Surviving against the Odds

President Barack Obama's mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an anthropologist who specialized in social and economic development in 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 hoped to do. Dunham's thesis adviser, Alice G. Dewey, and her colleague, Nancy I. Cooper, undertook the revisions at the request of her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng. The result is "Surviving against the Odds", a book based on Dunham's fourteen years of research among craftsmen in Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia's population. A work of economic anthropology, "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 'Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field', "Surviving against the Odds" is a study of the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar. Focusing attention on rural Indonesia's small industries, Dunham argued that, contrary to the views of many scholars and development experts, wet-rice cultivation was not the only viable economic activity in rural Southeast Asia. Moreover, she contended that since the villagers were pursuing the economic activities they perceived as most profitable, they did not need development workers to teach them Western-style capitalism. "Surviving against the Odds" includes a preface by Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper and a foreword by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, both of which discuss Dunham and her career. In his afterword, the 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.