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Surviving Against The Odds
S. Ann Dunham
Village Industry In Indonesia
Duke University Press
December 2009
On Sale: December 1, 2009
368 pages ISBN: 0822346877 EAN: 9780822346876 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
President Barack Obama's mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an
economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who
worked in several countries including Indonesia. Dunham
received her doctorate in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age
of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her
dissertation for publication, as she had planned. Alice G.
Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, Dunham's graduate adviser and
fellow graduate student respectively, undertook the
revisions at the request of Dunham's daughter, Maya
Soetoro-Ng. The result is Surviving against the Odds, a book
based on Dunham's research, over a period of fourteen years,
among the rural craftsmen of Java, the island home to nearly
half Indonesia's population. Surviving against the Odds
reflects Dunham's commitment to helping small-scale village
industries survive; her pragmatic, non-ideological approach
to research and problem-solving; and her impressive command
of history, economic data, and development policy. Along
with photographs of Dunham, the book includes many pictures
taken by her in Indonesia. After Dunham married Lolo Soetoro in 1967, she and her
six-year-old son, Barack Obama, moved from Hawai`i to
Soetoro's home in Jakarta, where Maya Soetoro was born three
years later. Barack returned to Hawai`i to attend school in
1971. Dedicated to Dunham's mother Madelyn, adviser Alice,
and "Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their
mother was in the field," Surviving against the Odds centers
on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of
Kajar. Focusing attention on the small rural industries
overlooked by many scholars, Dunham argued that wet-rice
cultivation was not the only viable economic activity in
rural Southeast Asia. Surviving against the Odds includes a preface by the
editors, Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, and a foreword
by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, each of which discusses
Dunham and her career. In his afterword, the anthropologist
and Indonesianist Robert W. Hefner explores the content of
Surviving against the Odds, its relation to anthropology
when it was researched and written, and its continuing
relevance today.
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