A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [62]
There was something almost matronly about her. By the time she reached her early thirties, Ann had been an adult for a long time. Other students went out drinking, lay on the beach, flirted, gossiped, threw parties, shied away from commitments, toyed with trendy academic ideas. They lived in what Kennedy called “capsules of theoretical, highfalutin nonsense, very far from the real world.” Ann kept her distance from the chitchat, both theoretical and social. She seemed to be looking for a way to pursue her interests—in anthropology, in Indonesia—while also making a living. Ben Finney, a professor who had grown up in Southern California and had written an ethno-history of surfing, was put off initially by what he took to be Ann’s well-bred manner. Her fastidious diction reminded him of WASPs he had encountered as a graduate student at Harvard. “We did things much more informally than she seemed to,” he said. “After I got to know her, I said, ‘Well, Ann is just this upright person. That’s her, no problem.’” She had an inquiring mind, and she was endlessly curious. She was absorbed by handicrafts, a topic that was not trendy but that interested Finney, too. He had done fieldwork in Tahiti, where, he said, traditional craft industries had all but disappeared, supplanted by the production of whatever tourists would buy. He had seen the strength of the handicraft sector of the Indonesian economy, where craftspeople still made textiles, tools, ceramics, and other items for everyday life. It was one of the reasons, he said, why anthropologists loved Indonesia: the persistence of a recognizably Indonesian way of life. But some had ruled out working there because of the difficulties inherent in getting the government’s permission. Ann, however, had already lived there and was going back. Between the fall of 1972 and the fall of 1974, she completed sixty-three credits and all the coursework required for her Ph.D. When I asked Alice Dewey, the chairman of Ann’s dissertation committee, what Ann was like as a student, she answered, “Ah! All business.”
Ann’s application had caught the attention of Dewey, a professor of anthropology who had gone to Java herself in the early 1950s as a twenty-three-year-old graduate student on a field team from Harvard. Settling in a town in east Central Java that they called Modjokuto, the members of the team did pioneering work on subjects ranging from the Javanese family to the rural economy. Their work became the basis of a series of seminal books, the best known of which was The Religion of Java by Clifford Geertz, who went on to become the most celebrated anthropologist of his generation. Dewey studied peasant markets, which are run by women in Java. She lived for more than a year in a rural village north of Modjokuto, bicycling every morning into the main Modjokuto market, spending afternoons visiting the homes of the market people, and passing the evenings on visits to her neighbors. Her most important market informants were two middle-aged half sisters, one of whom sold coffee and hot snacks “and provided me not only with information about her own business affairs but also with the current gossip of the marketplace, of which she had extensive knowledge because coffee stands are important social centers,” Dewey wrote later. “Her half sister, who dealt first in dried corn and later in onions, was the most important informant for my study of wholesaling. She, her husband, a married daughter, and a son, married while I was there, were all experienced traders; between them, with great patience, they managed to teach me the workings of the market.” Dewey’s 1962 book Peasant Marketing in Java covered, among other things, bargaining, the division of labor, trade discounts, loans and interest rates, moneylenders, pooled savings plans, traders’ rights and privileges, interpersonal relationships in the marketplace, small-scale cash crops, mountain crops, prepared-food vendors, and door-to-door peddlers. It also touched on the role of craftsmen, including metalworkers, leatherworkers, tailors,