Ann Dunham's 'Surviving Against the Odds' Published: The Dreams of Obama's Mother Come to Light

Almost 20 years after she completed her doctoral dissertation and 15 years after she prematurely passed away due to cancer, S Ann Dunham's dream to publish her life's work has finally been realized.

Due partly to the efforts of an esteemed group of economic and cultural anthropologists, who worked with her for more than 30 years, and in no small measure to the new-found fame of her children, Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro-Ng, her research in the remote villages of Java has found a growing audience that even she could not have imagined.

Caught between the Beat generation and the hippies, Dunham was a product of the radical ideals of the 1960s and raised her children with the same idealism and values, recalled Alice Dewey, professor of anthropology at the University of Hawaii, who was a mentor and friend of Dunham.

When US President Barack Obama accepted the Noble Peace Prize, he fulfilled one of the cherished dreams of his mother to be a peacemaker. "She would be so proud of him right now," said Alice Dewey as she became tearful. "Ann Dunham was becoming well known in her own right and getting recognized for her development work before she passed away.

"She worked until her very last days from the sick bed, calling and e-mailing Bank Rakyat Indonesia in Jakarta, to ensure her projects were on track," said Dewey. Almost a year before her death, Dunham had prepared her organization to attend the United Nations' conference on women in Beijing. She did not make it to the conference - where Hillary Clinton, then first lady, was the keynote speaker - as she was struggling with the last bouts of cancer,

Her book, Surviving against the Odds, is a testament to her lifelong passion for working for the development of rural populations around the world. The book, which consists of only half of her dissertation, has six densely packed chapters. The introduction presents a review of the economic anthropology of rural Indonesia.

Against the backdrop of top-down Asian development programs of the 1970s, on the one hand, and academic anthropology focused exclusively on low-wetland rice production, on the other, she outlines the scope of the non-agricultural sector, specifically, blacksmithing in six different villages.

While she documents the rise of blacksmithing as a cottage industry, her focus is on the special craft of sword making or keris, which carries great symbolic importance in Indonesian society.

Chapter two presents the socioeconomic organization of metalworking industries, examining the clusters of enterprise units and how manufacturing, service and repair are organized among them. Dunham corrects the broad-stroke characterization of the Javanese economy as backward, tradition-bound and irrational or not driven by the basic principles of economics, a view propagated by leading academics. She demonstrates that even the rural hinterlands of Java were driven by "capital as the engine of stratification".

Chapter three presents a relatively detailed view of a blacksmithing village, Kajar, in Yogyakarta. Kajar is a large and well-stratified village, located in a dry agricultural region and thus relies on cassava as opposed to rice as its principal crop.

Dunham spent almost 15 years intermittently collecting data in this village. She documents in painstaking detail some of the sociocultural and demographic changes that have occurred during the late 1970s to the early 1990s. The agricultural resource base continued to shrink due to population growth, which drove villagers to non-agricultural occupations.

The subsistence economy shifted towards a mixed production mode due to endogenous as well as external government pressures. Due to financial support from development agencies and the arrival electricity and automobiles, blacksmithing continued to expand. Dunham documents change in the basic technology of blacksmithing as smiths acquired new machinery for metal blowing and finishing. Some of the villagers become savvy about selling their products and how best to market their skills through local cooperatives.