Arts & Sciences

On February 2, 1963, about a year after my initial encounter with what I had been trained to imagine as "Southeast Asia," I had a strange experience to which at that time I could not give a name. The then-president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was to receive an honorary degree from the University of Indonesia. Sukarno was speaking about two of his favourite topics: nationalism and leadership. All went pleasantly until, out of the blue, he began to talk about Adolf Hitler. The president, surely suspecting that few of the students had ever heard of Hitler, attempted to give the distant spectre of the Führer some local life by ventriloquizing in his inimitable style of public speaking:

For myself, I felt a kind of vertigo. For the first time in my young life I had been invited to see Europe as through an inverted telescope. Sukarno regarded himself as a man of the Left, and he was perfectly aware of the horrors of Hitler's rule. But he seemed to regard these horrors with the kind of calm with which a devout Christian contemplates the centuries of massacres and tortures committed in His Name—or perhaps with the brisk distance from which my schoolteachers had spoken of Genghiz Khan, the Inquisition, Nero, or Pizarro. It was going to be difficult from now on to think of "my" Hitler in the old way.

I did not find a good name for this experience till almost a quarter of a century later, when I was in the Philippines and teaching myself to read Spanish by stumbling through José Rizal's extraordinary nationalist novel Noli Me Tangere. There is a dizzying moment early in the narrative when the young mestizo hero, recently returned to the colonial Manila of the 1880s from a long sojourn in Europe, looks out of his carriage window at the municipal botanical gardens and finds that he, too, is, so to speak, at the end of an inverted telescope. These gardens are shadowed automatically—Rizal says maquinalmente—and inescapably by images of their sister gardens in Europe. He can no longer matter-of-factly experience them, but sees them simultaneously close up and from afar. The novelist arrestingly names the agent of this incurable doubled vision el demonio de las comparaciones. So that's what it was in 1963, I said to myself: the spectre of comparisons.

For me, "Southeast Asia" has been an exceptionally good locus from which to try to get accustomed to this kind of haunting. As a meaningful imaginary, it has had a very short life, shorter than my own. Not surprisingly, its naming came from outside; and even today very few among the almost 500 million souls inhabiting its roughly 1,750,000 square miles of land (to say nothing of water) ever think of themselves as "Southeast Asians."

Southeast Asia, as such, emerged as a significant political term only in the summer of 1943 with the creation of Louis Mountbatten's South-East Asia Command. The naming clearly was a response to the fact that for the first time in history a single power—that of Hirohito's armies—effectively controlled the entire stretch between British Burma and the Hispano- American Philippines. It was at almost exactly the same time that academics began to use the term seriously, above all those from the two Anglo-Saxon maritime imperial states.

Why so late? And why the final rush? To begin with, there was the absence of a historic hegemonic power like the Ottomans for the Near or Middle East, the Habsburgs and Bourbons for "Latin" America, the Mughals for "India," and the successive dynasts of Peking who made "China" a plausible bounded mirage. Next was the extraordinary religious heterogeneity of the region once Islam (from the thirteenth century) and Christianity (from the sixteenth) broke up a Hindu-Buddhist syncretic civilization whose residues are still among the world's wonders. Today, Burma, Siam, Laos, and Cambodia are variously Buddhist; Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei predominantly Muslim; and the Philippines, mainly Catholic; while Vietnam has inherited chiefly from Confucianism, Taoism, and Mahayana Buddhism. But there is no doubt that the central factor was the strange history of mottled imperialism in the region. Only the Belgians and Italians were missing. The British in Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and northern Borneo; the Dutch in the Indies; Portuguese in eastern Timor; the Spaniards and Americans in the Philippines; and the French in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; plus the buffer-state of quasi-independent Siam, surviving on sufferance between the colonies of rival London and Paris. Remote, heterogeneous, and, so to speak, imperially segmented, it is not so very surprising that the region was late in its unitary naming.

It was, however, the opening of the Cold War in Asia that really began the long process of making Southeast Asia the kind of imagined reality it is today. Seen from the United States, the major states of Big Asia had a more or less settled position. Japan had been occupied by the Americans. India, after the crisis of Partition, appeared stably quasi-British under the uncontested hegemony of Nehru and the Congress Party. China, alas, after 1949, was "lost" to communism, but it was too huge to warrant more than hit-and-run, semi-clandestine interventions. The new states of the zone between India-Pakistan and China were another matter. In almost all of them, indigenously created, and typically armed, communist-led movements contested the legitimacy of the postwar order that the Allies had attempted to create. In Burma, in 1949, a year after formal independence was achieved, two competing communist parties, along with assorted ethnic rebel groups, left U Nu's government in control of little more than Rangoon. In the French colonies to the east, the First Indochina War had broken out late in 1946, a year after Ho Chi Minh had declared Vietnam's independence. As this was lurched towards its end at Dien Bien Phu, communist movements spread across the hill country of Laos, and, a good bit later, into Sihanouk's Cambodia. In the Philippines, the American reimposition of a corrupt cacique order to lead the country after the formalization of independence (on, of course, the Fourth of July, 1946), led to a major communist insurrection (1948 to about 1954) based on the Hukbalahap anti-Japanese guerrilla forces of the war years. In Indonesia, it initially appeared that the indigenous Left had been crushed in 1948 by forces loyal to revolutionary President Sukarno and Vice President Hatta, but after the transfer of sovereignty, the Communist Party made an extraordinary (and legal) comeback, and within little more than a decade had become the largest communist party outside the communist bloc. In Malaya, which did not become formally independent till 1957, London found, after the spring of 1948, the longest and fiercest resistance it ever faced in the history of its modern empire—from a Malayan communist party which grew out of the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army. Only in Siam did "normality" appear to prevail; armed communism only began to emerge in the mid-1960s.

No other region of the world had this kind of alarming profile. The new hegemon was determined that it not be "lost" like China. Out of this, in 1954, came SEATO (the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization), formed in American Manila, and later headquartered in Bangkok, which was designed to save the whole postcolonial region from the communist spectre.

Beginning earlier in a quite different sphere from that of diplomats, generals, intelligence services, and heads of state, Southeast Asia was becoming a kind of reality. Just as heterogeneous colonialisms had produced substantial bodies of scholarship framed by each colony for itself—in the English language for Burma and Malaya, in American for the Philippines, in Dutch for the Indies/Indonesia, and in French for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—so postwar American anticommunist hegemony created the initial bases for the new field of Southeast Asian studies. The first academic programme to pursue such studies was set up at Yale University in 1947, followed shortly thereafter by a sister programme at my own university, Cornell. In the condition of alarm created by the launching of Sputnik in October 1957, and with the onset of the Second Indochina War, comparable programmes multiplied across the United States. Subsequently, the format spread, with differing emphases, to Australia, Japan, Ukania [Great Britain], France, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, and so forth.

There was, from the start, a key difference between Southeast Asian studies, as pioneered in the United States, and the colonial-era scholarship that preceded it. Virtually all the great names of the colonial era were, or had been, colonial civil servants. They lived long periods of their lives in the colonies and knew them pretty well. The condition for this immersion, however, was that, even if they privately doubted the colonial enterprise, they could not say so publicly. In the postwar, postcolonial era, this kind of figure disappeared. Southeast Asia, or at least the non-communist parts of it, encountered hordes of American officials—dealing with everything from military and intelligence matters to education and capitalist development—but they were busy people who rarely understood local vernaculars, had little time or inclination for the leisured research that the colonial calm had made possible, and were rotated too rapidly to understand anything very deeply.

As a result, Southeast Asian studies came to be the province of a metropolitan professoriat, who were financial beneficiaries not primarily of the American national state, but rather of private and state universities as well as private foundations (in particular the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations). Since the framing of their work—Southeast Asia—was the consequence of decolonization and the attempted American Cold War hegemony in the region, their studies were heavily concentrated in disciplinary fields quite different from those of their colonial-era predecessors: political science above all, but also modern history and anthropology, as opposed to archaeology, ancient history, and classical literatures.

Intense student classroom and personal relationships eventually lengthened out into academic careers which were deeply bound up with and committed to Southeast Asia as a real place. This commitment also transcended immediate Cold War divisions in that, in principle, communist, neutralist, and pro-American countries were to be studied side by side within a single frame. In this sense, Southeast Asia was more real, in the 1950s and 1960s, to people in American universities than to anyone else. Second, America had in those days the resources to create "Southeast Asian" libraries which had no parallels anywhere in the world; it also had the scholarship monies to bring over interested students from many different countries, of whom by far the most important were students from the accessible countries of Southeast Asia itself. The long years of student life, with their shared studies, cross-national friendships, love affairs and sometimes marriages, began already in the 1950s to create young people who could imagine themselves as Southeast Asians, as well as Indonesians or Filipinos or Siamese.

In the second half of the 1960s, the deepening of the Vietnam War into the Second Indochina War, had as one side effect the further crystallization of Southeast Asia, in university communities and beyond. For the American mass media, Vietnam was almost invariably located in Southeast Asia—though given its centuries of irritable intimacy with China and its communist government in Hanoi, it should have been possible to see it as part of a Sinitic sphere of influence.

I came to study at Cornell University in January 1958 for the most superficial of reasons: curiosity. Indonesia was then on the front pages of the newspapers because it had a huge and legal communist party and because a CIA-fostered civil war was on the verge of breaking out. It so happened that George Kahin, the scholar who had written the pathbreaking book about the modern politics of a country which, in those days, most Americans and Europeans would have had difficulty locating on a world map, was teaching at Cornell. He was also, however, an enormously creative executive director of the United States's second Southeast Asia programme, who assembled a remarkable array of professorial talents around him, and sought energetically to recruit students interested in every one of the emerging Southeast Asian nation-states on the assumption that they had every reason to study together and learn from each other. (For me, it was therefore institutionally impossible to study Indonesia on its own; it could only be done in a regional context.) One last decisive aspect of Kahin's formative influence was his patriotism. Precisely because he wanted to be proud, not ashamed, of his country, his scholarly career was, indeed still is, shaped by his political activism. He had been deprived of a passport in the early 1950s for his sharp criticisms of American foreign policy. Later, as the American intervention in Indochina deepened, he would switch his main focus of concern there, rather than to his first love, Indonesia. Looking back, it seems to me that Kahin was the logical-historical antithesis of the postwar American hegemonic project for Southeast Asia. His students learned from him the inseparability of politics and scholarship.

Indonesia was certainly a special place to study in the late 1950s and 1960s, by comparison with the other countries of Southeast Asia. Kahin had recruited the courtly linguist and lexicographer John Echols, who published the first good postcolonial dictionary of a national Southeast Asian language, and who by his teaching made young "Indonesianists" the first sizeable group of Southeast Asianists to be fluent in the national vernacular. He had also recruited the Riga-born, Jewish-Russian dancer, archaeologist, and art historian Claire Holt, who had lived and studied in the Netherlands Indies for much of the 1930s, and returned to independent Indonesia in the 1950s to continue and extend her earlier work. A few hours' car drive away at Yale was the Jewish-Czech historian Harry Benda, who had worked for an Austrian company in the Indies during the late 1930s and had been interned by the Japanese. Both these teachers brought students a sceptical European attitude towards the imperial aspects of American Southeast Asian studies, and both brought to students a vivid sense of the continuities and discontinuities between the colonial era and the era of independence. Finally, there was the accident—as he himself later recorded—that one of the most influential American anthropologists of the 1960s and 1970s, Clifford Geertz, did his most important fieldwork in Java and Bali.

Special in some ways Indonesia might be in those days, but it was always thought about and studied in a Southeast Asian frame. This frame was only reinforced by the experience of the Vietnam War years, which, to various extents, forced scholars and students studying very different countries and problems to take stands, for or against the war, as Southeast Asianists. And not merely for intellectual or political reasons. No matter what our particular scholarly research interests, we had grown up together, studied together, and read and criticized each other's work; in a certain way, we were chained together by a Southeast Asia to which, in one sense, we had helped give a certain reality.

Benedict R. O'G. Anderson is the A. L. Binenkorb Professor of International Studies, professor of government, and a revered teacher. This article is a much-truncated version of the introduction to his new book, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (Verso, 1998). His previous book Imagined Communities (Verso, 1983) has been extraordinarily influential across the humanities and social sciences.