Quote:
Obama's Mother's Dissertation Set for Release
November 30, 2009 02:37 PM ET
[...]Duke University Press is set to release the doctoral dissertation of Ann Dunham—the president's mother, who died 14 years ago—at the American Anthropological Association conference in Philadelphia. After unveiling Dunham's writings on life in Indonesia, the university press will hold a session devoted to Dunham's life and work, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
The dissertation, which will be published under the title Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, "still definitely has a lot of relevance," Laura Sell, a Duke University Press publicist, told the Duke Chronicle in May. "We sent it out to a lot of pretty high-powered reviewers, who all said it's a worthy work of scholarship and people can learn a lot from it."
Dunham received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1992, but she had worked and studied in the field for more than a decade before that. You can read a fantastic and detailed profile of Dunham's life and influence on her son.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/paper-trail ... lease.htmlAn embedded link from that article takes you to:
Quote:
Hot Type: Obama's Mother's Dissertation Gets Star Treatment From Duke U. Press
By Jennifer Howard
The scholarly book getting the most buzz at the American Anthropological Association's annual conference this 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.
Ms. Soetoro-Ng told me her mother was "a real romantic and a pragmatist" at the same time, interested in objects that were beautiful in their own right and also a practical means of making everyday life better. "Metalworking was an embodiment of that fusion between art and livelihood and between beauty and utility that was very much in keeping with her vision as an anthropologist," Ms. Soetoro-Ng said.[...]
http://chronicle.com/article/Obamas-Mot ... _medium=en