionist too, and a hard-working one at that. Her work is extremely well documented, with hard statistical data making the book extremely detailed and well informed.

At the same time, Ann's book - like her - is deeply empathetic. Full of evocative descriptions of the lives of villagers she worked with, it is a testament to her commitment to the development of lives of rural and marginalized peoples all around the world.

Ann was an internationalist with a global outlook, but it was Indonesia and its peoples that became the love of her life, and this passion comes through in her book - something all too rare in academic writing.

Surviving against the Odds is based on the anthropological work Ann did in Java between 1977 and 1991. The reason why it took her so long to complete was because she was juggling her research with being a single mum raising two kids, and working to keep the whole show together. Ann supported herself and her children by doing lot of applied development work in Indonesia on projects funded by USAID, ILO, the World Bank, ADB and The Ford Foundation, where she was a program officer for women's work from 1981 to 1984. She also worked for BRI Bank, and for Women's World Banking (http://www.swwb.org/) in the early 1990s.

Much of Ann's work involved developing micro-credit programs to help protect villagers against poverty, so there wasn't anything "armchair" about her anthropology work. Ann's research was firmly in the real world, working with villagers to solve their everyday problems. This comes through clearly, and it gives her work authority.

There are many aspects of Ann's book that I can identify with, for example, her approach of tracing the connection from jagad cilik (micro, or small world, meaning "the individual") to jagad gede (macro, the universe or world). Her understanding of the real needs of the rural populace enabled Ann to formulate the shrewd policy recommendations she offered throughout the course of her developmental work, and which meant she was always in demand from donor agencies.

Perhaps this close engagement is why Ann criticizes Western theoretical frameworks in the book, debunking the notion of "modernization theory" as ethnocentric and condescending, blaming the poor for their poverty, and characterizing native Indonesians as placing a greater social value on social rather than economic needs.

Among the theorists she lambasted were J.H. Boeke with his "economic dualism" theory (1953) and Clifford Geertz's Agricultural Involution (1963), which she considers a reincarnation of Boeke anyway. But Ann was also critical of Indonesians who believed in the stereotypes about themselves from Western scholars. Sadly, this colonial mentality of ours still exists, too often placing more weight on ideas of Western scholars and consultants than on those of our fellow Indonesians.

Ann's work was done some time ago, so is it still relevant to contemporary Indonesia, which has changed so much since then? The answer to that is yes, Indonesia has changed in many ways, but in others it hasn't. The poor are still poor, they are still at least half the population, and they have to cope with all the changes. In her book, Ann highlights the tensions between traditional skills and rapidly modernizing lifestyles. She could see traditional village industries and the crafts they keep alive would have to struggle to survive - and they have.

In the end, the most important thing about Ann's work is the example she sets of being on an exemplary scholar, with a gift for insightful analysis, and at the same time deeply empathetic and engaged. This why even though Surviving against the Odds is an important work, Ann's greatest legacy lies in her pioneering work in micro-finance, and in the lives of people she touched in her adopted land, Indonesia.

Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia

S. Ann Dunham
Edited and with a preface by Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper.
With a foreword by Maya Soetoro-Ng and an afterword by Robert W. Hefner.
440 pages (November 2009)
Duke University Press

 

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