This is a very serious book that has had to wait too long to be published. Ann Dunham did important anthropological research in Java over a period of 14 years from the 1970s to 1991, focusing particularly on the metal working industry in a village in Gunung Kidul. This produced a doctoral thesis at the University of Hawai‘i that was over a thousand pages long. Before the work could be edited and reduced to publishable length, Ann Dunham died in 1995. Her supervisor Alice G. Dewey – in her eighties – has now done the editorial work needed to produce this important study.
It should be noted that Ann Dunham was not just an academic anthropologist. She did a great deal of applied development work in Indonesia in projects funded by the ILO, USAID, Ford Foundation, ADB and World Bank. This work is set out in detail in an appendix to the book.
This is, thus, real-world anthropology: it is authoritative, extraordinarily well documented and detailed, informed by concern for the human issues that are involved, and deeply intelligent. Ann Dunham combines ‘hard’ statistical data with empathetic, evocative descriptions of the lives of the people she worked with. She differs from a prevailing ‘developmental’ view of small-scale village industries by ‘emphasizing their long-term stability and competitive advantages in the context of the rural market’ (p. 39).
The book rises above the exoticist fashions that have weighed down some Indonesian scholarship. It is clear that she had little time for Clifford Geertz's approach to either the discipline of anthropology or Indonesia. His Agricultural involution is dismissed as a book that ‘consists of secondary analysis … a curious amalgam of ecology, colonial history, and notions about economic “takeoff”’ (p. 18). In this context, she goes on to note astutely ‘the curious tendency for western stereotypes about Indonesia to become part of the way Indonesians think about themselves’ (p. 21).
The book abounds with insightful and important points. It critiques ‘modernisation theory’, noting how it ‘exaggerates the differences between East and West, blames the poor for their poverty … and ignores different factor proportions in the allocation of productive resources’ (p. 26). Dunham observes the very mixed blessing of foreign consultants in Indonesia (‘Some … were ideologically neutral, indifferent or confused’, p. 36). She overturns some conventional views of village entrepreneurs and shows how they ‘are intensely interested in profits and spend a good deal of time and thought trying to maximise those profits’ (p. 265). ‘Capital’, she demonstrates, ‘is the engine of stratification in the rural industrial sector’ (p. 286) and ‘entrepreneurship is in plentiful supply in rural Indonesia’ (p. 289).
Dunham evidently did not command Dutch and therefore was unable to make use of some of the earlier Dutch literature that would have been relevant to her research. I noted only one Dutch title in the bibliography (Schwaner's book of 1853 on Borneo) and the title is misspelled. So she did not make use of Jasper and Pirngadie's Inlandsche kunstnijverheid in Nederlandsch Indië (1912, republished in 2009) or Groneman's work on kris-making (1910–13, also republished in 2009, now in English translation with quite wonderful photographs). So perhaps the book lacks some of the historical depth it might have had with regard to the metal-working industry, but it does set its study in the context of earlier Dutch thought on ‘dualistic economies’ by using Boeke and others in translation. Robert Hefner provides an afterword that constitutes a sympathetic review of the book and is worth reading in its own right.
Dunham's book is authoritative and thoughtful, a profound analysis of social realities informed by serious research, long personal experience and great empathy. It stands on its own as a major contribution, but it is not surprising that the publishers should have chosen to promote sales by emphasising on the dust jacket that this is ‘by the mother of President Barack Obama’. We may all hope that the son is as shrewd, well informed, intelligent and clear-thinking about the real world as his mother was.
