A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [88]
Ann also had a certain Javanese sense of propriety, which Holloway went so far as to describe as prudery. It surprised him, because most of the Americans he knew were the opposite. Indonesian women in villages kept their arms and legs covered and wore nothing open at the neck. Ann followed the same rules: She wore dark skirts down to the mid-calf and loose shirts made of hand-loomed textiles or batik. She bought fabric and took it to a tailor, who would copy other pieces. “Her wardrobe was primarily blue and black and some tan,” Kadi Warner told me. “That was all the batiking colors. Rusty browns and blacks.” She wore sturdy utilitarian sandals without a heel. She kept her hair long, she told Warner, to cover her ears, which left her head at an uncommonly wide angle. “She wasn’t flash,” Holloway said. “She was dumpy.” She would express displeasure with behavior that violated Indonesian standards. In the countryside, where it was common to encounter people attending to bodily functions, anyone approaching would stop, turn his back, and wait for a cough or some other signal to proceed. On one occasion, Holloway said, he and Ann happened on some women gathered beside a spring. As he and Ann approached, it became clear that the women were naked. Ann stopped abruptly, turned on her heel, and walked briskly back down the hill they had just climbed. “As a man, I would probably have called out that I was coming and asked them if it was okay if I came on—which threw the ball in their court,” Holloway said. “She would just defer.” She was deeply attuned to the way the Javanese lived.
In Bali with the Solyoms some years later, she passed up the opportunity for an outdoor shower. In a tone of humorous self-mockery, she explained, “A girl from Kansas never bathes outdoors.”
Ann’s title on the development project was adviser on small-scale industries and rural credit, an area of expertise that had arisen naturally out of her fieldwork for her dissertation. The firm that hired her felt lucky to have an anthropologist who also happened to be married to an Indonesian, fluent in the language, and writing a thesis on small-scale industries. The job entailed supporting the ability of the provincial planning agency to oversee small-scale development projects in twenty-two villages in five of the poorest districts in Central Java. That included helping set up a credit program for poor people in those villages. Ann served as an adviser to the planning office and was charged with cultivating closer ties between the planning office and local civic organizations. She oversaw the work of a team from a local university that had been enlisted to collect data, and she monitored the participation of village women in the projects. The work was not unlike the work that her son, who was entering college in California, would take up in Chicago four or five years later. Like a community organizer, Ann understood the need to foster trust, build credibility, and be sensitive to the way other people did things.
“For me, Ann is not the anthropologist doing research,” Silverman said. “For me, Ann is the community organizer in Central Java.”
Ann’s style was nonconfrontational but direct. Silverman said he could not remember a single conversation in which Ann came to him, told him he was off track and needed to do something her way. They lived two blocks apart and shared a small office a half-mile away. They did not have meetings, he said, they just talked. The fact was, Ann knew more about what she was doing than he did, he said. His job, he came to believe, was to keep the bureaucracy off her back. “Initially, we’re just a bunch of stupid foreigners,” he said. “Over time, I think we emerged as something other than that. Ann was an important part of that.