The design on his ring is parang rusak. As you can see from this statement, he saw himself as royalty even in his marriage. Parang rusak is a Javanese batik design and is important in their culture.
“In weddings throughout Central Java, the patterns of sidomukti, sidoluhur, sidoasih, sidomulyo, wirasat and truntum are used to bless newly married couples and their parents.
The rulers of Yogyakarta and Surakarta Palaces always use prescribed patterns like the parang design.”
“But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.
Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html
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Ann Dunham: A Personal Reflection
*snip*
Then she got married and her name was Mrs. Barack Hussein Obama until she married her Indonesian husband and became Mrs. Lolo Soetoro, the old Dutch spelling. Everybody in Indonesia knew her as Ann Soetoro. She moved to Indonesia because she married Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese.
But she soon came to love Java and the arts. She was herself a craftsman and weaver. She taught weaving and just loved it. Most of her clothes were Indonesian. Java was as much her home as Honolulu.
Ideally, she moved back and forth. She’d be in Indonesia for a few years and then she’d get home sick for Honolulu and move back here for some months to pursue her studies, see her parents and friends, and then back to Java because she’d get homesick for Java and also need to earn money.
http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/News/Announcements/2008/dunham.html
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Parang Rusak Batik
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~iany/patterns/batik_parang.htm
Any sources?