"The greetings that the village women exchanged with Mom conveyed an intimacy that made clear they had fully taken each other's measure. Their connection had been established to a sufficient degree for laughter to be easy. Mom had come to a real understanding with them, it seemed, and not just the women; she was welcomed and trusted by all. This made me proud, I remember, for many of the same reasons my pride swells at the sight of my brother, our president; Mom too moved with such ease through every world, and people opened up at the sight of her smile."oMaya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of S. Ann Dunham and sister of President Barack Obama, from the foreword "S. Ann Dunham's Surviving against the Odds bears witness to her knowledge of and affection for the Southeast Asian nation of Indonesia. The book also speaks legions about Dunham's integrity as a cultural anthropologist... By the mid-1980s Dunham had begun to see the audience for her work as made up of not just academics but Indonesians, aid workers, and foreign analysts whose findings affect the lives of ordinary Indonesians. Rather than go with the academic flow, Dunham stayed true to a research program requiring varied and rigorous methodologies, all in an effort to speak truth to power and policy making."oRobert W. Hefner, Boston University, president of the Association for Asian Studies, from the afterword "Surviving against the Odds is a work of very fine scholarship grounded in a deep understanding of Indonesia. Reading it, I learned a great deal about economic anthropology, blacksmithing (across a range of dimensions, from the supernatural to metallurgy), local life and labor in the Javanese village of Kajar, and the remarkable welter of development schemes and projects in play during the long period of S. Ann Dunham's research. Dunham knew the arcane world of development very well and her account of it is fascinating and important."oDonald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz, past president of the American Anthropological Association "A few years before her death, Barack Obama's mother completed her doctoral dissertation. Nearly two decades later, S. Ann Dunham's fieldwork has been published o a fulfillment of her dream, courtesy of her daughter...Over a period of 14 years, Dunham visited and lived among Indonesian villagers. Her work challenged the prevailing view among social anthropologists of the time that Indonesian peasants were better off just cultivating rice...The result is Surviving the Odds, a study of blacksmithing in the village of Kajar, Indonesia." - NPR "Surviving against the Odds" is a condensed version of Ann's PhD on village industries in Java that she says she worked for almost two decades. In the end Ann decided to focus on just one of five crafts - bamboo, clay, leather, textile and blacksmithing - she had initially intended to cover in five villages she found specializing in these crafts. But even with blacksmithing as her "smaller topic", Ann ended up with a dissertation more than 1,000 pages long, finally submitted in 1992... Ann's book - like her - is deeply empathetic. Full of evocative descriptions of the lives of villagers she worked with, it is a testament to her commitment to the development of lives of rural and marginalized peoples all around the world." - Julia Suryakusuma, The Jakarta Post