A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [80]
Everything about blacksmithing captivated this native Kansan. If she could be reincarnated, she told a colleague, Don Johnston, years later, she would come back as a blacksmith. “I still dream of the day I can visit you and go upriver to see those big blacksmithing villages you told me about,” she wrote to another acquaintance in Kalimantan in 1981. She was not simply interested in the technical aspects of the craft; she could see that, in the hands of a skilled smith, utilitarian objects emerged as something closer to art. She became almost proprietary about her village. “She was very possessive of Kajar,” said Garrett Solyom, who was doing research on the kris, working closely with a smith in another village in Java. “It was very clear that she knew she’d stumbled on something special. She made it clear, in indirect ways, that she didn’t want me poking around there.”
Kajar was just one of a half-dozen villages, each with its own handicrafts industry, on which Ann had chosen to focus. There was Kasongan, a center of crockery production seven kilometers south of Yogyakarta, where competition from factory-made pottery was cutting into the market for traditional earthenware products. There, tourism was creating a new market for animal banks, toys, and terra-cotta souvenirs. Malangan, fifteen kilometers northwest of Yogyakarta, had been a center of hand-loom weaving, specializing in striped sarongs and solid-colored waistcloths. When shortages of yarn and competition from mechanized textile mills put most of the weavers out of business, villagers turned to converting bamboo and palm leaves into items such as baskets, winnowing trays, and rice steamers. That industry, too, was encountering competition from factory-made housewares. Pocung, like Malangan, had once been a thriving hand-loom weaving village specializing in lurik. When that industry faltered, villagers switched to trading or to making perforated leather shadow puppets out of animal hide. With the rise of tourism had come increased demand for leather “wayang-style” souvenirs, including bookmarks, lampshades, miniature puppets, and key rings. “Problem with marketing through stores because stores only want cheap wayangs and don’t care about quality while Sagiyo doesn’t want to make cheap wayangs,” Ann observed in her notes from a long interview with a puppetmaker named Sagiyo from the village of Gendeng. (Her notes from that day included a sketch of a birthday cake with four candles. “Joko’s birthday,” she wrote.)
Patterns and themes began to emerge. It became increasingly apparent, for example, that women were not necessarily benefiting from industrialization. When female-dominated industries adapted to competition by producing new products for new markets, the best paid jobs often went to men. The most profitable industries—the ones requiring expensive raw materials and access to working capital—were almost exclusively male. In one village, Ann found that nearly every household made bamboo basketry, but only forty of those had the capital to work with more lucrative rattan. In all forty, the entrepreneurs were men. Another pattern that captured Ann’s attention involved the industriousness of Indonesians. “We found almost every family to have an incredible array of subsidiary activities which they juggle around to make sure that they are always occupied and always have something coming in,” Ann wrote to Dewey from Kajar. That ingenuity seemed to defy the assumptions of scholars,