A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [75]
Farming was a tough way to make a living in Kajar, Ann was to discover. Flanked to the east by barren karst limestone hills, the village was situated in an ecological transition zone. The rocky soil was fertile enough for cassava, corn, and dry rice as staples, and peanuts and other legumes for sale to traders. But rainfall was unpredictable. Drought had wiped out crops, and famine had killed off most of the livestock and some villagers, as recently as the early 1960s. Not long afterward, there had been a plague of rats. Over several decades, blacksmithing had edged out farming as the dominant occupation. The industry was said to date back to the arrival in Kajar in the 1920s of two migrant smiths, who then married local women and brought their sons and sons-in-law into the business. During the Japanese occupation, Japanese military officers brought broken weapons and confiscated scrap metal to the village; they ordered the original smiths to teach other villagers how to turn scrap into tools. Forced to copy new items, village smiths learned to custom-make whatever a buyer might want. They also discovered that tools could be made more economically from scrap iron than from imported bar iron. After the famine and the rat plague of the 1960s, more smithies opened. The market for agricultural tools grew during the Green Revolution and under the Suharto government’s policy of transmigration, in which impoverished Indonesians were being induced to move from crowded Java to less populous corners of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and East Timor. In the late seventies, thirty more smithies opened in Kajar, bringing the total to ninety-eight, employing a total of six hundred men. Because of the demand for workers, the ancient taboo that had kept women from working in the forge began to crumble. “Kajar men consider themselves craftsmen first and agriculture a sambilan,” Ann wrote after her first full day of surveying in Kajar, using the Indonesian word for a sideline or second job. Kajar would prove a fascinating case study of the phenomenon she had set out to explain, the expansion of cottage industry.
Ann returned repeatedly to Kajar over the next year, sometimes for many weeks at a time. John Raintree, an anthropologist who worked with Ann several years later, told me that “the predominant anthropological method is to put yourself in the village context. You are the outsider, the childlike neophyte. You let them socialize you into their worldview.” Ann had hired two research assistants—a jovial, strapping young economics student named Djaka Waluja and his wife, Sumarni, a graduate student and an assistant at the Population Studies Center at Gadjah Mada. In January 2009, I met them in an office at Dr. Sardjito Hospital in Yogyakarta, where Sumarni, a lecturer in medicine at Gadjah Mada, was working. Djaka told me that he and Ann spent four months in the district of Gunung Kidul, living at least part of the time in the house of an Indonesian government fieldworker assigned to Kajar. Ann and Djaka would set out for the field every morning at five a.m. Dressed in a long skirt and loaded down with a shoulder bag stuffed with notebooks, books, and a camera, Ann would ride behind Djaka on the back of Sumarni’s small, not entirely reliable Yamaha motorcycle. When I asked why Djaka Waluja, rather than Sumarni, accompanied Ann to Kajar, he said, “Gunung Kidul was far away, Ann was a big woman. To get to Gunung Kidul, uphill, you can imagine.” His greater weight, he suggested, was needed for balance and control. Ann took to calling the motorcycle Poniyem, making a bilingual pun out of a name that sounds like the English word “pony” but also happens to be given to Javanese girls born on the third day (Pon) of the five-day Javanese week. “Ayo, Poniyem!” she would cry out as the motorcycle lumbered toward a hill,