August 11, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
Michael R. Dove, a professor of social ecology and anthropology at Yale University, is wondering how President Obama’s late mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, may have shaped her son by examining her 1,043-page dissertation.
As an anthropologist and former Ford Foundation employee in Indonesia, Ms. Soetoro learned that entrepreneurship and access to capital were the keys to fighting poverty, Mr. Dove writes in an opinion article in The New York Times.
She concluded that the lack of capital in Indonesian villages was a political problem, not a cultural one, says Mr. Dove.
“Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites,” says Mr. Dove. “As she wrote in her dissertation, ‘Many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials,’ who then used the money to further strengthen their own status.”
What do you think? Do you see Ms. Soetoro’s views reflected in her son?
