Obama's Mother's Dissertation Gets Star Treatment From Duke U. Press
The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference next week is likely to be a doctoral dissertation published 15 years after its author's death. Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, a connection noted on the book's front cover. The publisher, Duke University Press, will unveil the book on December 3 at the conference, to be followed by a special session devoted to Dunham and her life and work.
I spoke with Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is President Obama's half-sister, about their mother's life and work and how the dissertation made it from her closet to print. Ms. Soetoro-Ng wrote a foreword to the book. She and Mr. Obama spent some time in Indonesia as children while Dunham worked as a development and microcredit consultant and did fieldwork for the dissertation.
The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater...
Read entire article at The Chronicle of Higher Education
I spoke with Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who is President Obama's half-sister, about their mother's life and work and how the dissertation made it from her closet to print. Ms. Soetoro-Ng wrote a foreword to the book. She and Mr. Obama spent some time in Indonesia as children while Dunham worked as a development and microcredit consultant and did fieldwork for the dissertation.
The book runs about 300 pages and focuses on a blacksmithing village called Kajar, in the province of Yogyakarta on the island of Java. The work has been whittled down significantly from its original form, which ran more than a thousand pages and investigated the socioeconomics of several village-based handicrafts, including batik, pottery, and the making of puppets used in shadow theater...