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 competi
tors.
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.