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traditionally reserved for royal relatives and retainers. If Yogyakarta was the soul of Java, the compound within the crumbling, cream-colored walls was the soul of the city—the center of classical dance and drama, gamelan, batik, and puppet theater. There was a school for dalangs, the master puppeteers of wayang kulit, the shadow-puppet theater. Dancing masters instructed students in classical court dancing. Batik workshops produced by hand the classic brown-and-cream designs originally conceived for the sultan’s family. Because foreigners were barred traditionally from living inside the compound, Ann told Dewey, she received special dispensation from the palace on the grounds that she was taking care of Lolo’s mother. “She is 76 and strong as a horse but manages to look nice and frail,” Ann wrote to Dewey. Her mother-in-law’s house stood on a corner of Taman Sari, the ruins of the sultan’s “water castle,” a network of pools and waterways, like an early and more exclusive version of the water parks of today. The house was also adjacent to the bird market, where stalls stacked high with tubs of cracked corn and boxes of crickets lined narrow alleys; cages of roosters, parakeets, mynah birds, golden orioles, and turtledoves dangled from above. (In addition to a wife and a house, the markers of a man’s success in Java include a singing bird.) “I am very happy to be staying now in Jogja,” Ann wrote to Dewey, using the nickname and older spelling for Yogyakarta. “What an enjoyable city it is, especially as compared with Jakarta. I am getting a little tired of people saying ‘Hello Mister’ to me everywhere I go, but otherwise love it.”

Like any anthropologist contemplating fieldwork in Java, Ann found her way to the Population Studies Center at Gadjah Mada University, a research institute established several years earlier by an Indonesian anthropologist named Masri Singarimbun, whose pioneering research on rural poverty had challenged official claims about the progress of poverty eradication. The center, which has now trained generations of Indonesian social scientists, was a lively gathering place for scholars. It also contained a mother lode of data of interest to international development institutions. There were ongoing research projects on everything from marriage, fertility, and family planning to infant mortality, poverty, and divorce. There were workshops on how to conduct village research. International visitors, such as Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, would drop by. “Ann and hundreds of others came to Masri for advice,” said Terence Hull, who, with his wife, Valerie, had done a village study under Singarimbun’s supervision in the early 1970s and worked with him from 1975 to 1979. During the hot, dry season, he told me, development consultants descended like locusts, ravening information and data. They would drink tea and eat snacks on the porch, skimming off the impressions of scholars who had been immersed for months or years in village life.

“When you’re in that crowd, there are a lot of discussions about what people are doing in development—the World Bank, et cetera,” Hull said. “There’s a lot of cynical humor. Ann was not a cynical person, but she did appreciate the ironies that you would encounter all the time. The fact that the World Bank teams would always come between June and September with their vacuum cleaners, taking up reports every which way in any Indonesian institution, sometimes sitting down, taking their tea, telling people to go and photocopy hundreds of documents. Ann would appreciate the total inappropriateness of that sort of behavior, the irony of these people blowing in from Johns Hopkins or Michigan State or Iowa State or wherever, on what must be really, really high salaries or consultants’ fees, and coming into a research institute where people are being paid a pittance to do really hard work with 24/7 kind of responsibilities. They just showed no sensitivity to the vast gaps. Ann was totally attuned to the enormous gaps between Westerners’ lives and people who were really living tough