A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [69]
Ann found other kindred spirits in Yogyakarta. Nancy Peluso, the daughter of a Fuller Brush salesman from Bridgeport, Connecticut, had arrived in the city in 1975 as an undergraduate from Friends World College in the United States, doing independent research. She learned Indonesian, moved to a village, and decided to study the economic roles of women. “This was a big topic at that time,” she told me thirty-three years later in her office at the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a professor in the department of environmental science, policy, and management, specializing in forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. Women were breaking into academic fields in which they had once been scarce; research on women and development was in vogue. When Peluso applied to the Ford Foundation for a grant, she landed $2,000, which seemed to her an extravagant sum. “They asked me what I wanted to live on and I said, ‘Fifty dollars a month,’” she remembered. “They said, ‘How about a hundred?’” She began studying market traders—women who bought household items, such as ceramic pots, from craftspeople and sold them in markets. At two or three in the morning, Peluso would set off with a trader on a four-hour hike into the mountains, the woman maneuvering a cart piled high with pots up the slopes of a volcano in darkness, to arrive at the market as dawn was breaking. “These people had nothing,” she recalled. “It was often women—women in a family where there wasn’t a lot of agricultural land would go into these other kinds of businesses. They would either do small-scale trade or they would do crafts, like in the villages that Ann worked in.”
Ann and Peluso would meet in Yogyakarta and wander over to the marketplace for snacks, fried noodles, or durian in season. (The fruit of the durian tree is a local delicacy, but its smell disgusts many foreigners. At the Phoenix Hotel in Yogyakarta, it gets special mention in the directory of services. Coming after “duty manager” and before “extra bed,” the durian entry states, “By respect to others, it is strictly forbidden to bring durian into the hotel.”) At other times, Ann and Peluso would take Maya to dance performances at the palace or to shadow-puppet performances in the alun-alun, the grassy square with its two sacred banyan trees. “To this day, I nearly faint with pleasure when I smell hot wax, because I grew up roaming around the batik makers,” Maya told me. She remembered running in the ruins of the sultan’s “water castle,” gazing at the animals in the marketplace, watching the court dancers performing stories from the Hindu epics. She and Ann lived on a budget, she remembered her mother telling her, of about seventy-five dollars a month. Ann would take her to a bakery on Jalan Malioboro, the main commercial street in Yogyakarta, and pretend to look around while the owners plied her captivating child with chocolate and coconut breads. On one occasion, Peluso recalled, the three of them spent a night on a mountain. A professor had told Peluso of the practice of spending the night on certain mountains in pursuit of good fortune. People would climb to the top, burn incense, eat, talk, sleep, or stay awake. There would be people selling food. “It’s supposed to bring you good luck or you’re supposed to get a wish or get money,” Peluso remembered. “Well, we didn’t get money. We just did it to do it. Maya went with us. We took public transport to get out to this mountain. I remember getting there and starting to walk up the hill with Ann. You did things like this. You were single—and she was effectively single.”
With Nancy Peluso, Yogyakarta, 1977 or 1978
Not long before moving to Yogyakarta, Ann had appeared in the office of a young assistant curator at the National Museum in Jakarta named Wahyono Martowikrido, an archaeologist specializing in material culture, particularly gold objects and textiles. A museum guard brought her to his office, Martowikrido told me, after Ann had asked to speak with an anthropologist, who turned out not to