A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [127]
I asked James Fox, a respected anthropologist who had worked in Indonesia over a twenty-year period, what he made of Ann’s dissertation. Fox, who had degrees from Harvard and Oxford and had taught at Duke, Cornell, and Harvard, was a professor at the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University when we spoke. He said he held the view that anthropology, as a discipline, was too fashion-driven: Anthropological theory had a half-life of five years, and graduate students tended to gravitate to the latest theory. Ann, he said, did something unfashionable. She produced an ethnography of the sort Fox believed would be a reference point for many years. “Ann’s book will be a monument into the next century,” he said. “You can get into it, and you can get a glimpse of life in a certain period. You can’t do that with a lot of anthropological theory. It’s momentary. It might be stimulating, but it doesn’t last long.”
When a redacted version of the dissertation was published by Duke University Press in 2009, Michael Dove, the Yale anthropologist and Ann’s longtime friend, wrote in a review that her study of Kajar “is one of the richest ethnographic studies to come out of Java in the past generation. This sort of long-term, in-depth, ground-level study, once the norm in anthropology, is increasingly rare.” Ann had concluded that development in the villages she studied was held back not by a lack of entrepreneurial spirit but by a lack of capital—the product of politics, not culture. “Indonesia exemplifies the truth that often the disadvantaged do need not assistance but fair play, not resources but the political control over resources,” Dove wrote.
Ann signed the dissertation S. Ann Dunham. On the dedication page, she wrote:
dedicated to Madelyn and Alice,
who each gave me support in her own way,
and to Barack and Maya,
who seldom complained when their mother was in the field
On February 8, 1992, less than two weeks before Ann was to defend her dissertation, Stanley Dunham died. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer more than a year earlier. His condition had deteriorated, his brother said, to a point where he was unable to walk. He was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, or Punchbowl National Cemetery, a rolling green landscape of finely tended lawns flecked with gravestones overlooking the Pacific. His death hit Ann hard. The tensions between them, which had marked earlier years, had subsided. She had talked about him, at least to some, as the family’s emotional glue. “When she talked about her mother, it was with admiration,” Don Johnston, her colleague, said. “But clearly her stronger emotional bond was with her father.”
Two years earlier, Obama, at age twenty-eight, was elected president of the Harvard Law Review—“its first black president in more than 100 years of publication,” as the Associated Press reported on February 5, 1990, the day after the election. That initial article, in which Obama was said not to have ruled out a future in politics, made no mention of his parents. An article in The New York Times the following day mentioned them briefly—a former Kenyan government official and “an American anthropologist now doing field work in Indonesia.” A longer article a week