The book she was working on when she died in 1995, has now been assembled edited and published
Surviving against the odds : village industry in Indonesia / S. Ann Dunham ; edited and with a preface by Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper ; with a foreword by Maya Soetoro-Ng and an afterword by Robert W. Hefner, Duke University Press, 2009.
I’m reading it at present and its very good – a wonderful solid, ethnographically-grounded study of village industries, especially the makers of metal tools, mostly around Jogjakarta. But it also has a lot of detail of how she did her research, over a period of more than a decade, while working as a consultant to a series of development projects. Maybe I’ll add some more when I finish it.
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Thanks so much, Graeme, for doing this. Reviews of this book should be written and published in all the anthropology journals, and maybe other places. It shoud be encouraging to all commited anthropologists, perhaps most of all to anthropologist mums who struggle to reconcile their long, underpaid work in difficult overseas places with motherhood. Obama is proud of his mother, as well he should be. I’m sure she loved him and his sister dearly. We should celebrate the life of this remarkable woman.