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By Root 962 0

special knowledge. Their craft was passed on only within families, and was seen as dangerous; it demanded, as the Solyoms put it, “the release and control of threatening powers that could go astray if not treated properly.” By the late 1970s, there were said to be no master smiths left in Java, just a few village smiths carrying on the tradition of their fathers. On June 19, 1978, Ann wrote in her notes that she had learned that there was one kris smith left in Kajar. (She later learned there were two.) “He still has the magical power to make pamor kerises,” she wrote, referring to the light-on-dark damascened patterns on a kris blade, made of layers upon layers of iron and meteoritic nickel sandwiched together. “He has not been able, however, to pass the tradition on to anyone and he is old now.”

In early July, she and Waluja interviewed the kris smith, Pak Martodinomo, one of two surviving sons-in-law of Kasan Ikhsan, one of the two original smiths in Kajar. He was about eighty years old, Ann estimated. In his prime, he had received seven or eight commissions a year. Now he rarely received one. “People don’t attach importance to kerises any more,” Ann wrote in her notes. “A change in the times.” Martodinomo’s father-in-law had been an expert in a type of Javanese mysticism known as ilmu kebatinan, which Ann described later as a set of practices, Hindu and Buddhist in origin, intended to increase a person’s spiritual power and insight into the meaning of life. Ann listed the steps required before starting a kris: Fast for three days; hold a private selamatan with barbecued chicken, coconut rice, and boiled rice to protect the kris during forging; hold a personal selamatan to protect the smith from bad spirits. Work on a kris was to commence at the beginning of the Javanese month called Suro, continue intermittently throughout the year, and end the following Suro. A smith could kill no animals during Suro and was required to fast Mondays and Thursdays. “Get acquainted with the spirit of the iron to be used,” Ann wrote. “If you don’t get acquainted, can have an accident while working e.g. be blinded, paralyzed, very sick, insane or even die suddenly.”

Ann appears to have had little difficulty convincing her subjects to talk. In small script at the bottom of one page of field notes, she noted, “None of the people interviewed so far are comfortable in Indonesian.” For that reason, Djaka told me, he and Ann conducted all of the interviews together. She would discuss with him, in Bahasa Indonesia, the questions she wanted to ask; he would then ask them in Javanese and record the responses in his book. In the evenings, he would translate the answers into Indonesian for Ann, who in turn would translate them into English in her notes. When I asked why he thought the villagers were as forthcoming as they were, he first said, “Because I asked them in Javanese.” In addition, he said, “If a foreigner asks questions, they want to answer. They’re happy to be asked, and they’re delighted to answer.” Furthermore, he added, they came to think of Ann as a good woman.

During a visit to Kajar in July 2009, I met two women, Suparmi and Mintartini, who, like many Indonesians, did not use surnames. They identified themselves as daughters of Pak Sastrosuyono, head of the blacksmiths’ cooperative when Ann first arrived in the village. They told me that they remembered seeing Ann in Kajar when they were children, and they recalled the pleasure she seemed to take in talking with villagers. “People would shout, ‘There’s a londo here!’” one of the women told me, using a Javanese word for Dutchman that is often used for any European, Westerner, or Caucasian. “Everybody came. She was like a celebrity here. They really liked it. Some people couldn’t answer the questions, but they were happy that she was here.” In the acknowledgments in her dissertation, Ann described the Indonesian villagers she encountered as “invariably friendly, pleasant and willing to patiently answer many questions concerning their enterprises and personal finances, even when dozens