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By Root 941 0

her back to Jakarta (where she taught a course for development planners at the University of Indonesia until she could return to the field). But by late June, she was back in the villages. In a long entry in her field notebook about a visit on June 25, 1977, to a basketry village called Malangan, her recorded observations included such things as the percentage of the village population active in making basketry products (fifty percent), an accounting of the products made (rice steamers, lampshades, nesting boxes, et cetera), the age at which children are considered fully productive (ten years old), a description of the photos in the industry leader’s living room, a list of raw materials and their sources, a list of sources of credit, and a detailed accounting of “prosperity indicators,” which included school attendance, livestock, crops grown in house yards, bicycles and motorcycles, a television, and sweet tea and snacks offered to visitors. “Twice asked whether women did modern work (no) and why not,” Ann wrote. “Answer that they are too ‘busy’ and too ‘lazy’ to study the new techniques.” Over the next few weeks, she could be found noting the benefits of burning coconut husks in the fire pit in a candy factory in Bantul, counting the twenty-eight sizes and types of chisels on the worktable of an elderly maker of masks and wooden puppets, and examining the buffalo hides used by a leather puppetmaker in Gendeng (“Cow hides having a tendency to roll up and curl,” she noted). From there, she moved on to bamboo villages, batik villages, and weaving villages, as well as to factories producing fruit wine, coconut-fiber matting, and dolls.

On August 3, Ann left Yogyakarta, heading southeast on the road to Wonosari, a market town in the dry, hilly district of Gunung Kidul, which lies between Yogyakarta and the Indian Ocean. About a half-hour outside of Yogyakarta, the road to Wonosari climbs into the hills in a series of loops overlooking the Central Java plains. From Wonosari, a smaller road heads northeast toward Kajar, a cluster of hamlets where, in 1977, hundreds of village men worked as blacksmiths at backyard forges, hammering agricultural tools out of old railroad rails and scrap iron. By eight a.m., Ann would later write, the sounds of forging could be heard coming from every corner of the village—the three-beat rhythm of the hammer swingers striking metal on metal, the “light counterpoint” of the master smith tapping instructions on the anvil, “the muffled plops of the bellows,” the scraping sound of the filing and polishing of tools. Peak-roofed houses with woven bamboo walls and earthen floors lined a loose grid of narrow dirt and gravel roads. Bamboo, coconut palms, and fruit trees grew in the house yards, alongside a few cattle and goats. Women and children operated roadside stands selling snacks, kerosene, cooked food. There was no plumbing in Kajar; only one household had electricity, supplied by a diesel engine. Ann had first heard of Kajar one week earlier in an interview with a consultant on a World Bank team looking into possible development projects in the area. “There is a cooperative in the village, which has been controlled since 1962 by the same three men (elections are open, not by secret ballot) which purchases and farms out 30 million rupiahs worth of scrap iron per year!” she had written in her notes on the interview. The following week, having attached herself to a ten-day press tour organized by the Indonesian Department of Industry in connection with the anniversary of its ladies’ auxiliary, she was there. The smiths made more than tools, she learned that day; they also hammered gamelan gongs for village orchestras, using the ends of kerosene and diesel-fuel drums. They used a double-piston bellows made of two hollowed-out tree trunks—a style of bellows so old it can be found in a scene of a smithy in the reliefs at Candi Sukuh, a fifteenth-century temple on the slopes of Gunung Lawu, seen as one of the holiest mountains on Java. “The work is backbreaking and earsplitting, but no protective equipment