A Life Beyond Boundaries

by Benedict Anderson

  At another level, professionalization and the huge expansion of departments led to a big change in departmental culture. As described earlier, in my early student days, my classmates and I worked every semester as teaching assistants, so we had close contact with both undergraduates and our few professors. We picked our chief advisors on the basis of their interests and expertise. A decade later, funded by generous fellowships, the number of graduate students had greatly increased, and they did much less undergraduate teaching. This was not a matter of laziness or selfishness – they were watching their professors and being acculturated to professionalism.

  As departments expanded, the top professors tended to leave the teaching of the big undergraduate courses to junior faculty and concentrate on seminars for graduate students. In turn this process created a striking asymmetry in the choice of chief advisors, who were typically confined to the five or six best-known (elderly) professors. Graduate students calculated that these ‘big names’ would be of great help in getting jobs. Finally, there were no strong incentives for taking courses in other disciplines, which would do little to boost a youngster’s chances in the job market, and might even make him or her look ‘amateurish’.

  In spite of all this, there were significant countervailing forces at work. For a long time, these were most prominently represented by area studies, which, as mentioned earlier, both the national government and educationally concerned private foundations supported, financially and otherwise. Already in the 1950s, for example, Cornell had programs for China–Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Asia and Latin America; later programs came into being for Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and so on. Cornell also had, from prewar days, a small department of Asian studies, mainly housing students and teachers interested in pre-modern Chinese and Japanese history, literatures and religious systems. Literature and history used to mean patently those of Europe, and accordingly it was not possible to encompass their Asian variants in the departments of literature or of history. In the UK they were covered in Oriental studies, but in the US they were lumped together in departments of Asian studies.

  All the area studies programs mentioned above were cross-disciplinary to varying degrees, and many had their own publications, courses and weekly ‘brown-bag’ lunchtime meetings. What I mean by ‘cross-disciplinary’ here refers to the situation where a program includes professors of different disciplinary backgrounds among its faculty members, and graduate students are allowed to choose three members of their dissertation committee from across these disciplinary divides. It is different from ‘multidisciplinary’, which usually refers to a scholar of a particular disciplinary background incorporating other concepts and disciplines into his or her analyses.

  At the national level there were also associations (again with their own journals) such as the Association for Asian Studies, which held large annual conventions with dozens of panels and hundreds of papers. Nonetheless the atmosphere was different to that of the standard disciplinary convention, a key aspect of which was job-hunting – students would expect their chief advisors to introduce them and praise them to influential senior colleagues at other universities, and also hoped to be interviewed as candidates for vacancies. Almost no students went to the AAS convention expecting to be interviewed or to make ‘key contacts’, since area studies programs only rarely had jobs in their own gift. So the atmosphere was less tense, the panels more varied, and the fun livelier. More like a mass annual vacation.

  To get what they wanted, the programs were heavily dependent on backing from outside the universities and from intelligent university administrators. Among the area programs themselves, there were also big power differences that changed over time. Up to the American defeat in Indochina, the Southeast Asia programs were quite influential, and also commanded strong undergraduate followings. In the late ‘70s and ‘80s, when the US was briefly alarmed by Japan’s extraordinary economic success, Japan studies did well. China studies, traditionally strong anyway, became very powerful once the country opened up to American scholars. South Asian studies was much weaker, partly because people tended to think of the region as somehow ‘still British’, but mainly because Washington was not much worried about it. India was the ‘biggest democracy in the world’, except during the brief martial law regime of Indira Gandhi, and thus a fine counterweight to what was then thought of as ‘Red China’. A final factor was that both India and Old Pakistan increasingly imposed restrictions on foreign scholars, especially Americans: visas were harder to get, and more and more topics were declared too sensitive to be investigated.

  I do not think that the tension between disciplines and area studies was altogether a bad thing. There was usually room for compromises and accommodations since there was lots of money around till the 1990s, and universities were still expanding. There were plenty of scholars who thrived in both environments. But the prestige of area studies in the end depended on their ability to produce Big Names. China-Japan studies had John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer; Southeast Asia, Clifford Geertz and George Kahin; South Asia, Suzanne Rudolph and her husband.

  The area studies programs (especially those concerned with Asia) nonetheless had one important card up their sleeves: ‘foreign students’, who multiplied when what people loosely call ‘globalization’ set in. These students did not include Western Europeans, who were wishfully regarded as ‘just like us’. Rather, as more and more Thais, Latin Americans, Indonesians, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Indians, Sri Lankans, and later Iranians, Africans and Arabs arrived to study, there was at first, as I remember it, a mild nativist reaction. I used to hear some of my colleagues complain that ‘this an American university for Americans’, and ‘these Asians can’t speak English, don’t understand lectures, are useless as teaching assistants, and won’t think theoretically’. But in time they got used to the foreign students (some of whom did exceptionally well) and even became fond of them. By the late 1980s, my department even hired Asians as professors.

  It took longer for Japanese universities to see the benefits of bringing in foreign students; above all, the benefits for Japanese students themselves. In terms of the relationship between disciplines and area studies, postwar Japan offers an interesting contrast. It seems that, from early on, the institutionalization of the disciplines and area studies in Japan took a different form than it did in the US. One could describe it as a process of segregation rather than unequal integration. In the best universities, the institutional power of the disciplines was even greater than in the US, probably because modern Japanese education, initiated in the Meiji era under strong German influence, is, though excellent in many ways, more hierarchically structured than its cousin across the Pacific. Thus it was not easy to establish cross-disciplinary area studies programs. In the face of this, the Ministry of Education’s policy-makers, recognizing the political, economic and foreign policy potential of area studies, decided to set up a congeries of separate institutes, or specialized colleges both inside and outside the existing universities, where area studies people could congregate (even if their prestige was lower than that of professors in the mainstream universities).

  Furthermore, in postwar Japan, for a long time there existed no very wealthy and influential foundations comparable to those of Rockefeller, Ford and Mellon, which had provided the money and political support that allowed area studies to be institutionalized in the big American universities. However, the Japanese system had its advantages, of which the most important was real autonomy for area studies scholars. The disadvantage was that since these specialized institutes got their money and power from the Ministry of Education alone, it was sometimes hard for them to resist Ministry pressure to follow policy fads. It also meant that the intellectual cultures of the disciplines and the institutes did not often usefully cross-fertilize each other.

  Finally, one of the important effects of the turmoil in American universities during the ‘radical ‘60s’ was the rise of what is today called ‘id
entity politics’. The pioneers were militant Black students who demanded that university authorities set up Black Studies programs, hire more Black professors, and recruit more Black students. They were quickly followed by militant feminists and gays and lesbians, who convincingly argued that the standard curriculum either ignored or marginalized their historical roles and the centuries-old discrimination they had suffered.

  In the 1970s, various ethno-racial minorities joined the tide, including Native Americans and the American-born children of first-generation immigrants from Central and South America as well as many countries in East, Southeast and South Asia. In response to the demands of the latter, and taking into account their relatively small numbers, universities started setting up Asian-American Studies programs and hiring young professors capable of teaching courses adapted to their students’ identity interests. Only a few of these ‘amalgamated’ programs were very successful. Filipino-American students, for instance, shared few interests with Samoan-American, Chinese-American or Thai-American students. They wanted to take courses primarily on their countries of origin.

  The expansion at Cornell had already encouraged the department to hire a China specialist before I returned to Ithaca. The year I was made a junior professor (1967) also saw the appointment of a Latin Americanist trained at Yale. A little later arrived a specialist on India, who was also interested in feminist politics. Over the next five years I was too absorbed in developing new courses, managing a program for advising undergraduates, and keeping up with Indonesia under the Suharto regime to get much involved in the department as such.

  At the time I came up for tenure review, in 1971–72, it would have been hard to get rid of me, since the Vietnam War was still raging, Kahin was an influential and respected sponsor, and – a key requirement – my dissertation was being published by Cornell University Press. Still, a senior colleague said to me later: ‘I didn’t finish your book, though it looks well done. Isn’t it just history? Where is the theory? But I was interested your idea of power in Javanese culture, especially as you spoke about Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx and Weber.’ In fact, no one was much interested except Kahin, and I felt myself to be something of an outsider. Later, I heard from students that a gifted senior said to them: ‘Anderson has a good mind, but he is basically an area studies person’, which meant someone second-class. I didn’t mind this judgement because I too saw myself as basically an area studies person.

  When Imagined Communities was published by Verso in London, the curious thing was its contrasting initial reception on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In those distant days the UK still had a ‘quality press’ – meaning that there were good newspapers to which leading intellectuals and scholars regularly contributed, as both critics and essayists. To my surprise and pleasure the book was warmly reviewed by Edmund Leach, Cambridge’s famous anthropologist, the prominent Irish politician and political historian Connor Cruise O’Brien, and the up-and-coming Jamaican Marxist Winston James. Of course, they were all familiar with the long debate on nationalism in the UK and so could ‘situate’ my contribution.

  In the US, the book was almost completely ignored. In a way, this was fair enough, since I hadn’t written the book for Americans in the first place. Besides, in the US, nationwide quality presses are not common. However, one old European émigré political scientist, writing for the professional American Political Science Review, did review it, and deemed it worthless apart from its catchy title.

  This situation began to change rapidly at the end of the 1980s, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Like all empires, the American empire needs enemies. ‘Dangerous nationalism’ (which of course did not include American nationalism) emerged to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of ‘the communist threat’. I vividly remember receiving a frantic telephone call from a high official at the Kennan Institute, one of the key centres for Soviet studies. He begged me to fly down and give a talk at his institute. When I asked why – since I knew very little about the Soviet Union or Russia – he astonished me by saying, ‘Soviet studies are finished, money is not coming in anymore, and our students can’t get jobs. Everything in the former Soviet Union today is about nationalisms, and almost no one here has ever studied them. You are among the few people in the country who can help us get back on our feet.’ I didn’t go.

  A second factor was that, mainly by word of mouth, Imagined Communities had caught on in departments of history, sociology, anthropology and, strangely enough, English and comparative literature, and was being widely used as a graduate-level textbook. Political science was the one obvious exception, but eventually it had to yield to student demand for courses on nationalism, which, amazingly enough, did not exist almost anywhere in the US. As a result, in my fifties, I found my position completely changed. Suddenly I became a ‘theorist’, not just an area studies figure. I was even urged to teach a graduate course on the ‘theory of nationalism’, which I had never previously considered doing. To my amusement, the students who took the course came not only from political science, but from history, anthropology, comparative literature and sociology.

  It was fun teaching ‘The Theory and Practice of Nationalism’, because I forced the young anthropologists to read Rousseau, political scientists a nineteenth-century Cuban novel, historians Listian economics, and sociologists and literary comparativists Maruyama Masao. I picked Maruyama because he was a political scientist, an Asian/Japanese, and a very intelligent man who read in many fields and had a fine sense of humour and history. Luckily he had been translated into English. It was plain to me that the students had been so professionally trained that they did not really understand each other’s scholarly terminology, ideology or theory. My task as a teacher was thus to break down these barriers to scholarly communication.

  The idea of ‘interdisciplinary studies’ started to be talked about at around the same time. In its origins I suspect that this new interest reflected frustrations about the evident misfits between fields of scholarship and the conservative institutional power of departments claiming to represent disciplines. Discipline-based departments tend to have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo, yet fields of scholarship may not fit within the existing departmental boundaries because they are likely to change their contours in response to developing historical situations, societal needs or researchers’ academic interests. This is especially so in our age, when rapid social, economic, political and technological changes are everywhere apparent. Hence the misfits arise, and moreover expand. However, there were other signs of increased interdisciplinarity, as bits of different disciplines combined with each other. Interesting fields such as cultural studies and postcolonial studies blossomed. There was also the optimistic idea that interdisciplinary studies would help create bridges between disciplines and area studies. ‘Fashion’ also played an important if short-lived role.

  If the general idea of interdisciplinary studies was attractive, it was also vague and open to very different interpretations. The two most basic views could be crudely described as follows. The first took off from the Latin prefix inter-, which was read as meaning ‘in between’; in other words, researchers lodged themselves in the big empty spaces ‘between’ disciplines. If, for example, you wanted to study the elaborate, often poetic slang of Filipino transvestites in its political, social, historical and economic contexts, would there be adequate space in these disciplines for this kind of work to be carried out? Is there a discipline of gender studies that could help you? Why not? People working along these lines produced a lot of interesting and valuable material, borrowing from several disciplines in an ad hoc manner, but the studies themselves were often rambling, anecdotal and intellectually incoherent. For such people ‘cultural studies’ was a useful, prestigious rubric, but some did not fully realize that really good cultural studies are very hard to do.

  The second view implied the difficult task of systematically combining the basic frameworks and tools of tw
o or more disciplines. But such an approach required both a mastery of each discipline and a carefully considered supra-framework in which they could be handled. Only really exceptional minds could do this work well. David Laitin’s superior comparative work on the politics of language-policy and everyday language use is a good of example of how political science and social linguistics can be elegantly combined. Needless to say, the two ‘basic views’ sketched above represent the two ends of a spectrum, and many scholars have worked somewhere in between.

  One has also to look at the intellectual culture in which a lot of youthful research is planned and financed. The US is again a good, if extreme, example. The funds to support dissertation research usually come from private foundations and/or governmental bodies. Success in securing funding typically depends on a good proposal, ‘logical, tidy and tightly framed’, since the referees for these institutions are usually prominent ‘disciplinary’ professors. The student grapevine fairly quickly spreads the word about ‘what will work’, which is why, if you sit on such panels of referees, you find that the proposals often look very much like each other.