A Life Beyond Boundaries

by Benedict Anderson

  The US actively worked to counteract this trend, with the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and open and covert interventions in Burma, Indochina, Indonesia, the Philippines and even Siam. American state anxiety about Southeast Asia increased rapidly in the 1960s with the disastrous Vietnam War, which later engulfed both Laos and Cambodia. The irony was that this war, which Southeast Asia scholars mostly opposed, was also the source of the rise of well-funded Southeast Asia programs across the US. But after the American defeat in 1975–76, there was a popular revulsion, and for a long time few people wanted to think about Southeast Asia. State and private financial support began to dry up. Excellent students of the region who were unlucky enough to finish their PhDs in the late 1970s and early 1980s found it very difficult to get academic jobs in America. Many moved to Australia, the UK, New Zealand or Canada. Others were forced to seek careers in the civil service, the diplomatic corps, UN agencies, big corporations and even the CIA. Besides, not only Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia but also Burma were now completely closed to American researchers. Enrolments fell, and new students, often as interested in MAs as in PhDs, were less focused on scholarly careers and more on practical training for professional work in medicine, development assistance and so forth. It was really not till the late 1980s, when Southeast Asia emerged – briefly, and only in some places – as a newly industrializing tiger economy (following Japan, Korea and Taiwan), that Southeast Asian studies really made a comeback. In the field of political science, ‘political economy’ became all the rage.

  By comparison with other area studies, Southeast Asian studies, by its very novelty, came to be threatened by a serious structural problem which has only recently been resolved. When the small founding generation of scholars began to retire in the 1980s, it often happened that universities decided not to replace them, but rather to invest in other fields and specializations. More importantly, the bulk of academic specialists on Southeast Asia had been recruited, very young, during the Vietnam War and the Great Boom. Most of this generation did not start to retire till near the end of the twentieth century. The result was a kind of ‘lost generation’ – highly qualified youngsters who could not get the jobs they deserved because of the peculiar top-heavy age structure of the faculty pyramid (in long-established fields, with normal pyramids, they would have had little trouble). Hence it was common to find programs in the early 1990s with distinguished elderly professors and excellent young ones, and very few people in between.

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  This chapter has mainly been about global political and economic changes, large institutions and structures, and educational policies in connection with the development of the Southeast Asia program at Cornell University. To provide a link between the first chapter and the one that follows, on my experiences doing fieldwork in different parts of Southeast Asia, let me conclude here with some personal recollections.

  At the beginning I felt very lost. In the Cornell department of government I was expected not only to help teach undergraduates comparative politics, American politics (America evidently could not be compared!) and political theory – about which I knew next to nothing – but to take graduate courses in these fields as well. I was a real ‘baby’, only twenty-one years old, extremely ignorant, and with no competence at all in any Southeast Asian language. But student solidarity was amazingly strong. The older students were really like elder brothers and sisters, patiently teaching me, guiding me, teasing me, and boosting my frail morale. We were together all the time in the classroom, the library, and of course the bars. Looking back, I realize that I learned as much from my fellow students as from my teachers, whom I usually met only in the classroom or the office. The teachers were very kind but extremely busy, and I didn’t feel like imposing myself.

  The Southeast Asia program was something else, because Kahin had the brilliant idea of asking the president of the university, whom he knew well, to allow him to use an abandoned fraternity house as the office space for the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project he had just started. Kahin got some of his students to put in steel pillars to hold up the sagging floors. He kept a downstairs office for himself, but the rest of the three-story building was turned over to the senior students of the program, whether they were Indonesianists or not. The lunchtime ‘brown-bag’ meetings were held here too. This crumbling building, which became legendary as ‘102 West Avenue’, somehow survived till the 1980s, when it was torn down to make way for a parking lot. So we had our own building, which was socially and psychologically very important.

  When I arrived, Kahin had organized a team of his senior students to produce a book called Governments and Politics of Southeast Asia under his editorship, the first such book published anywhere. So ‘baby Anderson’, who spent a lot of time chatting in the building, had everyday contact with senior students, some just back from Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines or Indonesia, who were full of fabulous stories and eager to share them. The core group in the building, however, were the Indonesianists, Herbert Feith, John Smail, Ruth McVey and Dan Lev, along with Selo Soemardjan, the already middle-aged secretary to the sultan of Jogjakarta, and a wise, kind and extremely friendly man. Ruth McVey stood out, not only by her intelligence and wide knowledge – she had early on been a Sovietologist and was fluent in Russian – but also because she was a woman. In those days Southeast Asia program members were 90 per cent male. Everyone was very nice to the ‘baby’.

  One other aspect of my intellectual life in those days was something that today is really hard to imagine. There was little to read on Southeast Asia that was in English and of high quality. (I did not learn to read Dutch till after I went to Indonesia.) There was of course Kahin’s previously mentioned masterpiece. There was Benda’s book, already mentioned too. In 1960, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s best book, The Religion of Java, became available, as well as shorter pieces by the same author. Neither Kahin nor Benda were especially interested in Java, and neither knew any Javanese. But Geertz opened my eyes to ‘culture’, Javanese culture, in a powerful way, which connected up with my European ‘cultural education’. There were also Bill Skinner’s studies of Chinese communities in Siam and Indonesia. Almost nothing first-class was available on post-independence Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam or Cambodia, except a few articles here and there. Even if we wanted to research, for example, Indonesian politics, there were few helpful studies available in English. The result was that we found ourselves in the position of anthropologists, studying things that were still largely unknown while relying on our curiosity, observation and daily chatting. That is why, all my life, I have kept up reading in anthropology and have been greatly influenced by it.

  Meantime, I was taking and enjoying classes in bahasa Indonesia under the supervision of John Echols and two Indonesian students. How happy I was to be studying an Asian language, with rules and sounds that did not exist in ‘my Europe’! I did not know then what I discovered later – that three years of classroom language study is not worth six months of immersion in foreign everyday life.

  Early in 1961, Kahin insisted that I draw up a thesis proposal. As I hesitated, he said, ‘Why don’t you look at the Japanese Occupation and its impact on Indonesian society and politics?’ I knew what he was after. The only weak chapter in his Nationalism and Revolution was the one on the Occupation, because there was almost nothing published on the period when he wrote his dissertation, and he had had to rely mainly on interviews. So I thought, why not? The Occupation only lasted three and a half years, so it must be manageable! Besides, from my teen years I had been (superficially) interested in Japan. My mother and I used to quarrel gently about this – she was strongly pro-China and down on Japan, and as a teenage rebel in the claws of Genji, I had to insist that Japan was more interesting than China.

  Chapter 3

  Fieldwork

  For most scholars, their first experience of doing fieldwork is decisive. One never again has quite the same sense of shock, strangeness and exc
itement. Later in my career I spent years studying, and living in, Thailand and the Philippines, both of which fascinated me and both of which I loved. But Indonesia was my first love. I can speak and read Thai and Tagalog, but Indonesian is really my second language, and the only one in which I can also write fluently, and with the greatest pleasure. Sometimes, I still dream in it.

  I arrived in Jakarta late in December 1961 and stayed till April 1964. When my plane landed, in the dark, the rainy season had begun, and I remember vividly the ride into town with all the taxi’s windows open. The first thing that hit me was the smell – of fresh trees and bushes, urine, incense, smoky oil lamps, garbage and, above all, food in the little stalls that lined most of the main streets.

  My senior classmate Dan Lev, before returning to Ithaca, had arranged for me to lodge in the house of the welcoming and kindly widow of a Supreme Court judge. She lived in a large and comfortable house at the end of what was then a ‘high-class’ street named after the national hero Prince Diponegoro. Two of her grown children were still living with her, and her household included a cook, a maid and a young boy gardener and errand-runner.

  The story of Prince Diponegoro goes back to the early nineteenth century. When Napoleon incorporated the Netherlands into France, London decided to seize the Dutch East Indies. Stamford Raffles, agent of the East India Company, ruled Java from 1811–16. When the Napoleonic wars finally ended, Britain returned Java at the price of Dutch holdings in the Cape and Ceylon. Ruined financially by the Continental System, the Dutch government was in a weak position to enforce its power in the Indies. Prince Diponegoro of the little Jogjakarta kingdom took advantage of this situation to rebel and raised a large army to fight the Dutch from 1825–30. But when he was defeated and exiled, he wrote that his aim was to ‘conquer Java’, a fact little known by present-day Javanese.

  The day after my arrival in Jakarta, the late Ong Hok Ham, well known to all Indonesianists, dropped by to visit. He was then still a student in the University of Indonesia’s history department, but had worked for Skinner as a research assistant. He invited me to hang out with three of his Javanese student friends in a dormitory for boys at the University of Indonesia’s old campus in Rawamangun. Any illusion that I was good in Indonesian disappeared immediately. But since the friends knew little English we did our collective best to understand each other. Ong had explained to them that although I was studying in an American university I was Irish. This helped a lot since they knew that Ireland had had to fight for its independence, while, like most Indonesian nationalists at that time, they regarded Americans with suspicion.

  They gave me a delicious, simple dinner, but intentionally did not warn me about tjabe rawit, the tiny green or red peppers that set fire to one’s tongue. They were impressed that I struggled to be brave and not spit the peppers out. Then the torrential rain started again. Ong said it was impossible to get to my lodgings, and there was no telephone handy, so we had better sleep with his friends. They handed me a small towel and a spare sarong, and showed me how to use the Indonesian-style bathroom. I took to the sarong like a duck to water, and in spite of swarms of mosquitoes, I slept like a log.

  The next morning I returned ‘home’ and apologized effusively to my landlady for staying out on my second night in Indonesia and not informing her. But she brushed the apologies aside. The monsoon was like that, she said. You could get stuck anywhere, and boys will be boys. This was my first experience of ‘culture shock’. I felt that I had been rude by my European standards, but she did not at all feel the same way. Later I came to realize the huge difference between how unmarried men and women were treated in Indonesian society: the young men were free to do what they wanted, but the young women were watched, guarded and kept at home as much as possible.

  The next shock was quite different, and wholly pleasant. Opposite the house there was a triangular, unused open space covered with weeds, grasses and mud. In the afternoons, a gang of little kampong boys, aged between eight and twelve, would gather there to play soccer. They would begin by tossing a coin, and the losing side would solemnly take off their shorts (they wore no underwear). That was how they told one side from another. Of course they had no goalposts. But they brought along four little brothers and sisters, still at the crawling rather than the running stage, and used them carefully as moving goalposts.

  This was my introduction to two aspects of the lives of ordinary Indonesian children. The first was easy public nudity for boys until they reached puberty – something unimaginable in Ireland or the US. The second was the intimacy between siblings. From a very early age Indonesian children have to help the younger ones, and to respect and obey their elder brothers and sisters. My landlady explained the custom by saying: if you are older you have to give in to the young ones, give them what they want, love them and protect them; if you are younger you have to do what your older sisters or brothers tell you. This seemed contradictory, but it really worked. While in Indonesia I rarely saw the children in a family fighting with each other, exactly the opposite of my own experience. Rory and I fought constantly – to our mother’s annoyance – till we went off to Eton.

  A third shock was my first contact with madness. I was walking past a crowded market one day when I noticed a strange figure surrounded by a swarm of giggling and screaming little boys. It was a completely naked young woman, unwashed, with very long tangled hair reaching to her behind. Mostly, the market people paid her no attention, or, if in a good mood, gave her little gifts of food. When I asked a vendor who the woman was, she said, ‘Poor thing! Some man broke her heart and she went mad. Her parents try to clothe her, but she always tears off any clothing.’ Later, I would come across mad men, also naked and dirty, and people would say the same kind of thing. I began to reflect that maybe these poor creatures, who did no one any harm, were better off than mad people in Europe and America, who, in those days, were shut away for years in isolated asylums. Here they could go where they pleased, and society casually fed them.

  My immediate difficulty was language. I quickly learned that the kind of formal Indonesian I had studied at Cornell was textbook stuff that people only used in formal situations. My new friends laughed at the way I tried to talk, and children didn’t understand a word I said. After about three months, I was really depressed, feeling that I was making no progress at all. Later I realized that it was like learning to ride a bicycle: when you start you fall off all the time, but then suddenly, one magic day, you get the feel of it, and even start cycling without using your hands. Suddenly, in the fourth month, I found I could speak fluently without any hesitation. I was so happy I could have cried. I could now conduct interviews in the language. I do not blush easily, but when an old lady I was interviewing said to me, ‘I see that you know how to use padahal [close to ‘even though’] perfectly, so you are thinking in Indonesian’, I went red in the face with pleasure. But the difficulties did not stop there.

  Like many educated members of her generation, my landlady spoke to her children and her friends in Dutch. She also used it when she did not want me to understand what she was saying, just like my parents speaking in French when they did not want us to know what they were talking about. At Cornell, Dutch was not then regularly taught. So I taught myself the language, not to speak it, but to read and understand. It was not too hard, since I knew some German, which is like a more difficult version of Dutch. But I did it in a way that I repeated many years later when I decided to learn Spanish. I took a large, difficult and fascinating book, and stumbled through it line by line, almost word for word, with a big dictionary at my side.

  The book I chose, and which influenced me more deeply than any other book about Indonesia, was Theodoor Pigeaud’s encyclopaedic Javaanse Volksvertoningen, or ‘Javanese Popular Performances’, published in the 1930s. Pigeaud was not a nice man; jealous of the prestige of Stutterheim, Claire Holt’s brilliant lover, he had tried to have her expelled from the colony on the grounds of ‘immoral behaviour’. But h
e was a great scholar. The book’s title did not do it justice, since its author included a huge amount of comparative material on the Javanese people’s closest neighbours, the Sundanese, Madurese and Balinese. It included an astonishing compilation of information on folktales, legends, masks and mask-dances, spirit possession, the puppet-theatre, and travelling troupes of actors and clowns. It was a revelation to me of the depth and complexity of traditional Javanese culture outside the royal courts. Even better, Pigeaud mapped all the local variations, peculiarities and specializations, district after district. Nothing I had learned at Cornell prepared me for this.

  Through the book I fell in love a second time, this time with ‘Java’ rather than Indonesia. I have put the word in quotation marks, because ‘my’ Java was not even the whole thing. Officially, 90 per cent of Javanese were Muslims, meaning that they were circumcised (if boys), married and buried according to Muslim rites. But especially in the interior and the south of the island, the residues of a grand Hindu-Buddhist past, as well as enduring shamanism, animism and mysticism, were very strong. People would talk to me about ‘white’ (devout Muslims) and ‘red’ (nominally Muslim, but basically traditional) Javanese who were often very hostile to each other. Although I got to know a lot of serious Muslims, and loved going to traditional mosques, ‘my’ Java was definitely ‘red’. Later on, many scholars would rightly criticize me for this bias.