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By Root 1005 0

than anticipated. My field workers are sharp, but most are economics or business majors who have never worked with village people before.” In mid-December, she returned to Hawaii for Christmas. Maya, having finished her job as a tour guide, was back in Honolulu, staying with a University of Hawai‘i professor, with a temporary job lined up waiting tables in a Japanese restaurant. “Barry is also coming at Christmas with a new girlfriend in tow,” Ann wrote to Dewey. “He is still enjoying law school and writing pro-choice opinions on the abortion issue for the Law Review.” Ann’s dissertation committee, headed by Dewey, and the chairman of the anthropology department agreed to submit an extension request to the graduate division. “So now I must make some hard decisions about finishing my degree vs taking a new job,” she wrote to Suryakusuma in January. Bank Rakyat Indonesia had agreed in principle to giving her a two-year contract, but she did not know whether the bank would wait several months while she finished. “My family and friends all say to finish my degree, but there are also practical considerations if I take several months off from work,” she wrote. Among them were the usual financial pressures. To Dewey, Ann wrote, “Am sending a money order for the $1,000 I borrowed from you some time back. You can take out interest in batiks or other goodies when I get back.”

In early 1991, Dewey persuaded Ann to narrow the focus of the dissertation to metalworking, with particular attention to blacksmithing, the forging of iron and steel to make tools. That meant dropping four other peasant industries—basketry and matting, clay products, textiles, and leather—about which Ann had gathered data over the course of a decade and a half. Soon, she was firing off chapters to Honolulu. “Since narrowing the topic to blacksmithing and metal industries, everything is going much better,” she wrote to Dewey. Ann’s office rented a house for her in her old neighborhood, Kebayoran Baru. “I thought if I went to Jogja I would end up eating lesian with Made on Jalan Malioboro every night and never get anything done,” she told Dewey. (Lesian appears to be a misspelling of lesehan, a Javanese word meaning to sit on the ground or on a mat, usually with one’s legs folded back. Makan lesehan is to eat in that position, often at a low table.) In her spare time, she could not resist rounding up even more data, driving with Suarjana to Klaten, where, she exulted to Dewey, “there are iron and brass casting industries which date from the Dutch period (they used to make spare parts for the sugar factories and railway locomotives). Absolutely fascinating!” The following fall, she was back in Hawaii for two months, finishing her dissertation. On November 10, with her draft due at the end of the month, she handwrote a short note in Indonesian to her former research assistant, Djaka Waluja. She had heard from the village headman in Kajar, through Suarjana, that Waluja had been in the village. If he had any new information, Ann asked, could he send it along?

Ann’s opus weighed in, at the end, at one thousand forty-three pages. She had completed the dissertation, “Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds,” almost twenty years after entering graduate school. She had paid for the typing of at least one draft in barter, Dewey would remember: rattan furniture from the house in Kebayoran Baru.

Drawing on data from the fields of archaeology, history, metallurgy, and cultural anthropology, Ann described the occupation as it was seen by the smiths themselves. She recounted the early history of metalworking industries in Indonesia, with its “unbroken line” tying the culture of the Early Metal Age to the present-day smiths. She discussed metalworking technologies, types of bellows, the layout of the smithy. She examined the class position and social status of smiths. She devoted one hundred pages to Kajar, and another seventy to smithing villages in the Minangkabau highlands in West Sumatra, Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, Central Java, Bali, and