Duke University Press is about to publish a revised version of Stanley Ann Dunham's 1992 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.
Dunham is Barack Obama's late mother, by the way. The piece about the book prompted me to take a look at Dunham's Wikipedia page, which I'd never done before. Turns out she was quite cosmopolitan, and a pretty damned interesting person all-around. I wonder if there's a good biography of her...
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