A Life Beyond Boundaries

by Benedict Anderson

  After the abbot’s death, other temples started to imitate him, invariably creating Disney-like little Hells which scared nobody, though they no doubt brought in some cash. The old abbot’s statues quietly turned into erotica for teenagers and foreign tourists. Was Rural Hell dying out? I was struck by the strange symbolic presence of the Great Religions inside the temple, and the absence of any Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Taoist being tortured in the Garden of Hell. It suddenly came to me that all these religions had their own Hells, reserved strictly for themselves: no Christians in Islamic Hell, no Muslims in Hindu Hell, no Hindus in Christian Hell, etc. The old abbot’s architecture somehow recognized both the other Great Religions and their own responsibility for punishing their own sinners in the after-life – and no one else. Theravada Buddhism would handle only the sins of its own believers.

  ~

  In 2014 Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program kindly published Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam over Forty Years, with a really perceptive introduction by our then director and Siam expert, Tamara Loos. In the same year, my young Spanish friend Carlos Sardiña Galache, an excellent journalist on the current horrors of racism in Burma, and Ramon Guillermo, a first-class Filipino professor, worked with me on a translation from the Spanish of a curious and very funny work called The Devil in the Philippines According to the Chronicles of the Early Spanish Missionaries, published by Anvil Publishing in Manila. It was written in 1887 by Isabelo de los Reyes (then a twenty-three-year-old journalist), the founder of Philippines’ folklore research. It is useful to recall that though the term ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 by The Athenaeum, the first scholarly Folklore Association in the world was founded in England in 1878 when Isabelo was fourteen years old. Perhaps as a trendy teenager he was thrilled by the novelty of this ‘science’ and plunged into fieldwork in various parts of Luzon.

  Very soon he was corresponding with European folk-lorists in Germany, Portugal, Italy and England, and especially with progressive Spaniards in Madrid and Seville. He discovered that the science of folklore was a perfect instrument for use against the Catholic orders that had dominated Spanish colonialism as far back as the late sixteenth century. All he had to do was to take the mass of ‘official’ superstitions of the missionary chroniclers and put them in the same category as paganism’s imaginary – as merely interesting myths, miracles and legends – under the microscope of the rationalist new science.

  He was also cunning enough to give his original text the title El Diablo en Filipinas, suggesting that Satan only arrived his country with the earliest conquistadors. He pointed out that the various spirits known by the indigenous population were all local, and so were never referred to as Satan. On the other hand, it was easy to see that, thanks to the Papacy and the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions – with their enormous power, vast bureaucracies, elaborate hierarchies, executioners, and agents all over the world – Satan had to be imagined as following suit with his own demonic bureaucracy and the terraced ranks of evil giants, wicked dwarves, alluring sirens, witches, sorcerers and cunning shamans.

  No wonder that in the 1890s, as Filipino revolutionary nationalism became a threat to the colonial regime, Isabelo was arrested, sent by ship to Barcelona in chains, and imprisoned in the sinister Montjuich Prison, where dozens of anarchists were tortured and sometimes executed. He became great friends with many of them, and when he was finally released and able to return home, his suitcase contained works by Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, as well as Darwin and Marx.

  All my life I have been excited by the difficulties and pleasures of translation. But Eka Kurniawan’s novels and short stories are in a class of their own, far above all authors in Southeast Asia that I know. His works have been translated into Japanese, American, French and now, in 2015, into English-English by Verso. When he learned of my fascination with his narrative and my admiration for the ‘unbelievable’ prose in Lelaki Harimau (Man Tiger), he asked me if I would help Labodalih Sembiring with the translation. Dalih is a mutual friend of ours, also a novelist, and good at English after living for some time in Australia. I spent about four months of constant frustration and laughter at the job. I had the foolish idea that I was in complete command of bahasa Indonesia, but on every page I had to rush to the best bahasa dictionaries, as well as Javanese and Sundanese (Eka was born and raised in a remote village on the border between the latter two languages). How beautiful, poetic and sophisticated his sentences were. The problem was how to be loyal to both author and reader. The first European novel he had read was Knut Hamsun’s terrifying Hunger, and he had learned technically from Colombia’s Gabriel García Márquez, but he was haunted by the rural traditions he had trusted in his childhood, the horrendous anti-communist massacres in 1965–66 before his birth, and the consequences of the brutal urbanization of his childhood. The biggest problem was how to use English, now an urban and self-satisfied language, to make things so remote also frightening, tragic and understandable.

  _________________

  * Unsurprisingly, but depressingly, the Fukuoka prize committee of 2000 made no mention of its predecessors’ cowardice.

  Afterword

  If the reader cares to consult the indexes of any two dozen important scholarly books, the odds are very high that she or he won’t find an entry for ‘luck’. Academics are deeply committed to such concepts as ‘social forces’, ‘institutional structures’, ‘ideologies’, ‘traditions’, ‘demographic trends’ and the like. They are no less deeply committed to ‘causes’ and the complex ‘effects’ that follow from them. Within such intellectual frameworks there is little room for chance.

  Once in a while I would tease my students by asking them if any of their friends or relatives had ever been involved in a motor accident. In response to a positive reply, I would then ask: ‘Do you really mean it was an accident?’ And they would usually answer with something along the lines of: ‘Yes! If Grandma had stayed chatting in the shop five minutes longer, she wouldn’t have been knocked down by the motorcyclist’; or, ‘If the motorcyclist had left his girlfriend’s house five minutes earlier, Grandma would still have been chatting in the shop.’ Then I would ask them: ‘So how do you explain the fact that over the Christmas holidays the authorities can predict fairly well how many Americans will be killed in accidents? Let’s say that the actual number turns out to be 5,000. The authorities will have looked at statistical trends over past Christmases and predicted, say, 4,500 or 5,500, not 32 or 15,000. What “causes” these predictions about “accidents” to be so good?’ Once in a while a clever student would reply that the answer is probability theory, or ‘statistical probability’. But in what sense can ‘probability’ be understood as a ‘cause’? More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim faced the same problem when he studied the most lonely of all human acts: suicide.

  The point is that we have not yet managed to eliminate chance and accident, let alone luck, in our everyday thinking. We do try to explain bad luck. For this reason or that, because of this person or that, I had this or that bad luck. Yet we cannot explain how good luck intervenes either in our scholarship or in our daily life. This is why, in the preceding account of my life as a scholar and intellectual, I have put such emphasis on my general run of good fortune: the time and place of my birth, my parents and ancestors, my language, my schooling, my move to the US and my experiences in Southeast Asia. It makes me feel like the grandpa who stayed to chat with the shopkeeper five minutes longer.

  At the same time, chance does not knock on our door if we do nothing but wait patiently in the shop. Chance often comes to us in the form of unexpected opportunities, which one has to be brave or foolhardy enough to seize as they flash by. This spirit of adventure is, I believe, crucial to a really productive scholarly life. In Indonesia, when someone asks you where you are going and you either don’t want to tell them or you haven’t yet decided, you answer: lagi tjari angin, which means ‘I am looking for a wind’, as if you were a sailing-ship heading out of a ha
rbour onto the vast open sea. Adventure here is not of the kind that filled the books I used to enjoy reading as a boy. Scholars who feel comfortable with their position in a discipline, department or university will try neither to sail out of harbour nor to look for a wind. But what is to be cherished is the readiness to look for that wind and the courage to follow it when it blows in your direction. To borrow the metaphor of pilgrimage from Victor Turner, both physical and mental journeys are important. Jim Siegel once told me: ‘Ben, you are the only one among my friends and acquaintances who reads books unrelated to your own field.’ I took this as a great compliment.

  Scholars, especially younger ones, need to know as much as possible about their changing academic environment, which offers them great privileges but at the same time tends to confine them or leave them stranded. In the G8 countries most professors are very well paid, have plenty of free time and opportunities for travel, and often have access to the general public through newspapers and television. What they usually lack is closeness to their countries’ rulers. It is true that in the US there have been some high-profile political professors – such as Kissinger, Brzezinski, Summers and Rice – but the huge country has more than 1,400 universities, and the capital city has no first-class model. In poor or medium-rich countries, professors are often less well paid, but they enjoy superior social status and access to the media, and, especially if they work in capital-city universities, are able to develop close contacts with the circle of their rulers. In both environments, if for different reasons, they have a high degree of security with regard to their futures. Their high salaries and high security are justified on the grounds of defending ‘academic freedom’ and ensuring professionalism. The first claim is a good and classic justification, so long as the professors practise it themselves – which they do not always do. The second is more recent and more ambiguous, since it depends on qualifications set by senior professors, requires long periods of disciplinary apprenticeship, and is marked by a jargon which is increasingly hard for intelligent laymen to grasp. Furthermore, professions are notoriously self-protective, and this outlook can encourage conservatism, conformism and idleness.

  Professionalism is also increasingly accompanied by changes in the philosophy and practice of higher education. Active state intervention is visibly increasing almost everywhere, as policy-makers attempt to square the intake, processing and production of students and professors with the ‘manpower needs’ of the ‘labour market’, and respond carefully to demographic trends. More and more states make efforts to tie research grants to the state’s own policy agenda. (In the US today, for example, a huge amount of money is being poured into ‘terrorist studies’ and ‘Islamic studies’, much of which will be wasted on mediocre or mechanical work.) Corporate intervention, direct or indirect, benign or malign, has been on the rise for some time, even in the social sciences and humanities. Professionalization is also having its effect on undergraduate education, where the older idea that youngsters aged between eighteen and twenty-one should be gaining a broad and general intellectual culture is in decline, and students are encouraged to think of their college years as mainly a preparation for their entry into the job market. It is highly likely that these processes will be difficult to reverse or even slow down, which makes it all the more important for universities and their inhabitants to be fully conscious of their situation and to take a critical stance towards it. I think I was very lucky to have grown up in an era when the old philosophy, in spite of its being conservative and relatively impractical, was still strong. Imagined Communities was rooted in that philosophy, but a book of its type is much less likely to emerge from contemporary universities.

  In the America of the 1950s, when there were huge institutional pressures to conform to the prejudices and ideology of the Cold War state, far the bravest, funniest and most intelligent comic strip was Walt Kelly’s Pogo. Set in the swamps of Florida, its cast of animals included caricatures of dangerous politicians, opportunist intellectuals, apolitical innocents and good-hearted but comical average American citizens. Its hero, little harmless Pogo, is the only genuinely thoughtful figure, and to this animal Kelly gave the masterfully funny and telling line: ‘We have met the enemy, and it is us.’ It is just this sceptical, self-critical stance which I think scholars most need to cultivate today. It is easy enough to despise politicians, bureaucrats, corporate executives, journalists and mass media celebrities. But it is much less easy to stand back intellectually from the academic structures in which we are embedded and which we take for granted.

  Young scholars will have to think seriously about the consequences of the interacting processes of nationalism and globalization, both of which have a way of limiting horizons and simplifying problems. Let me then draw to a close with some remarks about nationalism in relation to the peculiarity of Europe.

  In its heyday, Europe had two unique and inestimable intellectual advantages compared with other parts of the world. The first was its self-conscious inheritance of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The Roman Empire was the only state ever to rule a large part of today’s Europe for a long period – even if this era is extremely remote in time. But it was not a ‘European’ state, since it controlled the entire Mediterranean littoral, a large part of today’s Egypt and Sudan, and much of the Middle East, and it did not rule Ireland, Scandinavia or much of northeastern Europe. Furthermore, over time, it drew its emperors from many parts of the Mediterranean world. No European state or nation has had any chance of claiming exclusive inheritance from this extraordinary polity, nor has any of Christianity’s multiple sects. The Empire is not available for nationalist appropriation, not even by Italy. Here there is a huge contrast with China and Japan, and probably also India, where antiquity is easily nationalized. The ancient history of the Japanese islands is inseparable from their relations with mainland China and the Korean peninsula, but it can be nationalized as ‘Japanese history’.

  Even better, a substantial part of the extraordinary philosophical and literary production of Graeco-Roman Antiquity survived into early modern times, thanks to monkish copyists in the West, but also to Greek-speaking Christian Arab scribes under the rule of Byzantium. As time passed, their translations into Arabic allowed Muslim thinkers in the ‘Maghreb’ and Iberia to absorb Aristotelian thought and pass it on to ‘Europe’. This inheritance offered ‘Europe’ intellectual access to worlds (Greek and Roman) which in profound ways were alien to Christian Europe: polytheistic religious beliefs, slavery, philosophical scepticism, sexual moralities contrary to Christian teachings, ideas about the formation of personhood from the bases of law and so on. Direct access to these worlds depended on a mastery of two languages which for different reasons were both difficult and alien. Ancient Greek not only had its own orthographic system, but also borrowed heavily from languages then used in today’s Middle East and Egypt. (Though a kind of Greek survived into modern times, it was profoundly changed by Byzantine Christianity and by centuries of Turkish-Ottoman rule.) Ancient Latin in its most advanced forms is grammatically and syntactically far more difficult and complex than any of the major European languages of today. Better still, it gradually became ‘dead’. That is, neither ancient Greek nor ancient Latin belonged to any of the countries in Europe.

  For all these reasons (and others I have not mentioned), Graeco-Roman antiquity brought Difference and Strangeness to European intellectual and literary life right through till the middle of the twentieth century. Just as in fieldwork, this awareness of Difference and Strangeness cultivated intellectual curiosity and enabled self-relativization. There were city-states and democracy in ancient Greece. The Roman Empire was much larger than any other state in European history, and as its ruins were spread almost all over Europe, one could recognize its greatness no matter where one might be. The literature, medicine, architecture, mathematics and geography of Graeco-Roman antiquity were clearly more sophisticated than those of medieval Europe. And all of them were products of pre-Christian civiliz
ations, products which had pre-dated the appearance of ‘messianic time’. While China and Japan tried to bar Difference and Strangeness with their ‘closed-door’ policies, Europe came to hold antiquity in high regard and adopted it self-consciously as its intellectual heritage.

  Students today may read Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, Cicero and Tacitus, which is all to the good, but they typically read them in translation – in the everyday national languages which they take for granted; hence Difference and Strangeness have been drastically reduced. Egyptian students cannot read hieroglyphics, Arab students are unlikely to read Aristotle in the version from which their Christian ancestors made their early translations, and not many Japanese or Chinese can read Pali-language Buddhist texts.