Re: [xmca] sounds like the young Dr. Cole?

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

Golly
No wonder that Obama is what he is...a formidable set of genes on the one
side (We don't know about his Dad or do we?)  I respect anthropology even
more than psychology, and that thesis sounds formidable.

On the other hand, I would love to hear about how his grandparents brought
him up--but that is in his books, I expect---and I haven't read them.

I hope he can do all of them justice.

Carol

2009/8/11 Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>

> Op-Ed Contributor
>
> Dreams From His Mother
>
> By MICHAEL R. DOVE
>
> Published: August 10, 2009
>
> New Haven
>
> PRESIDENT OBAMA's late mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, was famous for the good
> cheer and optimism that she preserved in the face of a complex and
> challenging world. Her personality went hand-in-hand with her career as an
> anthropologist in Indonesia and Pakistan, where she studied and worked with
> village craftsmen, slum-dwellers and countless others. I knew Dr. Soetoro
> as
> a friend and colleague for many years before her death from cancer in 1995.
> Though I only met her son once, briefly at her memorial service, I've
> watched him as he's taken on the hardest job in the world, and often found
> myself wondering how her worldview might have shaped him.
>
> Dr. Soetoro's most sustained academic effort was her 1,043-page
> dissertation, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving Against All
> Odds," completed in 1992 and based on 14 years of research. This was a
> classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old
> industry. Her principal field site was a cluster of hamlets, containing
> several hundred households, on an arid limestone plateau on Java's south
> coast. There, village metalworkers produced dozens of different iron blades
> and tools for use in farming, carpentry and daily life.
>
> When Dr. Soetoro began her study in 1977, the village could be reached only
> by walking a mile and a half from the nearest paved road. The first
> battery-powered television set did not arrive in the village until 1978,
> and
> was placed in a window and watched by the village en masse; electricity did
> not arrive until a decade later. In her dissertation, Dr. Soetoro called
> this village "a wonderful and mysterious place to live."
>
> Running through Dr. Soetoro's doctoral research, as through all her work,
> was a challenge to popular perceptions regarding economically and
> politically marginalized groups; she showed that the people at society's
> edges were not as different from the rest of us as is often supposed. Dr.
> Soetoro was also critical of the pernicious notion that the roots of
> poverty
> lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible
> for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West.
>
> Indeed, Dr. Soetoro found that the villagers she studied in Central Java
> had
> many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most
> capitalist of Westerners. Village craftsmen were "keenly interested in
> profits," she wrote, and entrepreneurship was "in plentiful supply in rural
> Indonesia," having been "part of the traditional culture" there for a
> millennium.
>
> Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in
> these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of
> which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that
> ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating
> inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she
> wrote in her dissertation, "many government programs inadvertently foster
> stratification by channeling resources through village officials," who then
> used the money to further strengthen their own status.
>
> These same observations also led her to start working with institutions
> like
> the Ford Foundation and the United States Agency for International
> Development to devise alternate pathways for reaching and working with the
> poor. She helped to pioneer microcredit programs that made small amounts of
> capital available to weavers, blacksmiths and other low-income groups -
> people who would otherwise have had no access to credit.
>
> It's worth pointing out that though microenterprise is fairly well-known
> today - and Indonesia now has one of the world's largest microcredit
> programs - it was pretty radical stuff when Ann Soetoro was doing her work.
> But then, she had a habit of swimming against the current. While many
> American academics tried to avoid antagonizing the repressive Suharto
> government, Ann Soetoro called attention to those the regime had failed to
> benefit: the village craftsmen, the plantation workers and urban
> scavengers,
> the underpaid workers in the shoe and clothing factories.
>
> There is a final lesson from her work that is worth remembering: No nation
> -
> even if it is our bitterest enemy - is incomprehensible. Anthropology shows
> that people who seem very different from us behave according to systems of
> logic, and that these systems can be grasped if we approach them with the
> sort of patience and respect that Dr. Soetoro practiced in her work.
>
> The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "the aim of anthropology is
> the enlargement of the universe of human discourse." This was clearly a
> central goal of Dr. Soetoro's work and life. From an admittedly great
> distance, I can see those same values in her son.
>
> Michael R. Dove is a professor of social ecology and anthropology at Yale.
>
>
>
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