A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [72]
In the Field
It is not difficult to understand why people become entranced by Java. The landscape is breathtaking—shimmering paddy fields, terraced hillsides, luminous green plains carved by rivers and studded with volcanoes. The people are, as Francis Drake wrote after sailing there in 1580, “sociable, full of vivacity and beyond description happy.” The culture is the product of centuries of cross-fertilization—Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic influences mixed with elements of animism, ancestor worship, and Javanese legend. The past lives on in the patterns in textiles, in the performing arts, in thousand-year-old temples. Before dawn, visitors clamber up the sides of the twelve-centuries-old Buddhist monument of Borobudur to watch Gunung Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, materialize out of the darkness, swathed in mists, the silence broken only by roosters and the whine of a motorcycle in the distance. At first glance, Javanese life seems to unspool in the open, as though on a vast and meticulously painted canvas: The dusty village streets shaded by mango and mlinjo trees where children skitter barefoot, the man bending in the flooded paddy field with his pants rolled, the women selling peanut fritters and gado-gado in the market. But the fact is, Java reveals itself, layer by layer, only over time, challenging Western assumptions about what it means to understand or know. “It’s not that they do it differently,” a British friend of Ann’s, Clare Blenkinsop, told me. “You have to be in a different way.” After returning to Java and Morocco several decades after doing fieldwork there as a young anthropologist in the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford Geertz confessed to having had, as he put it, a rather shaking experience—“the reawakening of an imperfectly suppressed conviction that I have never understood and never will understand a damn thing about either of these peculiar places, or, for that matter, myself.” Java rewards patience, Garrett Solyom told me one afternoon in Honolulu. His observation struck me as cautionary, not just about Java but about trying to understand his friend Ann. Java rewards patience, he said: diligence, patience, and long study.
When Ann began her fieldwork in Central Java in the mid-seventies, sixty percent of all Indonesians lived on the island of Java, though it makes up just seven percent of Indonesia’s total land area. It was, and remains, among the most densely populated agricultural areas in the world. Most Javanese were peasants living in rural villages, working on small farms, raising crops by hand. But aspects of that life were changing. The “Green Revolution” of the 1970s had increased rice production, but it also had less immediately visible effects. The introduction of pesticides, sickles, and mechanical rice hullers took away much of the work of weeding, harvesting, and hand-pounding, traditionally done by women. Meanwhile, circuit traders driving trucks, mostly men, were taking the place of female traders who traditionally traveled on foot. Wage labor had been rare in rural areas before 1965. Now handicraft industries—including weaving, batik, and ceramics—faced competition from imported goods and products made in new factories set up with foreign capital. Hand-loom weavers, predominantly women, were being squeezed out of production. Many Western-style factories favored men in hiring, training, promotion, and pay. By the end of the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of women had moved out of agriculture and into rural manufacturing, many of them as part-time unpaid cottage-industry workers, Ann estimated in an apparently unpublished paper in the early 1980s. Some had difficulty finding stable employment as hired workers. With credit hard to come by and interest rates high, they also lacked the capital needed to become successful small-scale entrepreneurs.
The subject of Ann’s fieldwork was cottage industries and their role as a subsistence alternative for peasant families on Java. “In many areas of the developing world the native handicraft industries have either died out completely