Duke University Press on Thursday released Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, a book by anthropologist S. Ann Dunham, the late mother of President Obama. The 300-page book, a condensed version of Dunham’s dissertation of the economics of the blacksmith trade on the island of Java in the 1970s and 80s, was unveiled at a press conference at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Ken Wissoker, editorial director of the Duke University Press, called the book “a very prescient work” that “anticipated a lot of what we now know as microfinance” — the movement to give tradespeople in underdeveloped countries access to banking services.

To any who would say that Duke was only publishing Dunham’s book because of the celebrity of her son, Wissoker said anthropologists without such ties stand to benefit from the book's anticipated popularity. “It brings attention to a kind of work that a lot of anthropologists are doing,” he said. “And by publishing it, it enables us to publish more books of this kind.”