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By Root 996 0

in this century, or have managed to hang on only in a very weakened state, catering to a much-reduced market of curio-seekers and tourists,” she wrote in an early proposal to the East-West Center. Time once spent making handicrafts now went to “more profitable pursuits,” such as wage labor in foreign-owned operations. “Java offers the startling contrast of a case where cottage industry has not only survived, but rapidly expanded in the last fifteen years,” she continued. As many as six and a half million people on Java worked in cottage industry production—up from as little as half that number in 1961. Many Javanese villages specialized in a single product—bamboo birdcages, clay roof tiles, leather puppets, to name a few. In some villages, almost every adult took part. “Instead of being merely a quaint and minor survival of days gone by, cottage industry is the major mode of manufacturing many types of light consumer goods, including such items as roof tiles, bricks, ceramics, textiles, furniture, shoes, umbrellas, wall matting, baskets and containers, cigarettes, silver and brassware, herb medicines, snack foods, etc.,” Ann wrote. “The central problem of my research is to explain this expansion of cottage industry on Java.”

Her hypothesis arose out of a harsh fact of Javanese life: As the population grew and the amount of agricultural land remained constant, more and more laborers worked the same finite plots of land. As a result, each laborer’s share of the yield decreased, requiring that he or she work longer just to keep up. The rural economy, however, was based not only on agriculture but also on petty commerce and cottage industry. Rather than work unnaturally long hours with diminishing returns, peasants found it more profitable to spend more time on other ways of making a living. “This tendency to turn to subsidiary occupations in the face of declining agricultural returns lies, I suggest, behind the expansion of cottage industry activities on Java in recent years,” Ann wrote.

Ann was challenging what she believed was a common misconception. In the literature on peasant societies, she argued, peasant industries got short shrift. “Typically an ethnography of a peasant group will devote a hundred pages or more to describing the agricultural sector in great detail, and then dismiss peasant industries in a few throwaway lines,” she wrote. “Peasant industries are frequently characterized as ‘spare time’ activities, low in productivity and profitability, which are carried out mainly by poor women and children, and then only when they can find no agricultural work to do.” Ann started from a different premise—one rooted in her years of experience on Java, and in an appreciation for the economic decision-making of Javanese peasants. Peasant society, she said, “produces rural generalists rather than specialists. By this I mean that nearly every peasant has a repertoire of various skills which can be utilized for productive or income-generating purposes. A Javanese man, for example, may have skills in plowing and land preparation which are related to rice agriculture, but he may also know how to repair bicycles, make bricks, drive a pedicab (becak), raise fish or eels in ponds, make noodle soup and hawk it around the streets of a nearby town, etc. Similarly, a Javanese woman may have agricultural skills in transplanting, weeding and harvesting rice, but she may also know how to make batik cloth, operate a roadside stall or coffee shop (warung), collect teak leaves from a nearby forest for sale as food wrappers, trade vegetables or spices in a nearby marketplace, deliver babies for her neighbors, make palm sugar or cassava chips, etc.” Some researchers had remarked on this pattern. But Ann intended to expand the concept to encompass not simply an “observable pattern of activity” but a conscious strategy.

She began her fieldwork with short visits to several dozen cottage-industry villages near Yogyakarta. For a time, a nationwide ban on village research in the six months leading up to the May 1977 general elections forced