A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [89]
In the summer of 1979, Ann wrote to Dewey asking her to pass along a job offer to a former student and housemate of Dewey’s, John Raintree. A newly minted anthropologist, Raintree had intended to become a physicist, majored in psychology, then spent two years in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone with his wife, Kadi Warner, before they both enrolled in graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i. He was fascinated by technology. The late 1970s were the heyday of so-called appropriate technology—often simple gadgets especially suited to the social and economic conditions of a developing community. “At that time, appropriate technology was on everybody’s to-do list,” Raintree told me. Development Alternatives Inc. needed an expert in the subject to work in Central Java with Ann. Raintree moved to Semarang with Kadi, their daughter, and a small library of appropriate-technology resources. Over the next six months, he developed half a dozen prototypes designed to relieve production bottlenecks in small industries. For blacksmiths, who used files to sharpen the tools they were making, he came up with a grinder powered by a person pedaling a kind of stationary bicycle. He found a simple method of pressing roof tiles that cost a fraction of the cost of the machine it would replace. “You have to get up very early in the morning to suggest anything of any real relevance to these people,” Raintree told me. “Occasionally, you can. What was nice about working with Ann was she understood the villages and the rural industry situation so well that she could prime me, so that I could find a lot of things that really seemed to make sense. Ann had it all figured out long before I got there.”
Using her dissertation field notes as a guide, Ann took Raintree on an orientation tour, giving him the deepest and most insightful anthropological perspective on rural industry he told me he had ever encountered. With Semarang as their base, they would drive up to four hours out of the city to villages all over Central Java. They paid countless courtesy calls on provincial officials, district heads, and village headmen—formal meetings in which Ann would introduce Raintree and their project. The government official would preside from a chair on a dais, looking down on his visitors, seated below. Raintree, who had done fieldwork in the Philippines and was used to villages of tribal people with their own traditions, was unaccustomed to the rigid, hierarchical nature of Java. To do anything at any level, one needed permission from all the levels of government and administration above. It helped that Ann knew what she was talking about and spoke the language. “But she couldn’t have gotten anywhere with that if she didn’t also know how to be politically correct and formal, and at the same time charming,” Raintree told me. “These were all kingdoms before they became bureaucracies within a national state. She knew how to be courtly.”
Ann worried about corruption among government officials, who, Raintree said, sometimes seemed to her not to care much about ordinary people. She also noticed that the class background of government planners and administrators, who were mostly men, tended to work against poor women sharing in the benefits of development projects. The Indonesian men she worked with, mainly from the planning office and the Department of Industry, “simply did not believe that the lives of poor village women were significantly different from the lives of women of their own class,” Ann would write to a colleague in July 1981. “In other words, they believed that poor village women spent most of their time at home, caring for children and doing housework, fully supported by their husbands except for a little ‘pin money’ they might earn doing handicrafts or selling something in the market from time to time. Given these preconceptions about the importance (or unimportance) of women’s work, it is not