As it turned out, fate worked out differently than I originally expected. It did not take long for me to be enticed by the beautiful natural setting of Cornell, and by George Kahin’s lecture classes on Indonesia, Southeast Asia and US policies in Asia. By the end of my first year at Cornell, I realized that I had finally decided what I wanted to do in life: become a professor, do research, write and teach, and to follow in Kahin’s footsteps in my academic and political orientations. I will say more later about Kahin, who was not only an excellent scholar but also a man of conviction and energy.
So I stayed on. My mother was happy that I had finally settled down, though she complained about my being so far away from her and my brother and sister. So I wrote to her nearly every week, and every year returned home for Christmas and during the summer holidays. She wrote back to me regularly too, and my aunt Celia sent me clippings of crossword puzzles which were generally more difficult to solve than their American counterparts.
Though I was attracted by Kahin’s lectures on Southeast Asia early on in my stay at Cornell, it took me a few months to adjust to American graduate student life, and still longer to understand how unique a place Cornell University was in those days, with its Southeast Asia program. To explain the nature of this uniqueness, it is necessary to leave Cornell for a while and consider the sudden rise, after the Second World War, of what the Americans came to call area studies.
Before Pearl Harbor the United States had been isolationist, despite its aggressive policy of worldwide economic expansion. It will be remembered that despite Woodrow Wilson’s strenuous efforts, the US had rejected membership of the League of Nations. It had only one significant colony, the Philippines, and was often embarrassed, as a former colony itself, to be in the game of ‘European’ and Japanese colonialist imperialism. By the mid-1930s, a schedule had already been set for Filipino independence in 1946. America had a huge, modern navy, but an insignificant army and air force. Its direct political interventions were mainly confined to what it regarded, under the Monroe Doctrine, as its ‘own backyard’: Central and South America, a part of the Caribbean, and a big chunk of the Pacific. The American scholarly world mirrored this larger picture. Since so many Americans originated from Europe, and since the prestige of European scholarship was high, there were plenty of US scholars who studied the main countries of Western Europe – the UK, France, Germany and Italy. The Soviet Union was also studied because it was regarded as a powerful ideological enemy. In Asia, the only countries of general concern were China and Japan. The latter was studied mainly because of its military power, which threatened to rival America’s in the Pacific region. In the case of China, a strong early interest was stimulated by the large number of American missionaries who worked there from the end of the nineteenth century. In the late 1940s, as the Chiang Kai-shek regime fell apart, many Chinese scholars, reactionary and liberal, first class and mediocre, fled to the US and there substantially increased the influence of anti-communist sinology. Unlike scholars from Japan or other Asian countries, many of them entertained particular political agendas. Allying with American scholars of China with similar ideological perspectives, they were to form a major and influential faction in American academic associations with Asia.
There was some work done on India, but it was mainly confined to books read by students of Sanskrit, influenced by European Orientalism, rather than works on contemporary colonial India. Almost no one, except an anthropologist or two, studied Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia or Southeast Asia. For Southeast Asia (except for the Philippines) the number of serious specialists could be numbered on one hand: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (Bali), Cora Dubois (Alor) and Rupert Emerson (Malaya). As late as 1958, when I began studying in the Cornell department of government, the small faculty was dominated by Americanists. One professor handled the Soviet Union, another Western Europe. George Kahin was responsible for the whole of Asia. No one taught Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa or the Middle East.
The Second World War changed everything in a very dramatic fashion. The US suddenly became the world hegemon. Germany and Japan were completely defeated, and Britain and France, though on the winning side, were so drained by the costs of their participation that their position as world imperialist powers rapidly declined. By the 1960s, their colonial empires had largely disappeared. Only the Soviet Union remained, and it was still a regional rather than global power. Where America had stayed out of the League of Nations, it now became the central organizer of the United Nations, symbolized by the location of its headquarters in New York. Under these new conditions, the more powerful American elites became acutely aware of how little they knew about many parts of the world in whose politics they now expected to play a key role. All the more so since decolonization was happening at a furious pace in both Asia and, a little later, in Africa.
The rise of area studies in the postwar United States directly reflected the country’s new hegemonic position. The state began to put a lot of financial and other resources into the study of contemporary politics and economics in countries outside Western Europe, much less into studies of history, anthropology, sociology, literature and the arts. As the Cold War set in, there was a growing interest in policy studies, particularly with regard to the threat, real or imagined, of what was still understood as ‘world communism’. In this expansion of scholarship the driving forces were the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon. But very large private institutions, especially the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, also played an important role, partly offsetting the ‘policy’ focus of the state.
Senior officials in these foundations, often highly educated people who had grown up under the long reign of President Franklin Roosevelt, were more liberal in their outlook than state functionaries, and somewhat less obsessed with combating ‘world communism’. Many of them believed in the importance of deeper, historically based scholarship, which was more likely to develop healthily in open universities than in state-related agencies. They were also much more aware of the need for long-term planning, and the urgency of developing adequate research libraries and the efficient teaching of languages which, before the war, had barely been studied.
How was ‘Southeast Asia’ seen by Western eyes? The Chinese written language had long contained the word nan-yang, a vague geographical term meaning something like ‘southern region’ but also connoting ‘water’. It thus signified the southern region oriented from Beijing and reachable via waterway or seaway. At various times it could refer to China’s own southeastern coastal provinces, the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos, and the Malay peninsula – but not land-accessible Burma and Laos. In Japanese, its cognate, nampo, acquired in the Meiji period a clearer and more political meaning, 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 was important, his concern for the Philippines solid, and he was a good teacher. Second was Claire Holt, a truly romantic and extraordinary woman. Born to a rich Jewish family in Riga, she grew up in the last years of Russian Tsardom, so that her mother language was Russian. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the family moved to Sweden, and she ended up as a reporter and newspaper critic on dance, especially ballet, first in Paris and later in New York.
After her husband was killed in a freak accident, she set off with a friend on a trip to the Orient. But while in Dutch colonial Indonesia she fell in love with the place and the peoples, and promptly studied Javanese dancing to a high level of proficiency. She also became the lover of the brilliant German archaeologist Wilhelm Stutterheim, and through him became thoroughly knowledgeable about Indonesia’s pre-colonial civilizations. Then tragedy reoccurred in her life. After the Nazi invasion of Holland in the spring of 1940, Stutterheim, along with all other Germans in the colony, was interned. When the Pacific War broke out, the Dutch colonial regime decided to move the internees to British India. But Stutterheim’s ship was sunk by Japanese planes off the coast of Sumatra, and everyone on board died.
After returning to America, Claire was recruited to teach Malay and Indonesian languages to young diplomats and intelligence officials. She stayed till the McCarthy era, which so enraged and depressed her that she quit. Kahin, who already knew her, seized the chance to bring her to Cornell, where she remained till her death in 1970. She had no academic credentials, so could not become a professor, but she was a fine teacher of bahasa Indonesia, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of colonial society, Indonesia’s cultures and its performing arts. She was the only member of the program who had actually lived for many years in any part of Southeast Asia. She was also the only woman, and the only person who was really interested in the arts.
The Yale Southeast Asia Program was smaller but had some advantages over Cornell. Its founding father was Karl Pelzer, an emigré Austrian agricultural economist who had worked in colonial Indonesia, specializing in the study of the colony’s vast plantations. But the key figure, till his too-early death, was Harry Benda, a Czech Jew who as a young man had pursued a career in business in prewar Java. During the Japanese Occupation he was put in an internment camp and barely survived. On his release in 1946, he made his way to the US, and ended up writing a brilliant doctoral dissertation at Cornell on the relationship between Japanese and Muslims in prewar and wartime Indonesia. He was one of Kahin’s first students, though he was the slightly older man. It says something for the fluidity of academic life in those days that his dissertation in political science was no barrier to him becoming a professor of history at Yale.
Pelzer and Benda gave the Yale program a ‘European’ culture and outlook in contrast to a more ‘American’ Cornell. But the two programs were in driving distance of one another, the faculties were friendly to each other, and by the time I arrived at Cornell, the universities took turns hosting tough language classes during the summer.
The four teachers who influenced me most as a graduate student formed a wonderfully diverse constellation of characters, talents and interests. Claire Holt and Harry Benda were my fellow Europeans, and very interested in history and culture. Benda had a gifted mind, a thoroughly sceptical outlook on life, and a restless temperament. He worked at being ‘unconventional’ in his thinking. He was loyal to the US but never really felt himself part of it. Claire Holt was very special to me, and I spent many hours at her house, asking her about art, dance, archaeology and Javanese life. Sometimes we would read Russian poetry aloud together. She was not at all academic, and helped me not to become too embedded in academic culture.
Kahin and Echols were two perfect American gentlemen, kind, gentle, morally upright, and devoted to their students. Echols introduced me to modern Indonesian literature and gave me an abiding love of dictionaries. Still today, the favourite shelf in my personal library is filled only with dictionaries of many kinds. And every time I go to the fabulous library collection that bears his name, I think of his selfless dedication. Kahin formed me politically, with his progressive politics, his activist commitment to justice at home and in the rest of the world, and his tolerance of honest difference.
Sharp and Kahin were both intelligent academic politicians who recognized the power of disciplinary departments in American universities. They also understood, better than Pelzer and Benda at Yale, that the long-term growth and stability of Southeast Asia programs depended on new faculty being integrated, intellectually and financially, into these departments. New, young professors in America are on trial for their first six years, during which they can be dismissed very easily. In the sixth year, at the latest, they come up for an intensive review of their teaching and publication records. If they pass, they move up in rank from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, and get lifetime tenure, meaning that they cannot be dismissed except for criminal activity or serious sexual scandals.
The Sharp-Kahin strategy therefore involved two stages. The first was to find youngsters capable of securing tenure by showing strong disciplinary credentials. (Usually departments were not much interested in Southeast Asia as such.) Having located such youngsters they would then use Rockefeller and Ford money to pay the salaries of these young scholars for a few years, on the understanding that if they did well from a disciplinary viewpoint, they would be moved over to their department’s regular salary budget. The second step was to make sure the youngsters did a lot of undergraduate teaching on subjects having nothing to do with Southeast Asia. In my case, I taught subjects like ‘Traditions of Socialism’, ‘Politics in the British Commonwealth’, ‘The Political Role of the Military’, or ‘Politics and Literature’. This involved a lot of work, but it protected the program from lapsing into isolation and Orientalism. The crucial thing was that every professor in the program should have a firm base in a discipline, and be able to teach many more subjects than just Southeast Asia.
It was still quite hard to realize these goals in the 1950s, but the situation changed greatly in the 1960s. First, the Russians’ achievement in putting an astronaut into space ahead of the Americans alarmed many politically powerful people and institutions in the US. Part of the humiliation was attributed to the backwardness of American universities. But there were wider anxieties as well: the war in Korea, the rising power of Mao’s China, the growing crisis in Indochina, wars in South Asia, instability in the Middle East, and so on. Starting around 1960, a huge amount of money was poured into the universities in the form of scholarships, language courses and the like. Area programs like Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program for the first time began to receive a lot of money from the state.
This change created a clear semi-generational break among the students. The whole time I was a graduate student, my classmates and I never received any scholarships; we paid for our education by working as teaching assistants to professors with large classes. We took this for granted, assumed it was good practice for the future, and even quite enjoyed it. By 1961, the number of graduate students had visibly increased, most had scholarships, and some were rather annoyed if they were forced (for their own good) to teach.
By the second half of the 1960s the looming catastrophe in Vietnam, and, for undergraduates still liable for military conscription, the prospect of fighting in Indochina, created the powerful, campus-based anti-war movement and generated an enormous interest in Southeast Asia. All of a sudden, right across the country and including almost all the more important universities, there was a great demand for Southeast Asia–related courses, to which university administrators had to respond. Faculty positions opened up all over the place and almost any student who got a PhD connected to Southeast Asian studies had little trouble finding a good job.
I was very fortunate to finish my dissertation on the eve of the Tet Offensive. Against normal recruitment rules – which require competitive candidacies, extensive interviews, and hostility to ‘nepotism’ – I walked into an assistant professorship without any interviews and without any outside candidate being considered.
Although the Cornell Southeast Asia Program was usually under strong pressure to reach out to undergraduates, in its heart it thought of itself as mainly oriented to graduate students. The formal requirements were not very demanding. Every semester all students had to study one of Southeast Asia’s vernaculars, and were encouraged to learn French or Dutch if they were interested in Indochina or Indonesia. All students had to take at least two so-called Country Seminars, which over a three-year period rotated between the major countries of the region. These seminars, often taught by two faculty members, and often using guest teachers for particular topics, were supposed to involve intensive multidisciplinary work on, say, Burma’s history, politics, sociology, economy, anthropology, religion, international relations, and maybe arts and literature. Burma-bound students were to have a thorough immersion in ‘Burma studies’, and like students specializing on other countries would learn how to think comparatively.
Aside from language courses and the Country Seminars, students would take a range of other courses which were almost always defined as comparative and pan-Southeast Asian: for example, ‘Comparative Decolonization’, ‘Hill Tribes in Southeast Asia’, ‘Rural Development in Southeast Asia’, ‘Communism in Southeast Asia’, and so on. This comparative framework, necessitated by the Southeast Asian studies format, was in complete contrast to the European tradition of one-country specialization. I was lucky to have experienced it, and it had a great influence on my later thinking about the region and about the world.
A final, less structured part of the teaching program was inviting foreign scholars. Sometimes they would be invited to teach for a whole semester or even a year. Usually they would come as visiting fellows, or as one-day speakers at the weekly lunchtime ‘brown-bag’ meetings of the faculty and students. I remember being fascinated by the visit of Nishijima Shigetada, who was a legend for his activities in the last days of the Japanese Occupation of Indonesia. He is said to have been bitten by leftist ideology in his youth and was sympathetic to the Indonesian nationalists, but Kahin knew him now as the agent of a giant oil corporation, and felt he was an opportunist. Nishijima spoke in rapid-fire Indonesian in the ‘brown-bag’ meeting and lived up to his reputation as a man of mystery. Visits by former Burmese prime minister U Nu and Cambodian monarch Norodom Sihanouk were hardly less intriguing.
Having experienced the often authoritarian university traditions of their own countries, many foreign students in the program were surprised and pleased by the close and democratic relations between professors and students. In seminars students were encouraged to express their own opinions, often received detailed comments on their papers, and never had the impression that they were being exploited as informal research assistants for the professors’ projects in the countries of their origin.
In my time, and indeed until long afterwards, the students were a diverse cluster. Initially, in the 1950s, all the countries of Southeast Asia were accessible to various degrees. After that period Burma closed its doors, as for a long time did the countries of Indochina. There were dictatorships in Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore, and an authoritarian regime in Malaysia, which in 1963 secretly provoked the Malays into anti-Chinese violence in Kuala Lumpur. Kahin especially wanted to have close contact with bright young Southeast Asians, and found the means to bring a good number to Cornell.
Hence in the late 1950s I had Burmese, Filipino, Vietnamese and, especially, Indonesian classmates. For us this was a marvellous chance to learn first-hand about our countries of interest, to build friendships, and to have our prejudices challenged. Furthermore, Cornell’s location in a very small town meant that students were together all the time, not just in the classroom and library, but in shops, bars, restaurants and the local parks. Many of us shared apartments with Southeast Asians, sometimes even learning to cook in the process.
The novelty and high reputation of the program, and its considerable financial resources, meant that we also had many students from non–Southeast Asian countries: the UK, Australia, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Canada, Switzerland, and so forth. It all felt very international.
Finally, there was a peculiar contingent for which Kahin was primarily responsible. A strong and thoughtful critic of American foreign policy, he was inclined to explain its stupidities and violence as resulting from simple ignorance. He therefore believed that one of the program’s missions was to enlighten the state. In those days he had a wide set of contacts in Washington, and encouraged both the State Department and the Pentagon to send promising young officials and officers destined to serve in Southeast Asia to study at Cornell for a year or two, alongside the regular graduate students. I am sure this contingent was genuinely influenced by the Cornell experience, but not nearly as much as Kahin hoped. As the years passed, and especially during the Vietnam War, their numbers shrank drastically and they eventually almost disappeared.
I think it was partly this amazing jumble of students, in constant everyday contact with one another, that built strong bonds of solidarity that lived on long after the youngsters graduated. This is why the legend of the ‘Cornell Mafia’ still survives today, and why Cornell was so unusual compared to most other, later centres for Southeast Asian studies, where American students were usually in the great majority.
There are nevertheless two strongly related reasons for offering a critique of Southeast Asian studies in the United States, based on my experience at Cornell. The first is that the Cornell program was generally regarded as the best of its kind, with the most varied and outstanding faculty, by far the largest library, and the most extensive language offerings. The second is that when in the 1960s other universities established comparable programs, many of the younger professors they hired had been trained at Cornell. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that a critique of Cornell would apply a fortiori to its various later competitors.
My criticism concerns the marked imbalance between the disciplines. Even today, it is hard to find any Southeast Asian sociologists, beyond a handful of excellent demographers. The study of contemporary Southeast Asia rested on two pillars, political science and anthropology, which shared few intellectual interests or common methodologies, and which for a long time focused on national political elites or on rural villages and small ethnic minorities, leaving a huge gap in between. The major exception was the outstanding sinologist-cum-sociologist G. William Skinner, who, unable to get access to Mao’s China, and uninterested in Taiwan, studied the Chinese communities in Siam and Indonesia in books that are still valuable today, half a century on. I do not think that this lack was the fault of Cornell’s program, but rather of American sociology as a whole, which was primarily interested in the United States and relied on statistical methods difficult to use in countries where for decades reliable statistics were hard to come by.
The second major imbalance was between the social sciences and the humanities. A significant background factor in this imbalance was the concept of ‘Southeast Asia’ itself, which implied an exclusive communality. But the reality was hard to find. Eight different good-sized countries, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Confucian-Taoist; colonized by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch in the seventeenth, by the French and the British in the nineteenth, and by the Americans in the twentieth, with Siam semi-colonized by the British; significant literatures in mutually incomprehensible languages such as Burmese, Mon, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Malay, Javanese, Old Javanese, Sanskrit, Arabic and several others. This was in huge contrast with East Asia, which covered only three countries sharing a good deal in terms of moral order, religious outlook and literary genres; and with South Asia, comprising four countries with long-standing, even if sometimes hostile, religious, economic and classical literary connections, but all colonized by the same imperial power.
Had the institutional concept of ‘Southeast Asia’ not existed, Vietnam could have been included in East Asia studies thanks to its millennial ties to China, while much of the rest of western Southeast Asia could have been linked to South Asia, since its indigenous cultural base was deeply influenced (via Sanskrit and Pali) by southern India and Sri Lanka. And the Philippines could have been attached to Latin American studies.
Many students of Southeast Asia at Cornell were encouraged to ‘minor’ in Chinese studies because of the great importance of Chinese immigrant communities in almost every Southeast Asian country, but very few actually learned Chinese very well. Almost no one was encouraged to learn about either Sri Lanka or India, let alone the Middle East. I cannot think of a single program student who seriously studied Arabic or Hindi.
The enormous heterogeneity of ‘Southeast Asia’ made it extremely hard to train even the most brilliant students who might be interested in classical literatures, classical musics, and classical plastic arts. That the great modern composer Debussy admired a Javanese gamelan orchestra, and borrowed from it in the final period of his career, gave this music wide prestige. In the 1970s a core of gifted American students, taught by Javanese masters, worked to get jobs in music departments, including that of Cornell. But the music of Siam, Vietnam and Burma was not so valued. The classical literatures required a thorough knowledge of either Sanskrit or classical Chinese, and people with these skills usually preferred to study India or China. Until quite recently, Southeast Asian art history, in the few places where it was taught, concentrated on Indonesia, Siam and Vietnam.
In the last fifteen years, however, there has been a significant change. There is now very little interest in antiquity, but rather in modernity of a special kind, mediated mainly by American popular culture, especially pop music, film and writing or translations in English. This has made it possible to teach quite novel courses (in English), on, say, ‘Southeast Asian Film’, ‘Southeast Asian Popular Culture’, ‘Southeast Asian Fiction’, ‘Contemporary Southeast Asian Art’, and so on. The cost is that substantial knowledge of antiquity is being lost.
This cost is also visible in history. At Cornell, Southeast Asian history was for a long time divided between ancient (pre-colonial) history, magisterially presided over by the British Orientalist Oliver Wolters, and modern history. Today the division is no longer temporal but geographical: mainland versus island modern history. The same pattern is visible in most of the rest of the US’s Southeast Asia programs. One cannot help thinking that this reflects the general American focus on what is contemporary, recent, popular and accessible by US standards. The phenomenon of motorcycle gangs in Kuala Lumpur is, as it were, comprehensible by those standards, but not the fire-walk ritual in Bali, thus the latter is dropped from scholarly pursuits.
A second critical observation arises from my present position as an old man, long retired. It concerns the academic tendency to focus on one country, which looks a bit like the pattern of the late colonial period.
The great charm of Southeast Asian studies in the 1950s and 1960s was that it seemed like something completely new, so that students felt like explorers investigating unknown societies and terrains. The region was barely mentioned in American high-school textbooks, except for a little bit on the Philippines and on the fighting there during the Second World War. This was also the period of decolonization and the rise of new nations with world-famous nationalist leaders like Soekarno, U Nu and Ho Chi Minh. Probably inevitably, we were almost all drawn into a close attachment to the nationalism of the country we chose to study. This attachment was also influenced by language. Indonesia, Siam and Vietnam were the only major countries which could not be studied seriously through English and/or French. My Indonesianist friends and I were enormously proud of being pioneers in achieving fluency in bahasa Indonesia, and the same was true for our Thai-speaking classmates. This linguistic attachment bound us all the more closely to ‘our countries’. Classmates studying Burma and Malaysia could get away with English, those working on the Philippines with American, and those engaged with Vietnam with French and English. It was not till much later that one found youngsters fluent in Tagalog, Vietnamese, Khmer or Burmese.
The emotional attachment to ‘our countries’ also had political effects of which we were not very conscious. My Indonesianist comrades were generally on the left to different degrees because that was the climate in Soekarno’s post-revolutionary Indonesia. (Or were we attracted to Indonesia by its leftist politics?) Students going to Thailand were much more conservative, since there the ‘only game in town’ was conservative military-monarchical domination. This divergence was to have serious consequences at the height of the Vietnam War, when almost everyone studying Indonesia or Vietnam was strongly against the war, while those working on Thailand initially supported it. A gradual polarization took place among the faculty, which had serious effects on the morale of the program for some years after. It should be added that this emotional attachment to the individual countries we studied made it psychologically very difficult to study any other, aside from the linguistic problems involved.
Here I have to say I owe a strange debt to the tyrant General Suharto, who expelled me from Indonesia in 1972 and kept me out till after his downfall in 1998. For this reason I was forced to diversify, studying Thailand mainly between 1974 and 1986, and the Philippines from 1988 to the present. I am grateful to him for forcing me beyond the ‘one country’ perspective. Had I not been expelled, it is unlikely that I would ever have written Imagined Communities. But I was a very unusual case, almost unique until very recently, with the exception of Yale’s James Scott, who was forced to work on Malaysia because the military in Burma banned all foreign scholars who were interested that country.
By the 1960s, the programs at Cornell and Yale were no longer unique, even though their influence, mediated through alumni who secured jobs in other universities in the US and abroad, remained quite strong. Over time, comparable programs were created at big universities in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Seattle, Honolulu, Madison and Ann Arbor. Japanese students at Cornell, such as the late Nagazumi Akira, Goto Kenichi, Kato Tsuyoshi, Shiraishi Aiko and Shiraishi Takashi, played key roles in reviving and transforming Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. Former Australian Cornell students, led by the late Herbert Feith, built programs based on the Cornell model, which were reinforced by an influx of Americans in the late 1970s and 1980s (to be discussed later). In London, the famed School of Oriental and African Studies started to shake off its colonial past and broadened its teaching beyond the former British colonies. In this process Ruth McVey, my brilliant senior classmate, was decisive. France, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia moved in the same direction. This meant that ‘Southeast Asian studies’ gradually became internationalized, though with different traditions and specializations. One should add that, in the process, the proportion of women, as students and later as professors, rose impressively almost everywhere.
Southeast Asian studies in the US had a much more dramatic history than in any other country because of America’s global power, ambitions and phobias. One reason why Southeast Asian studies got a head start in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s was that the region abutted China, where, by the end of 1949, Mao Tse-tung had taken power and effectively driven the West out. But in that same period, Southeast Asia was unique in witnessing the rapid rise in almost every country of powerful, usually armed, local communist parties. There can be no doubt that a crucial reason for this peculiarity was the brief but pivotal ‘Japanese period’. The Japanese not only brought down all the colonial regimes in the region, humiliating and imprisoning the ‘white’ colonials, and encouraging an identification with Asia. They also, for their own reasons, mobilized the local populations for the war effort, trained and armed indigenous auxiliary militaries, and largely destroyed the prewar economies. Japanese military brutality and economic exactions gradually turned the mobilized populations against Japan and towards the left. When Japan was abruptly defeated, after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a power vacuum emerged in Southeast Asia that was favourable to the rise of the left, which had not collaborated with the Imperial Japanese forces. No other region in the world had this profile.
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.