Duke University Press Log

Two Great Interviews

Listen to two great interviews with our authors. Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of S. Ann Dunham and sister of President Barack Obama, was interviewed this weekend by NPR's Guy Raz. She talks about her mother's book, Surviving against the Odds, about growing up in Indonesia and accompanying her mother on research trips, and about what their mother might have thought about her son becoming President. And on the BBC show Thinking Allowed, you can hear Karen Ho talk about her anthropological research in a very different locale: Wall Street. Ho took a job at Banker's Trust for a year and interviewed dozens of investment bankers for her book Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.

Dunham Launch Today

Everyone at the Press is excited for the big launch of S. Ann Dunham's Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia today. Dunham, the mother of President Obama, submitted her dissertation on metal workers in Java in 1992 and died before she she could get it published. Now, fourteen years after her death, we are proud to be bringing her important work to the public. The book is being launched today at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. At noon there will be a press conference about the book and Dunham's work. Editors Alice Dewey and Nancy Cooper, Duke Press Editorial Director Ken Wissoker, University of Hawaii's Geoffery White, and Dunham's daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng will attend. The press conference is followed by a special Presidential Session on Dunham and her work. And later in the evening, Duke Press and the AAA host a reception and book signing. Of course the book will be on sale at Duke's booth in the exhibit hall throughout the conference. To read more about the book, check out this great Chronicle of Higher Education piece which includes interviews with Soetoro-Ng and Wissoker (subscription required) or this Publishers Weekly article.

Maya Soetoro-Ng on Diane Rehm Today

Today in the second hour of her program, Diane Rehm interviews Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of S. Ann Dunham and sister of President Barack Obama. Dunham died in 1995, before she was able to revise her dissertation, so Soetoro-Ng worked with editors Nancy Cooper and Alice Dewey to bring the work to publication. Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia is based on Dunham’s research over a period of fourteen years among the rural metalworkers of Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia’s population. Soetoro-Ng will reflect on her mother's life and legacy and her own upbringing in Indonesia as the daughter of an anthropologist.

Sunday Times Returns to Java to Profile S. Ann Dunham

 The Sunday Times (London) sent reporter Christine Finn to Kajar, Java in Indonesia to revisit the site of S. Ann Dunham's research there. As you have read before on this blog, Dunham, who died in 1995, was President Barack Obama's mother. An anthropologist, she did her fieldwork on Javanese metal workers in the village of Kajar. Finn writes, "Dunham is still remembered in the central Javan hamlet of Kajar as a generous benefactor whose gifts of money, food and schoolbooks helped numerous villagers. Yet none of them had realised that the woman who paid several visits to research rural crafts in the 1980s had a son who was to become America’s 44th president." Duke will publish Dunham's dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia next month.

Remembering Masao Miyoshi

Duke Press was saddened to learn of the death of Masao Miyoshi after a long illness. Miyoshi was Hajime Mori Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Japanese, English, and Comparative Literature at University of California San Diego. He has worked closely with Duke Press for many years, as editor of our Asia/Pacific book series, as a member of the boundary 2 editorial board, and as a writer and editor of many books: Postmodernism and Japan (1989), Japan in the World (1993), The Cultures of Globalization (1998), and Learning Places (2002). Next spring we will be proud to publish Miyoshi's final book, Trespasses, a collection of his essays on topics such as transition from colonialism to transnationalism and the decline of the nation-state, Japan in the age of the recession, and the decline of the liberal arts and corresponding corporatization of the university.

BBC Radio Documentary and Independent Article Profile S. Ann Dunham

Britain's The Independent and The Telegraph both have features today on S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama. Dunham, who died in 1995, was an anthropologist. In December Duke Press will be publishing her dissertation, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. In The Independent, Judith Kampfner, who has also created a radio documentary for the BBC about Dunham called Dreams from My Mother, reminds readers that Dunham "was an economic anthropologist and that for 30 years she devoted herself to studying rural enterprise in Indonesia. She took on projects as a development officer with the Ford Foundation, the US Agency for International Development and the Asian Development Bank, pioneering micro-credit projects that extended small loans to the rural poor." Kampfner interviewed Alice Dewey, Dunham's dissertation adviser and one of the editors of our book. Dewey says Dunham "wanted to know why people do things and how they do what they do - applied anthropology. She was the hardest-working person I have ever met. When she came down to breakfast, she had already been working for four hours." A documentary film about Dunham is also in the works.

Kim Dae-jung and the Asian Debt Crisis

 

Former South Korean President, Kim Dae-jung, passed away Tuesday, August 18th at the age of 83. Mr. Kim was president of South Korea from 1998-2003, and his presidency overlapped with the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997-2001). In the recently released South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: The Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare Society, author Jesook Song discusses Mr. Kim's role in creating the neoliberal welfare state that was a response to the crisis. For more information about Mr. Kim and the debt crisis, check out Song's new book.

S. Ann Dunham's Support of Indonesia's Village Industries

On NPR today, Susan Stamberg discussed S. Ann Dunham and the colorful fabric (batiks) she collected in Indonesia. The batiks are currently on display at the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. Dunham's collection of batiks was just one piece of her study of Indonesia. This fall, Duke Press will be publishing Dunham's anthropological study of Indonesia, Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. As demonstrated by her batik collection, Dunham did not simply research the village industries of Jakarta, she also supported them.

Michael R. Dove on S. Ann Dunham's Influence on Barack Obama

Anthropologist Michael R. Dove writes about S. Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother, in an op-ed in today's New York Times. He has often wondered, he writes, how Dunham's role as an anthropologist might have shaped her son. He writes that "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." Another lesson that can be learned from her work, he writes, is that "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." Duke University Press will publish Dunham's dissertation as Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia in December.

Textile Museum Displays Obama's Mother's Batiks

For only two weeks this month, the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. will display batik patterned textiles from the collection of S. Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother. Dunham amassed the collection while living in Indonesia and doing research for her doctoral dissertation in anthropology. In December, Duke Press will publish that dissertation as Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia. The exhibit runs August 9-23.