A Singular Woman (23 page)

Farming was a tough way to make a living in Kajar, Ann was to discover. Flanked to the east by barren karst limestone hills, the village was situated in an ecological transition zone. The rocky soil was fertile enough for cassava, corn, and dry rice as staples, and peanuts and other legumes for sale to traders. But rainfall was unpredictable. Drought had wiped out crops, and famine had killed off most of the livestock and some villagers, as recently as the early 1960s. Not long afterward, there had been a plague of rats. Over several decades, blacksmithing had edged out farming as the dominant occupation. The industry was said to date back to the arrival in Kajar in the 1920s of two migrant smiths, who then married local women and brought their sons and sons-in-law into the business. During the Japanese occupation, Japanese military officers brought broken weapons and confiscated scrap metal to the village; they ordered the original smiths to teach other villagers how to turn scrap into tools. Forced to copy new items, village smiths learned to custom-make whatever a buyer might want. They also discovered that tools could be made more economically from scrap iron than from imported bar iron. After the famine and the rat plague of the 1960s, more smithies opened. The market for agricultural tools grew during the Green Revolution and under the Suharto government's policy of transmigration, in which impoverished Indonesians were being induced to move from crowded Java to less populous corners of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and East Timor. In the late seventies, thirty more smithies opened in Kajar, bringing the total to ninety-eight, employing a total of six hundred men. Because of the demand for workers, the ancient taboo that had kept women from working in the forge began to crumble. “Kajar men consider themselves craftsmen first and agriculture a
sambilan
,” Ann wrote after her first full day of surveying in Kajar, using the Indonesian word for a sideline or second job. Kajar would prove a fascinating case study of the phenomenon she had set out to explain, the expansion of cottage industry.

Ann returned repeatedly to Kajar over the next year, sometimes for many weeks at a time. John Raintree, an anthropologist who worked with Ann several years later, told me that “the predominant anthropological method is to put yourself in the village context. You are the outsider, the childlike neophyte. You let them socialize you into their worldview.” Ann had hired two research assistants—a jovial, strapping young economics student named Djaka Waluja and his wife, Sumarni, a graduate student and an assistant at the Population Studies Center at Gadjah Mada. In January 2009, I met them in an office at Dr. Sardjito Hospital in Yogyakarta, where Sumarni, a lecturer in medicine at Gadjah Mada, was working. Djaka told me that he and Ann spent four months in the district of Gunung Kidul, living at least part of the time in the house of an Indonesian government fieldworker assigned to Kajar. Ann and Djaka would set out for the field every morning at five a.m. Dressed in a long skirt and loaded down with a shoulder bag stuffed with notebooks, books, and a camera, Ann would ride behind Djaka on the back of Sumarni's small, not entirely reliable Yamaha motorcycle. When I asked why Djaka Waluja, rather than Sumarni, accompanied Ann to Kajar, he said, “Gunung Kidul was far away, Ann was a big woman. To get to Gunung Kidul, uphill, you can imagine.” His greater weight, he suggested, was needed for balance and control. Ann took to calling the motorcycle Poniyem, making a bilingual pun out of a name that sounds like the English word “pony” but also happens to be given to Javanese girls born on the third day (Pon) of the five-day Javanese week. “Ayo, Poniyem!” she would cry out as the motorcycle lumbered toward a hill, while she pretended to swat its imaginary rump. (The meaning of that expression falls somewhere between “C'mon, Poniyem!” and “Hi-Yo, Silver!”) She and Waluja would conduct interviews from dawn until seven p.m., then stay up until midnight, transcribing their data into English in one of the hard-backed, pale green composition books Ann used as field notebooks. “Kajar is certainly an interesting village from several points of view, not the least of which is political,” she wrote to Dewey. “I can envision a little article someday with a model of the balance of power there and the shifts affected by various styles of tinkering from outside.” According to Waluja, he and Ann slept four hours a night, on average. He returned to Yogyakarta on weekends, he said; she returned less often. When I asked him if he found the schedule demanding, he told me he made a habit of drinking a liquid multivitamin supplement “to keep my strength up and my eyes open.”

Ann was ambitious. That was how Waluja and Sumarni put it, at least when they expressed the idea in English. “She would often tell us, ‘I want this, that, this. I have to get that,'” Waluja told me. She liked to put her plans in writing, often in the form of a diagram with multiple steps, as though it were proof that she intended to deliver. The working conditions were rough, but she never complained, even walking long distances in heat or rain. “She just exhaled loudly,” said Waluja, whom Ann took to calling Joko. Then she would say, “It's nothing compared to hell, Joko.” In the village of Pocung, the river that ran through the bottomland would overflow, preventing her from reaching the home of a craftsman she was observing. She would overhaul the day's schedule on the spot. She adapted easily to the customs of her informants. In a culture in which tea and snacks materialize at almost every encounter, Ann accepted whatever was offered rather than risk appearing rude by declining. “Speaking of cash crops, we arrived in Kajar just at the time of the peanut harvest,” she wrote to Dewey in July 1978. “This meant that at every house we surveyed we were given large glasses of sticky sweet tea, refilled at least 3 times despite all of my
‘sampuns,'
and big plates of peanuts in the shell to consume. Considering some days we visited 5 or 6 households, I don't think either Joko or I will be able to look a peanut in the face again (yes, peanuts
do
have faces—smirky, nasty little faces, in fact). At any rate you can be sure that before moving on to the next village we are checking out very carefully what
they
have just harvested.” (
Sampun
is a Javanese expression, roughly equivalent in this context to the American expression “I'm full.”)

On one occasion, in a village called Jambangan in Ngawi, a town in East Java on the Central Java border, Ann was invited to watch a
tayub,
a dance performed by young women at which men in the audience may join in. It was rare for an outsider to be present, Sumarni told me, and men in the audience turned out to be drunk. When the men began shoving money down the dancers' strapless tops, Sumarni said, she watched Ann closely. “She laughed,” Sumarni said. “Uncomfortably.”

With her interview subjects, she could be tender. “She was always touching,” Sumarni said. Before beginning an interview, she might put her arm around a farmer's shoulders and ask if he had eaten recently. If the answer was no, she sometimes would say sorrowfully, almost to herself, as though trying to come to grips with the fact, “He said he didn't have anything to eat.” Occasionally, Waluja and Sumarni noticed her turn away and wipe tears from her face. Once, she was visibly upset by the sight of an elderly woman in the village of Kasongan who, despite her age, was forced by her circumstances to work. “I wondered if she was too sensitive,” Waluja told me.

Ann was nothing if not methodical. She accumulated lists—of raw materials, of people to contact, of nineteen steps in making agricultural tools. “Steps in Surveying New Village,” she wrote in pencil inside the back cover of one notebook; twelve instructions followed, covering everything from how to secure government clearances to the need to summarize all data in charts. “Photos needed from Kajar,” she once wrote, going on to list forty-three. To say the questionnaires she administered to villagers and village officials were comprehensive would be an understatement. Geography, demography, technology, labor investment, purchasing, output, distribution, capital, returns, cash expenditure patterns, assistance from outside agencies, history, land tenure, agricultural yields, trading: Those were a few of her areas of interest. Her notes from a single day of fieldwork in Kajar might include the price and sources of scrap iron; rates of pay for bellows workers, hammerers, and the smith; an accounting of one smith's expenditures and revenues; types of charcoal used; an inventory of fifteen blacksmithing tools; discussions of marketing practices, the function of the cooperative, cooperative dues, the availability of credit, seasonal shifts in labor supply; and observations on child labor, women's roles, diet, and land use. “Difficult person to interview,” she reported in her notebook after a routine interview in Pocung. “Interview cut after 3 or 4 hours with poor results.” Her six pages of notes on a conversation with Garrett Solyom about field photography covered shutter speeds, film speeds, filters, lens paper, liquid lens cleaner, processing, storage of negatives, and a lot more. “The smaller the F stop, the wider the aperture,” Ann noted. “Need a fast lens.” Solyom, who had bought his photographic equipment with a gift of one thousand dollars from Dewey, had learned his technique from his father, a game biologist. “Look with your entire being,” his father had told him. “Sit still. Things will begin to happen because you're not there.” The advice that Ann chose to write down had a practical cast. “Ask yourself before each photo: What am I trying to show in this photo?” she wrote. “Don't decapitate people.”

Yes, don't decapitate. Ann's descriptions of her informants were precise, affectionate, and not without humor. “Pak Atmo is a small, shrewd, comical man, fond of a good joke,” she wrote in her notes, describing the head of the biggest hamlet in Kajar. One man was “shy, vague, pleasant”—and utterly without business sense. Another struck her as “open, good-hearted, modest and sexy.” After interviewing one man, she scribbled parenthetically, “Wife a bit of twit.” After a visit from a team of German engineers: “Much nonsense talked.” She regaled Dewey with details of one Pak Harjo Bodong: “Roughly translated, ‘Father Harjo with the Long Belly Button,' though I never had the courage to really ask why,” Ann wrote in a letter. “Pak Harjo Bodong used to be the most famous
dalang
in the Wonosari area. He also used to be a famous thief and was in jail four times when he was young. Now he is . . . a pillar of the community and lives there with his twelfth wife (he is her tenth husband). They are both in their seventies and quite a sketch. We enjoyed many evenings at their house hearing stories about the old days, and I got a free course in the
wayang
to boot!”

Pak Sastrosuyono, the head of the blacksmithing cooperative and Kajar's leading entrepreneur, became one of her most important informants—a man of average build with “an intelligent-looking face and a habitual expression that could be described as slightly worried or puzzled-looking,” she wrote in her dissertation. “Although one hears many stories about Pak Sastro from other villagers, some of them bordering on the fantastic, he seldom talks about himself or his accomplishments. When he does, he tends to downplay those accomplishments. If asked to discuss the extent of his property, his wealth, his financial contributions to village ceremonies or improvement projects, etc., he always gives underestimates. In part, this can be attributed to Javanese culture, which places a high value on personal modesty and abhors bragging. In part, however, it is probably due to a realistic assessment of his situation in the village. He is both highly respected, and resented to a considerable degree.”

She went on to describe what struck her as a particularly telling moment.

Kajar's charms and mysteries, natural and supernatural, fascinated Ann. There were three sacred springs in the village. One, shaded by a large and sacred banyan tree, was to be avoided at night because the Javanese believe that ghosts and spirits live in banyan trees. At the base of another was a flat stone on which one could see coloration in the shape of the wavy-bladed Javanese dagger, the kris, or
keris,
in Indonesian. “Villagers consider this image of a
keris
as proof that the men of Kajar are fated to be smiths, and that men from neighboring villages do not share this fate,” Ann wrote in her dissertation. Blacksmithing was considered sacred; so were the forge, the hearth, and the nail-shaped anvil, which resembled a lingam, the stylized phallus worshipped in Hinduism as a symbol of the god Shiva. Smiths were revered, and old smiths were believed to have special powers. Before opening a new forge, a smith would prepare an offering of molded rice, fruit, and flowers to be burned along with incense in the smithy. There were offerings to the anvils on the first day of the Javanese week. Every year, on the first day of the first Javanese month, all the smiths would dress formally in sarongs, high-necked jackets, and small folded batik turbans. Walking in single file and each carrying a tray laden with food offerings, they would circle the village and climb one of the limestone hills behind it to the graves of the two original smiths. There, they would make their offerings and meditate or pray. “Whenever villagers have a problem such as illness or sterility, or when they are looking to improve their luck, they bring offerings of rice, flowers, etc. to those graves,” Ann wrote. When she developed an eye infection on one occasion, she was advised to rinse her eyes in the waters of the sacred spring. When the infection persisted, villagers suggested a pilgrimage to the top of the limestone hill and offerings to the smiths' graves.