A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [63]
Dewey, hired by the University of Hawai‘i in 1962, had arrived on campus shortly after the elder Obama graduated and headed for Harvard. Over the years, she would become a mentor and friend to generations of graduate students, serving on countless doctoral committees and dispatching dozens of young anthropologists into the field, armed with what she considered to be four essentials: a flashlight, a penknife, heavy string, and a few mystery stories. (Dewey, who received The Complete Sherlock Holmes for her thirteenth birthday, once explained to me in some detail the uses of the first three. Then she added, “The reason for the mystery stories is self-evident.”) The year Ann applied to the anthropology department to do graduate work, Dewey was on the committee that reviewed applications. “She obviously knew her way around Indonesia,” Dewey told me. Ann spoke Indonesian fluently, she was knowledgeable about all things Indonesian, and her interest in handicrafts intersected with Dewey’s interest in markets.
“I said, ‘I want this one,’” Dewey recalled.
Dewey was charmingly unconventional herself. A granddaughter of John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, and a descendant of Horace Greeley, the crusading newspaper editor, Alice Greeley Dewey had grown up in Huntington, Long Island, with a certain amount of parental license to be fearless. In games of cowboys and Indians, her sympathies did not incline toward the cowboys. As a high school student, she worked in what is now the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where James D. Watson would deliver his first public lecture on his discovery, with Francis Crick, of the double-helix structure of DNA. At Radcliffe College, she was lured into cultural anthropology by the enticing prospect of field research. Fieldwork, she once told me, comes as close as any experience to being somebody else: “Because they don’t know who you are.” She wanted to go to China, where her grandfather had lived, but Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China two years earlier, and the United States and China were fighting on opposite sides in the Korean War. So when her professor suggested Java, Dewey jumped at the chance. Arriving in Indonesia in 1952, she and the other members of the field team were introduced to a cousin of the sultan of Yogyakarta, and his wife, who was affiliated with the junior court. The couple took the students under their wing, getting them in to performances of shadow-puppet theater, gamelan music, and Javanese dance at the palace. Men in batik and turbans wandered barefoot through the lantern-lit halls, speaking high Javanese. “If I had walked into the court of King Arthur, I couldn’t have been in more of a fairyland,” Dewey remembered. She became captivated by Java, returning again and again over many decades. In 1989, at the investiture of Sultan Hamengku Buwono X in Yogyakarta, Dewey was in attendance.
Generous and tolerant, Dewey had a reputation for accepting the world on its own terms. “She felt that things work the way they do because they make sense that way, and that people are ultimately rational,” said John Raintree, a former student of Dewey’s. “If you don’t understand why somebody is saying or doing something the way they are, then you don’t understand their point of view. This is the article of faith for those of us who’ve worked in development—trying to explain that. Alice communicated that to her students.”
In 1970, two years before Ann resurfaced on the University of Hawai‘i campus, Dewey acquired a handsome old house in Mānoa, a short bicycle commute away from the campus. One of the attractions, as she told me, was a tree in the garden that produced avocados the size