by Janny Scott
Everything about blacksmithing captivated this native Kansan. If she could be reincarnated, she told a colleague, Don Johnston, years later, she would come back as a blacksmith. “I still dream of the day I can visit you and go upriver to see those big blacksmithing villages you told me about,” she wrote to another acquaintance in Kalimantan in 1981. She was not simply interested in the technical aspects of the craft; she could see that, in the hands of a skilled smith, utilitarian objects emerged as something closer to art. She became almost proprietary about her village. “She was very possessive of Kajar,” said Garrett Solyom, who was doing research on the kris, working closely with a smith in another village in Java. “It was very clear that she knew she’d stumbled on something special. She made it clear, in indirect ways, that she didn’t want me poking around there.”
Kajar was just one of a half-dozen villages, each with its own handicrafts industry, on which Ann had chosen to focus. There was Kasongan, a center of crockery production seven kilometers south of Yogyakarta, where competition from factory-made pottery was cutting into the market for traditional earthenware products. There, tourism was creating a new market for animal banks, toys, and terra-cotta souvenirs. Malangan, fifteen kilometers northwest of Yogyakarta, had been a center of hand-loom weaving, specializing in striped sarongs and solid-colored waistcloths. When shortages of yarn and competition from mechanized textile mills put most of the weavers out of business, villagers turned to converting bamboo and palm leaves into items such as baskets, winnowing trays, and rice steamers. That industry, too, was encountering competition from factory-made housewares. Pocung, like Malangan, had once been a thriving hand-loom weaving village specializing in lurik. When that industry faltered, villagers switched to trading or to making perforated leather shadow puppets out of animal hide. With the rise of tourism had come increased demand for leather “wayang-style” souvenirs, including bookmarks, lampshades, miniature puppets, and key rings. “Problem with marketing through stores because stores only want cheap wayangs and don’t care about quality while Sagiyo doesn’t want to make cheap wayangs,” Ann observed in her notes from a long interview with a puppetmaker named Sagiyo from the village of Gendeng. (Her notes from that day included a sketch of a birthday cake with four candles. “Joko’s birthday,” she wrote.)
Patterns and themes began to emerge. It became increasingly apparent, for example, that women were not necessarily benefiting from industrialization. When female-dominated industries adapted to competition by producing new products for new markets, the best paid jobs often went to men. The most profitable industries—the ones requiring expensive raw materials and access to working capital—were almost exclusively male. In one village, Ann found that nearly every household made bamboo basketry, but only forty of those had the capital to work with more lucrative rattan. In all forty, the entrepreneurs were men. Another pattern that captured Ann’s attention involved the industriousness of Indonesians. “We found almost every family to have an incredible array of subsidiary activities which they juggle around to make sure that they are always occupied and always have something coming in,” Ann wrote to Dewey from Kajar. That ingenuity seemed to defy the assumptions of scholars, such as J. H. Boeke, the early-twentieth-century Dutch economist whom Dewey had mentioned. Boeke had described the economy of the Indies as “dualistic,” with a gap between Western-style, capital-intensive enterprises and the more labor-intensive peasant enterprises. He attributed the gap largely to cultural differences—an Indonesian inclination toward cooperation rather than competition, a lack of interest in capital accumulation, and a tendency to engage in wage labor only until one met one’s limited needs. But Ann found village industry producers intensely interested in profits and keenly aware of fluctuations in the prices of fuel, labor, and raw materials. Instead of cultural differences, Ann thought, a lack of information and lack of certain technologies might help explain economic “dualism.” But what about access to capital? Even the relatively large investment in equipment of a successful entrepreneur such as Pak Sastro in Kajar paled by comparison with the money required to set up a Western-style factory.
The main cause of the gap in the Indonesian economy was not cultural, Ann came to believe. It was differences in access to capital.
In March 1978, Ann found herself face-to-face with the problem to which she would end up devoting much of her professional attention in the coming years. She was attending a meeting of the Indonesian government agency that had sponsored her research, a unit within the Department of Industry that worked with small enterprises. According to her field notes, the subject of the meeting was income distribution and employment. The question arose: Why was the government’s development aid not reaching the lowest levels of the landless? The answer given was that credit was going to farmers—not to village industries, including handicrafts. Under the government’s five-year plan, special banking units had been set up to make loans to small farmers. But there was no similar program for rural craftspeople. Banks were interested in efficiency and profit, not in employment and income distribution. When craftsmen filled out loan forms and took them to the bank, even with the help of Department of Industry officials, the banks turned them down. Employment would increase and income distribution would improve, someone pointed out, only if small entrepreneurs got help.
“Ask Subroto where the credit is,” someone said, referring to a Department of Industry official. “We never see any credit.”
When Ann was not in the field, she was in Yogyakarta, sometimes with Maya, sometimes not. Lolo Soetoro’s niece Kismardhani S-Roni, who was a teenager when Ann moved to Yogyakarta, remembered Ann and Maya living for a time with Lolo’s mother in the house near the bird market and Ann homeschooling Maya in a room hung with Maya’s drawings. “Tante Ann” was an exacting teacher, Lolo’s niece and her brother, Haryo Soetendro, recalled. Maya got no favored treatment just because she was the only student, Soetendro remembered. “You had to work hard to get a good mark from your ‘teacher,’” he wrote in an e-mail to Maya in 2008. At other times, while Ann was in the field, Maya sometimes stayed with her cousins and their parents in a big house on the edge of the campus of Gadjah Mada University, where Lolo’s sister and brother-in-law taught. “I wandered around a lot,” Maya recalled. “Mom was working sometimes, and I would be taken care of by a collection of people—possibly some were employed by the family, possibly some were family, some were neighbors. There was a complex across the way. I remember old Dutch gates and wrought iron and running around there. Sort of like ‘it takes a village’ kind of thing. A lot of the women who took care of me had other kids. . . . But I also remember her being very present in the afternoons and teaching me.”
For several months, apparently in mid-1978, Ann stayed with an Indonesian family in their house next to the Pakualaman Kraton, a smaller compound not far from the main compound of the sultan. Maggie Norobangun, who was teaching English at the time, had met Dewey in 1976. Dewey had become a close friend of the family’s and a regular guest. With Dewey’s help, Ann stayed for several months in what Norobangun called “Alice’s room.” She would leave early every morning on the back of the motorcycle of yet another graduate student who was working as her research assistant in the field. She would return late in the day, saying, “Oh, Maggie, I’m dead beat.” She was friendly, easygoing, and happy to be living in Yogyakarta, but she never spoke about her family, Norobangun told me. On one occasion, to Norobangun’s surprise, Maya, then age eight, came to visit for several days. Norobangun had not understood that Ann had a daughter. On another occasion, Lolo stopped by with Barry and Maya on a trip to Borobudur. “I didn’t even know about Mr. Soetoro,” Norobangun told me.
By the fall of 1978, Barry was seventeen and a senior at Punahou in his last year at home in Hawaii. Ann had never found the distance separating them easy, commuting between continents and trying to remain engaged in his life. Now his childhood was coming to a close. Nancy Peluso, Ann’s friend from Yogyakarta, told
me she remembered meeting Ann earlier that year in a small hotel in the southern part of Yogyakarta. They made a practice of getting together when they were both in town—to eat dinner, catch up, get a massage. On this occasion, Peluso recalled, Ann broke into tears. “She just started crying,” Peluso said. “And she said, ‘You know, I’ve got to go back to the U.S. for the last year that Barry is in high school. I really want to do that. After that, he’s gone and I won’t have any chance to experience that. I just want to be back there.’”
So she returned to Honolulu for several months that fall. In a haunting scene from Dreams from My Father, Obama describes a confrontation between mother and son during that visit. A friend of his has been arrested for drug possession. Ann confronts Obama, with the intensity of a parent fearing that the opportunity to influence her nearly adult child is running out. His grades are dropping, she says; he has yet to start his college applications. Isn’t he being a bit cavalier about his future? In a manner at first patronizing, then hostile, he brushes Ann off. He tries an old gambit—a smile, a few reassuring words, the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head. When Ann is not appeased, he informs her that he is thinking of not going away for college, just staying in Hawaii, taking a few classes, working part-time. She cuts him off: He could get into any college he wanted, she tells him, if he would make a little effort. He cannot just sit around like a good-time Charlie, counting on luck. “I looked at her sitting there, so earnest, so certain of her son’s destiny . . .” Obama writes. “I suddenly felt like puncturing that certainty of hers, letting her know that her experiment with me had failed.”
Instead of shouting, he laughs.
“A good-time Charlie, huh? Well, why not? Maybe that’s what I want out of life. I mean, look at Gramps. He didn’t even go to college.”
Obama realizes, from Ann’s expression, that he has stumbled upon her worst fear.
“‘Is that what you’re worried about?’ I asked. ‘That I’ll end up like Gramps?’” Then, having done his best to sabotage her faith in him, Obama walks out of the room.
One can only imagine how Ann took that exchange. She came from a family of teachers, though neither of her parents had received a college degree. Her mother, regretting her own decisions, had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that Ann, then Barry, would have the education and the opportunities that she had missed. The University of Hawai‘i had thrown wide Ann’s horizons—emotionally, intellectually, and professionally. For Barry to have the same chances, she had accepted their living half a world apart. She could not have helped worrying about the toll of that aching separation on the connection between them. Ann had the highest expectations for her son; she had emphasized from his earliest years the value of education and hard work. Now, to spite her, he was professing to reject both.
What was Ann’s “experiment”—as Obama referred to it in the book?
When I asked President Obama that question, he explained that he had written the scene in the voice of his cynical, sarcastic, teenage self. His mother thought he was special, he believed at the time; she imagined that the values she had inculcated would make him the person she wanted him to be. But he was angry, full of self-doubt, and unconvinced that her efforts were worthwhile.
Who was the person she wanted him to be? I asked him.
“You know, sort of a cross between Einstein, Gandhi, and Belafonte, right?” he said, laughing. “I think she wanted me to be the man that she probably would have liked my grandfather to be, that she would have liked my father to have turned out to be.”
Then he added, “You know, somebody who was strong and honest and doing worthwhile things for the world.”
Seven
Community Organizing
The village of Ungaran was a speck in the mountains above the port of Semarang on the north coast of Central Java. A two-lane road between Semarang and Yogyakarta wound steeply through terraced rice fields and past the village. Trucks broke down or crashed so often that the road was said to be inhabited by spirits. There was a village square, some food stalls, a market, and a movie house that screened second-rate Hollywood movies. Ann Hawkins, a young American, was living outside Ungaran, working with an Indonesian organization, training village people in organic farming. To reach the training center from the road, one walked a mile along a footpath through paddy fields. One day in late 1979 or early 1980, Hawkins looked up from the ditch in which she was mixing compost and dirt, and was startled to see a Western man and woman watching. The woman, porcelain-skinned and smiling, sunglasses parked on the top of her head, was Ann Soetoro. The man was an official of an international development organization. “What are you doing?” one of them asked Hawkins. She was wondering the same thing. White people never came to Ungaran, she was thinking. Especially white women.
In early 1979, Ann had moved from Yogyakarta to Semarang, the ancient trading port that is the capital of Central Java. She had completed her fieldwork, for the time being, and had drained the last of her East-West Center grant. Barry, in his final year at Punahou, would be applying to colleges; Maya, still being educated at home, would soon need to be enrolled in a school. Even with Madelyn Dunham’s bank salary subsidizing Barry’s education, Ann needed money. “Please don’t forget to put me down for assistanting spring term,” she wrote to Alice Dewey from Java in the summer of 1978, announcing her intention to return to Honolulu in time for her favorite holiday, Halloween. “I’m going to be really broke when I get back.” But rather than settle down as a teaching assistant at the university, she returned to Java in January. “Although I finished fieldwork at the end of 1978, family finances and the exhaustion of my EWC grant prevented me from returning immediately to Honolulu for write-up and comprehensives,” she explained later in a progress report to the anthropology department. Instead, she accepted a job as a consultant in international development on a project in Central Java funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The job came with a salary, a house in Semarang, a car and driver, and home leave. She persuaded the University of Hawai‘i to grant her an initial nine-month leave of absence. “Well, now that I’m working I’m hoping to clear all debts soon,” Ann wrote to Dewey several months into the job.
Her reasons for taking it were not exclusively financial. The project, the first of its kind in Indonesia, was designed to build the capacity of provincial planning offices to do development planning in direct response to the needs of poor communities. “It was perfect for her,” Ann’s friend Nancy Peluso told me. “To be able to find something where she could directly apply the knowledge that she had been collecting in a very good way, and at the same time get enough of an income to maybe start paying for some of these things and saving up for college.” The prospect of solving problems, not just describing them, appealed to Ann. After a fellow anthropologist wrote to her jokingly that she had heard that Ann had “sold your soul to the large international organizations,” Ann apparently mounted a persuasive defense. The friend wrote back, “I must say that your job with AID sounds fascinating and challenging. . . . I can well understand the excitement of doing something practical rather than theoretical and actually working in the field of development rather than theorizing it and criticizing it from the safety of a U.S. university. In addition, I know what you mean when you describe the people you work with (or at least some of the people in your team) as being dynamic, progressive, social minded and involved.”
The project in Java represented a new approach. Development agencies had tended to operate by lending governments money for large-scale infrastructure, such as water systems and roads. When the work was completed and the agency moved on, the new facilities were often not maintained. By the late 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development was moving toward a different approach. Projects would be multifaceted—say, a little infrastructure, some skills training, some rural electrification, some microcredit—and decisions would emanate less from the top down than from the bottom up. “The idea was that we should em
bark upon programs that involved local communities, and we should be responsive to their needs,” Carl A. Dutto, the rural development officer for the agency in Jakarta at that time, told me. “The theory behind it was if you’re working that way, it’s sustainable, because people want it.” There was increasing attention, too, to addressing the problems of the rural poor. After the upheaval of the 1960s, the Suharto government had set about tackling rural poverty, which was seen as a cause of social and political unrest. The government enlisted the banking system to diversify the economy and encourage rural development. It would begin setting up credit programs to channel money to rural entrepreneurs, promoting small industries and reducing dependence on farming. To understand poor communities better, some development agencies began hiring anthropologists like Dutto, who joined the Agency for International Development in 1976 from a teaching job at the University of Nairobi. Their job became articulating the community’s perspective.