President Barack Obama's mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries including Indonesia. Dunham received her doctorate in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her dissertation for publication, as she had planned. Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, Dunham's graduate adviser and fellow graduate student respectively, undertook the revisions at the request of Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng. The result is Surviving against the Odds, a book based on Dunham's research, over a period of fourteen years, among the rural craftsmen of Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia's population. Surviving against the Odds reflects Dunham's commitment to helping small-scale village industries survive; her pragmatic, non-ideological approach to research and problem-solving; and her impressive command of history, economic data, and development policy. Along with photographs of Dunham, the book includes many pictures taken by her in Indonesia.

After Dunham married Lolo Soetoro in 1967, she and her six-year-old son, Barack Obama, moved from Hawai`i to Soetoro's home in Jakarta, where Maya Soetoro was born three years later. Barack returned to Hawai`i to attend school in 1971. Dedicated to Dunham's mother Madelyn, adviser Alice, and "Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field," Surviving against the Odds centers on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar. Focusing attention on the small rural industries overlooked by many scholars, Dunham argued that wet-rice cultivation was not the only viable economic activity in rural Southeast Asia.

Surviving against the Odds includes a preface by the editors, Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, and a foreword by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, each of which discusses Dunham and her career. In his afterword, the anthropologist and Indonesianist Robert W. Hefner explores the content of Surviving against the Odds, its relation to anthropology when it was researched and written, and its continuing relevance today.

"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