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By Root 925 0

to maybe start paying for some of these things and saving up for college.” The prospect of solving problems, not just describing them, appealed to Ann. After a fellow anthropologist wrote to her jokingly that she had heard that Ann had “sold your soul to the large international organizations,” Ann apparently mounted a persuasive defense. The friend wrote back, “I must say that your job with AID sounds fascinating and challenging. . . . I can well understand the excitement of doing something practical rather than theoretical and actually working in the field of development rather than theorizing it and criticizing it from the safety of a U.S. university. In addition, I know what you mean when you describe the people you work with (or at least some of the people in your team) as being dynamic, progressive, social minded and involved.”

The project in Java represented a new approach. Development agencies had tended to operate by lending governments money for large-scale infrastructure, such as water systems and roads. When the work was completed and the agency moved on, the new facilities were often not maintained. By the late 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development was moving toward a different approach. Projects would be multifaceted—say, a little infrastructure, some skills training, some rural electrification, some microcredit—and decisions would emanate less from the top down than from the bottom up. “The idea was that we should embark upon programs that involved local communities, and we should be responsive to their needs,” Carl A. Dutto, the rural development officer for the agency in Jakarta at that time, told me. “The theory behind it was if you’re working that way, it’s sustainable, because people want it.” There was increasing attention, too, to addressing the problems of the rural poor. After the upheaval of the 1960s, the Suharto government had set about tackling rural poverty, which was seen as a cause of social and political unrest. The government enlisted the banking system to diversify the economy and encourage rural development. It would begin setting up credit programs to channel money to rural entrepreneurs, promoting small industries and reducing dependence on farming. To understand poor communities better, some development agencies began hiring anthropologists like Dutto, who joined the Agency for International Development in 1976 from a teaching job at the University of Nairobi. Their job became articulating the community’s perspective.

The project for which Ann was hired was an experiment in what was called bottom-up development. Decisions would not be made by the central government in Jakarta; instead, the development agency and its contractor, a firm based in Bethesda, Maryland, that did economic development projects around the world, would work with the planning offices in the two provinces where the project was based. The aim was to cultivate the provincial offices’ capacity to come up with and carry out small-scale projects in response to local demand. Dutto, who oversaw the project from 1978 to 1983, said it began with the preparation of detailed profiles of each province and district, based on social and economic data, sometimes gathered for that purpose by local universities. There were meetings with village residents to determine what their communities needed—for example, rural roads, a market for selling their vegetables, higher-yielding varieties of rice. Initial meetings in Kudus, a center of the clove-flavored kretek cigarette industry, and Jepara, a wood-carving center, revealed a need for access to credit, especially for women. As a result, Dutto said, credit for small industries became one component of the development project. Jerry Silverman, whom the contracting firm Development Alternatives Inc. hired straight from a similar project in Ethiopia to head the one in Semarang, told me, “The project was built on the premises that DAI had been advocating and which I believed in. This was, ‘We’re really going to show the world what can be done with a bottom-up, demand-responsive