UHAA Distinguished Alumni Awards - Ann Dunham Soetoro, Ph.D.

realist · **Joined:** Fri Jan 23, 2009 1:33 pm **Posts:** 23527

If we've seen this before, my apologies. I do not remember it, but if so, I'll delete it.

University of Hawaii

Distinguished Alumni Awards
Congratulations to our 2012 honorees!

Ann Dunham Soetoro PhD (BA ’67, MA ’83, PhD ’92 Mānoa) – Anthropologist

Quote:

Ann Dunham Soetoro, PhD

2012 UH Alumni Association President’s Award

BA in anthropology, 1967, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
MA in anthropology, 1983, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
PhD in in anthropology, 1992, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Ann Dunham Soetoro, PhD, was an applied anthropologist who used her academic training from the University of Hawai‘i to better understand the culture, political system and values that underpinned the struggles – and successes – of the rural poor in Southeast Asia.

Soetoro’s research and consulting work took her around the world. She became a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development on setting up village credit programs, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta championing women’s issues. She later served in Pakistan as a consultant to the Asian Development Bank focusing on women’s welfare. In 1988, she joined Bank Rakyat Indonesia and helped develop the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program. Credit and savings services enabled poor people from rural areas to engage in cottage industries and emerge from poverty. As a pioneer in the field of microfinance, her anthropological research helped shape the bank's policies.

[...]

Her work lives on. In 2009, Duke University Press published, “Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia” – a condensed version of Soetoro’s 1992 dissertation on her 14 years of research in rural Java. Her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng called on Alice Dewey, Soetoro’s graduate adviser, and Nancy Cooper, a fellow graduate student, from the UH anthropology department to edit the work for publication. In addition, the Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowed Fund was recently established at the UH Foundation as a collaborative effort between UH Mānoa and the East-West Center to honor her legacy.

TexasFilly · **Joined:** Mon Sep 28, 2009 12:52 pm **Posts:** 10643

I hadn't seen that before. The last sentence touched my heart:

Quote:

In “Dreams From My Father,” President Barack Obama wrote of his mother: “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”

MaineSkeptic · **Joined:** Thu Mar 19, 2009 2:48 pm **Posts:** 5295

TexasFilly wrote:

I hadn't seen that before. The last sentence touched my heart:

Quote:

In “Dreams From My Father,” President Barack Obama wrote of his mother: “I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”

I have to admit, the whole thing brought tears to my eyes. And I learned that her undergraduate degree year -- '67 -- was the same as mine.

Plutodog · **Posted:** Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:17 pm

$\:D/$

verbalobe · **Posted:** Fri Apr 20, 2012 7:56 pm

Good for her.

I am still reading her biography, as well as Dreams and The Bridge, and as the mother of a President she is a remarkable and admirable figure.

The things that seem to stand out:

Her work ethic. The nobodies who malign her as a dirty hippy ni**er-lover have NO IDEA what they're missing in this regard. Over the course of her career she filled countless notebooks with meticulously researched and described metrics, mostly about a vanishing form of village life in Indonesia. This was a kind of work that nobody had ever done. Against stunning odds, in a patriarchal, sometimes anti-American (and certainly anti-colonial), and densely complex society, she made revolutionary inroads, helping to figure out how the international community could best aid struggling communities on their own terms. She worked from dawn till night, all her life, she seemed indefatigable.

I guarantee not one teatard who calls her names has ever worked half as hard.

Her courage. See above. She penetrated male societies. She learned the arcana of village blacksmithing, her specialty, which moreso than basket-weaving or a hundred other crafts is the domain of men. The Indonesian kris is a dagger imbued with mystery, power, divinity, and art, and she learned its secrets, with patience, a healthy dose of naivete, and years of work, cultivating a network of unlikely allies.

Her open-mindedness. You can't learn if you already think everything you know is the only way to be right. Ann definitely passed this virtue on to Barack. And it is the diametric opposite of the Fundy Xtian philosophy that I see in Amerika today: "Why learn? Everything I know is the only way to be right. Learning is the debil."

Edit:

Foggy · **Posted:** Sat Apr 21, 2012 6:07 am

^^^^^ This.

She was fluent in Bahasa Indonesian within a couple years of arriving with Lolo. She made lifelong friends wherever she went. Her Ph.D. dissertation, unlike so many others, was really useful to other anthropologists working in the field.

That was an unusual book. Not exackly a literary masterpiece, but you could see the amount of time and effort that went into writing it ... and she offers more details and anecdotes than most biographies. She dug up a metric shitload of factual information about her subject. I had the feeling at the end that there really wasn't anything important about Ann Soetoro's life that hadn't made it into the book.

My favorite part was when the 2008 campaign really got going, and her friends (she being long gone by then) were telling each other in wonder, "That's Ann's Barry!" They knew how immensely proud she was of her son, but they didn't know the name Obama and they didn't try to keep track of him. Suddenly, it was like "My friend Ann raised a President!" :shock:

Wonderful story.

Falsehoods unchallenged only fester and grow.

UHAA Distinguished Alumni Awards - Ann Dunham Soetoro, Ph.D.

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