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By Root 1023 0

such as J. H. Boeke, the early-twentieth-century Dutch economist whom Dewey had mentioned. Boeke had described the economy of the Indies as “dualistic,” with a gap between Western-style, capital-intensive enterprises and the more labor-intensive peasant enterprises. He attributed the gap largely to cultural differences—an Indonesian inclination toward cooperation rather than competition, a lack of interest in capital accumulation, and a tendency to engage in wage labor only until one met one’s limited needs. But Ann found village industry producers intensely interested in profits and keenly aware of fluctuations in the prices of fuel, labor, and raw materials. Instead of cultural differences, Ann thought, a lack of information and lack of certain technologies might help explain economic “dualism.” But what about access to capital? Even the relatively large investment in equipment of a successful entrepreneur such as Pak Sastro in Kajar paled by comparison with the money required to set up a Western-style factory.

The main cause of the gap in the Indonesian economy was not cultural, Ann came to believe. It was differences in access to capital.

In March 1978, Ann found herself face-to-face with the problem to which she would end up devoting much of her professional attention in the coming years. She was attending a meeting of the Indonesian government agency that had sponsored her research, a unit within the Department of Industry that worked with small enterprises. According to her field notes, the subject of the meeting was income distribution and employment. The question arose: Why was the government’s development aid not reaching the lowest levels of the landless? The answer given was that credit was going to farmers—not to village industries, including handicrafts. Under the government’s five-year plan, special banking units had been set up to make loans to small farmers. But there was no similar program for rural craftspeople. Banks were interested in efficiency and profit, not in employment and income distribution. When craftsmen filled out loan forms and took them to the bank, even with the help of Department of Industry officials, the banks turned them down. Employment would increase and income distribution would improve, someone pointed out, only if small entrepreneurs got help.

“Ask Subroto where the credit is,” someone said, referring to a Department of Industry official. “We never see any credit.”

When Ann was not in the field, she was in Yogyakarta, sometimes with Maya, sometimes not. Lolo Soetoro’s niece Kismardhani S-Roni, who was a teenager when Ann moved to Yogyakarta, remembered Ann and Maya living for a time with Lolo’s mother in the house near the bird market and Ann homeschooling Maya in a room hung with Maya’s drawings. “Tante Ann” was an exacting teacher, Lolo’s niece and her brother, Haryo Soetendro, recalled. Maya got no favored treatment just because she was the only student, Soetendro remembered. “You had to work hard to get a good mark from your ‘teacher,’” he wrote in an e-mail to Maya in 2008. At other times, while Ann was in the field, Maya sometimes stayed with her cousins and their parents in a big house on the edge of the campus of Gadjah Mada University, where Lolo’s sister and brother-in-law taught. “I wandered around a lot,” Maya recalled. “Mom was working sometimes, and I would be taken care of by a collection of people—possibly some were employed by the family, possibly some were family, some were neighbors. There was a complex across the way. I remember old Dutch gates and wrought iron and running around there. Sort of like ‘it takes a village’ kind of thing. A lot of the women who took care of me had other kids. . . . But I also remember her being very present in the afternoons and teaching me.”

For several months, apparently in mid-1978, Ann stayed with an Indonesian family in their house next to the Pakualaman Kraton, a smaller compound not far from the main compound of the sultan. Maggie Norobangun, who was teaching English at the time, had met Dewey in 1976. Dewey had become