A Life Beyond Boundaries. Benedict Anderson
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covering Southeast Asia as we know it today, but also a large part of the Western Pacific over which Japan was to rule as a mandate after the First World War.
The first Western scholar to use the term ‘Southeast Asia’ in a fully modern sense was the great Burma expert John Furnivall, who published his Welfare and Progress in Southeast Asia in 1941, just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. But the decisive change came during the war, with the creation of Louis Mountbatten’s Southeast Asia Command, an Allied force designed to ‘liberate’ all of Southeast Asia except the American Philippines – which was left to Washington. The SEAC not only (briefly) restored British colonialism in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but played a major role in aiding similar efforts by the Dutch in today’s Indonesia, and the French in Indochina. Still, the Command was abolished soon after the war came to an end.
‘Southeast Asia’ initially came into permanent general use via the United States, which, like Japan before it, had ambitions to dominate the entire region between India and China. The European empires had been content to divide the region among themselves, and focused their concerns on their own colonies. This big political change inevitably had a fundamental impact on scholarship.
Before the war, almost all the best studies concerning different parts of Southeast Asia were the work of scholarly colonial bureaucrats, not professors in metropolitan universities. These bureaucrats lived in particular colonies for many years, often knew some of the local contemporary or classical languages, and sometimes married or had affairs with native women. (A small minority were homosexuals, but had to hide this as much as possible.) They usually regarded their scholarly work as a kind of hobby, and were mainly interested in archaeology, music, ancient literatures and history. On the whole, these were fields in which they could say what they wanted. Undertaking political or economic studies was less popular because the authors usually had to toe the line of the colonial regime.
Most importantly, they normally studied only one colony – the one to which they were assigned – and had little interest in, or knowledge of, the others. The one major scholar who wrote a systematic comparative work, John Furnivall (Colonial Policy and Practice, dealing with British Burma and Dutch Indonesia), did so only after leaving the bureaucracy. Thus by the 1950s and early 1960s, fine American work on Southeast Asia was still so scarce that my generation had to depend a lot on the scholar-bureaucrats, and learn to read French or Dutch to do so. We all read Furnivall and Luce on Burma, Mus and Coedès on Indochina, Winstedt and Wilkinson on Malaya, and Schrieke, Pigeaud and van Leur on Indonesia.
This pattern was almost completely reversed in postwar America. From then on, virtually all the scholarship on the region was conducted by professors and graduate students, with little or no bureaucratic experience behind them. Their occupation and busy schedules meant that they could rarely spend any real length of time in the field. Many of the first generation never acquired a solid mastery of languages such as Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Tagalog, or even Thai and Malay-Indonesian. A number did marry Southeast Asian women, but they usually took their wives back to the United States.
There was also a major shift in disciplinary foci, reflecting the priorities of the US state. Political science became very important, followed by economics, then anthropology (Washington was interested in tribal and minority rebellions) and modern history. Serious interest in literature and the arts was rare.
One other feature of the American scene is also worth a brief mention. Except in the case of the Philippines, the US possessed almost no colonial archives from which scholars could work, which naturally encouraged a focus on the contemporary. In the UK, the Netherlands and France, the vast imperial-colonial archives were a major resource, so that for a long time, even after decolonization, young Dutch scholars worked mostly on Indonesia, French on Indochina, and British on Malaya, Singapore and Burma, and on historical rather than contemporary questions. It took more than a generation for European scholars to become accustomed, intellectually and institutionally, to what the Americans were pioneering.
‘Southeast Asian studies’ in America began with initiatives by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations to create the necessary institutional space for specialist academic work. At the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s, two universities, Yale (1947) and Cornell (1950), were given substantial funds as well as institutional backup to found multidisciplinary Southeast Asia programs, establishing new professorships, developing libraries, setting up professional language-training courses, and awarding grants and fellowships for fieldwork.
These two universities were selected primarily because of the leadership talent available in the difficult early years. The first director of Cornell’s program was the anthropologist Lauriston Sharp, who had studied the Australian aborigines in the 1930s, but during the war had been temporarily recruited to the State Department and assigned to work on Southeast Asia. He developed a special interest in ‘uncolonized Thailand’ and, after returning to Cornell, founded the subsidiary Cornell Modern Thai Project.
Sharp recruited two crucial figures. John Echols, a professor of language and linguistics who was familiar with more than a dozen languages, had originally been interested in Scandinavia, and was posted to neutral Sweden during the war to gather intelligence. After the war he became very interested in Indonesia, and compiled the first English language dictionary of bahasa Indonesia. It was he who mainly developed the teaching of Southeast Asian languages at Cornell, and in time the university was capable of teaching all the major vernaculars of the region. Echols was an extraordinary man in quite another way. Almost single-handedly, he built in the Cornell Library the largest collection of texts on Southeast Asia in the world, devoting the later part of his life to this monumental task without any personal financial inducements. This collection was a major reason why faculty recruited into the program very rarely moved to other universities, and why first-class students flocked to the Cornell campus.
The second central figure, George Kahin, was another remarkable man. In the last years before the Pacific War he had been an undergraduate at Harvard and there became very interested in international affairs, including those of the Far East. If Sharp and Echols were not very political, Kahin was the opposite. It is a good indication of his progressive thinking and personal courage that he became politically active immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The attack provoked a violent reaction against Japanese-Americans settled along the West Coast, most of whom were rounded up and put in horrible internment camps for the duration of the war. Unscrupulous and racist businessmen on the West Coast took the opportunity to refuse to pay their debts to the internees, making their fate even worse. Kahin joined a brave Quaker initiative to use legal and other means to force these people to pay their debts, in a political climate that made such action seem almost unpatriotic.
When the young Kahin joined the US Army he was trained to be parachuted behind Japanese lines in Indonesia and Malaya. Needless to say – if one knows the Pentagon – in the end he was sent to Italy instead. But his training led him to an abiding interest in Indonesia, and, on demobilization, he went back to school as a graduate student, setting off for political fieldwork in Indonesia in 1948, right in the middle of the long, armed struggle for independence. He became a close friend of many prominent Indonesian nationalists, found his way through Dutch lines to visit many parts of the archipelago, sent back pro-Indonesian articles to American newspapers, and later lobbied the US Congress to support the Indonesians against the Dutch.
Kahin arrived at Cornell in 1951, just before his classic Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia was published, the first great American scholarly work on contemporary Southeast Asian politics. He was a crucial recruit to Cornell because he was a political scientist at a time when the American focus on Southeast Asia was primarily political, and so there were many youngsters interested in studying under him. The move unfortunately came at the height of the McCarthy era, and Kahin’s right-wing enemies in the State Department took away his passport for a number of years on the false grounds that he was friendly to Indonesian communism.
With the support of Sharp, Kahin helped bring two other important, and utterly different, people into the Southeast Asia program. One was the economist and economic historian Frank Golay, who had been recruited into naval intelligence during the war, and had developed an interest in the Philippines. He was an orthodox economist, and quite conservative in many ways, but his discipline