President Barack Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, began her academic career at the University of Hawaii and transferred her scholarly interests soon after to Indonesia, where she exhaustively researched the changing economic culture of rural village life, focusing on blacksmiths' work as her model industry.

Dunham became known for her rigorous intellectual discipline, able to visualize complex economic “;data clouds”; and then precipitate commonsense deductions and observations.

Originally an observer, she became a participant in village life, which gave her doctoral dissertation a color and clarity amid all the scholarly wordage.

Dissertations aren't aimed at the general public, however, and Dunham was in the midst of rewriting her dissertation when she died in 1995. Work stopped on the document, which ran more than a thousand pages.

Dunham earned all of her degrees at the University of Hawaii. Her daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, also has a doctorate from the school and asked UH anthropology scholars Alice Dewey and Nancy Cooper to complete editing the work on subject matter that is just the sort of thing the University of Hawaii Press normally publishes.

So why was it published by Duke University? It almost was published locally.

“;Alice (Dewey) originally asked us to look at it, and we were interested, naturally, but not unless it was revised,”; said UH Press head Bill Hamilton, just back from an enforced two-week furlough of the entire University of Hawaii Press operation. “;She was working on it when the head of the American Anthropological Association heard about it and wanted copies for the association's annual convention.

“;Duke University Press got involved and fast-tracked it so that printed copies would be available for the convention last month,”; he said. “;We would not have made the decision until the revision was completed. ... It's just the sort of work we usually publish, whether or not there's a presidential connection. The time frame wasn't right.”;

Hamilton said although UH Press doesn't really monitor thesis work and dissertations looking for publishable materials, their authors are generally scholarly professionals who give them a heads-up if they have a student working on something interesting.

“;That's not uncommon. If Stanley Ann Dunham had lived, her dissertation was the sort of outstanding scholarship that we would have published 20 years ago.”;

In some ways, Dunham was ahead of her time in analyzing how a multinational economic system would color rural craftsmanship. The completed work will be soup and nuts to anthropologists and Third World economics scholars. Everybody else, not so much, although Dewey and Cooper's editing make it fairly accessible.

The work also enhances the elected president's position, planting him firmly within a family of dedicated scholars who consider not just the big picture, but the impact on the average guy. As the bumper sticker says, think global, do local.