A Life Beyond Boundaries

  Out of this came a new kind of anxious nationalism which was confined neither to the left nor the right. The pressure was so great that Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj, a moderate conservative, arranged for the withdrawal of all American troops and opened diplomatic relations with ‘Red’ China.

  After I had left for home, assassinations of leaders of progressive worker and peasant organizations, leftist students and even mildly left politicians became increasingly frequent. Cornell’s Dr Boonsanong, secretary-general of the moderate Socialist Party of Thailand, was gunned down outside his suburban home in the spring of 1976. The denouement came on October 6 the same year, when plain-clothed border police under royal patronage, together with a mob of right-wing thugs, attacked Thammasat University and murdered, in broad daylight, dozens of youngsters. The military toppled the existing moderate civilian government, and an extremist regime, led by a senior judge very close to the royal family, took over. Hundreds of people were arrested and thousands fled to the countryside, where they found shelter with the communist guerrillas.

  When I tried to get American Thai specialists to join me in signing a strong letter of protest to be sent to the New York Times, not a single one consented. Aside from myself, the only co-signers were my revered teacher Kahin, Dan Lev, my fellow Indonesianist, Jim Scott of Yale, starting his magnificent series of comparative studies of peasant resistance in Southeast Asia, and the China specialist Jerome A. Cohen. I am sure most of the specialists were horrified by the murders, but they lived in fear of not being allowed back into their beloved Siam if they opened their mouths. I learned the same lesson only a few years later, after Suharto’s bloody attempt to annex the ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor. The number of Indonesianists in America who published anything critical could be found on one hand – and for the same reason. I was ‘lucky’ enough to be banned from Indonesia, so it was not hard for me to write and lobby for the East Timorese.

  But history always has its surprises. I had fully expected to be banned from Siam, especially after I published a long and bitter analysis of what had happened, entitled ‘Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6, 1976 Coup’.* Yet this did not happen.

  In 1977, the extremist government of Judge Thanin Kraivixian was overthrown by a moderate group of generals led by Kriangsak Chomanan, who quickly opened diplomatic relations with victorious Hanoi, invited Deng Xiaoping to visit Bangkok, released political prisoners, and offered complete amnesty to all guerrillas who agreed to lay down their arms. Bangkok, and surely the Palace, was stunned when the newspapers printed a photograph of Kriangsak personally cooking a good home lunch for the ‘Bangkok 18’, a group of young political prisoners arrested after the Thammasat massacre. They had organized a play about two workers hanged by right-wing thugs, who claimed that the workers’ faces had been made to resemble that of the Crown Prince.

  Meantime the solidarity and confidence of the guerrillas were severely damaged by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the destruction of the Pol Pot regime, and Peking’s futile and conscienceless attempted invasion of northern Vietnam. Most of the former students who had taken refuge with the guerrillas accepted Kriangsak’s offer of amnesty. Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program benefited from this, since several of the most intellectually outstanding of these ‘returnees’ came to study there in the early 1980s. About that time, the Thai Communist Party collapsed, leaving the country in moderate conservative hands. Since then there has not been a single leftist party in Siam.

  Having been ‘forced’ to go to Siam, I was also ‘forced’ to start thinking comparatively. Everything I noticed in Siam led me to ask new questions about Indonesia. Siam had never been legally colonized, and its political culture was Buddhist, monarchical, and, for the most part, politically conservative; Indonesia was an Old Colony, mainly Muslim, republican, and, until 1965, generally to the left of centre. It had a proud popular nationalist tradition that was almost completely absent in Siam. How to compare them, and within what framework? It was out of these two ‘field-work’ experiences that in 1983, at the age of forty-seven, I came to publish the first edition of Imagined Communities.

  I had not been much interested in the Philippines until after my return to Cornell from Indonesia in 1964. About the time I became a professor (in 1967), Joel Rocamora arrived at Cornell with a very unusual project in mind. In those days it was virtually unheard of for any Southeast Asian student to study any country other than his own. But Joel was a young Filipino nationalist who had not only been impressed by Soekarno and the long Indonesian nationalist movement, but had even visited the country before his hero fell. As Kahin already had far too many advisees, he asked me to be Rocamora’s chief mentor. We were close to the same age, so we soon became very good friends, often speaking in Indonesian to each other. In the ‘wild’ late 1960s, we also went to many parties together, and Joel introduced me to marijuana, which, unfortunately, had no effect upon me. The parties did however convince me that I could dance – a major cultural breakthrough. Thanks to him, I began to get to know the other Filipino students and to engage with Philippine history and politics. I was very proud to supervise his brilliant study of the Indonesian Nationalist Party.

  Looking back, I think the beginning of my fieldwork on the Philippines began during the two weeks I spent there in the spring of 1972, on my way to Indonesia. The atmosphere was quite tense, as Ferdinand Marcos was nearing the end of his last constitutional term as president and most people were sure that he would soon install himself indefinitely as dictator (which indeed happened the following September). Rocamora took me to meet his cousin Francisco Nemenzo (who had met my brother, Rory, while studying in England). Nemenzo was then head of the youth arm of the still legal Old Communist Party (from which José Maria Sison, a professor at the University of the Philippines, had broken away to form a Maoist underground party and a significant guerrilla force). Nemenzo suggested that I spend two nights in Cabiao, Pampanga, where the Old Party was still strong, and which during the Japanese Occupation and after had been an important base for the anti-Japanese, left-wing Hukbalahap guerrillas. ‘You will have the chance to meet some terrific revolutionary veterans there, and they will expect you to make a speech to the cadres’, he said, as he assigned two sweet teenage boys to take me there. For ‘security’, we travelled north by night.

  My first night in a Filipino village was a memorable one. The veterans were very welcoming, liquor was passed around, and we chatted till after midnight. They spoke some English, and the two boys, well educated, did a lot of translation. It was mostly a matter of reminiscences, but I noticed a lot of words that sounded like Indonesian or Javanese. When I asked what these words meant, they almost always turned out to have the same sense as their ‘Indonesian’ counterparts. This astonished us all and made us even more cheerful. The next day I had to give my speech, and I was a bundle of nerves. I spoke about Suharto’s massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party, and had the diplomatic sense to say that Marcos seemed to be heading in the same direction. Filipinos on the left should be prepared! It seemed to go down well, and in the evening there was more jollity, until the boys and I quietly slipped back to Manila. Some years later, I discovered to my horror that when Nemenzo broke with the Old Party, those same two sweet boys were murdered by the veterans on party orders.

  So long as Marcos was in power, I had no intention of returning to the Philippines. Rocamora, however, was arrested there in September 1972. After spending some time in prison he was grudgingly released thanks to the lobbying of his rich American-Jewish father-in-law, a personal friend of the chairman of the US Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He went back to America and spent many years there organizing on behalf of Sison’s Maoist New Communist Party, of which he eventually became, for a while, a senior member. We were thus able to stay in touch, and he kept me well-informed about what was going on.

  By the mid-1980s, many of my best new students, expecting the fall of Marcos, wer
e studying the Philippines. When he fell in February 1986, they hurried to Manila. By that time, Siam had become very quiet politically, and I did not, for the time being, feel like writing about the country. So I stopped off for a short second visit to the Philippines, mainly to see old friends and keep an eye on the students starting out on their fieldwork. But I became sufficiently excited to start thinking about doing some serious research on the country.

  There was, however, also a theoretical motivation on my part. Though the country had strong linguistic affinities with Indonesia, was republican, and had a long nationalist and revolutionary tradition, it was strikingly different in two central respects. The first of these was religion. The Roman Catholic sect of Christianity had, over four centuries, established deep roots in most parts of the country. Here there was a certain attraction and repulsion, since I had grown up in Roman Catholic Ireland. Neither of my parents was Catholic, but a very conservative form of Catholicism completely dominated the country. If it was familiar to me for this reason, I did not find it in the least attractive, despite the snuff box from Pope Pius IX in our house. My Irish (mostly literary) heroes were either Protestants or atheists. But how interesting it would be to see what a Southeast Asian ‘cousin’ of Ireland was like!

  The second difference was that the Philippines had been colonized twice, and by two completely different empires: one Catholic and Spanish, which was the only European empire to collapse in the nineteenth century; the other a Protestant and American world-hegemon. Since I lived in the US, should I not try to study the American form of imperialism and its consequences?

  In 1987, aged fifty-one, I started learning the difficult Tagalog language under the excellent teachers at Cornell. Learning a new language in one’s fifties is hard, and I have to say that, even today, I do not read Tagalog easily, and my spoken language is pretty basic. But it was fun. The following year, after five years without a break as director of Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, I got permission to take eighteen months off to do my first real research on the Philippines. By that time, however, I realized that I could not bear to write about American colonialism and imperialism. Almost all the ‘American-language’ scholarship focused on the American period and its aftermath. US scholars preferred to do this for linguistic reasons, as well as, perhaps with mixed feelings, nationalist ones – on the premise that, although the US colonized the Philippines, its colonialism was more benevolent than that of other colonizing powers. Filipino scholars focused on the period for some of the same reasons, but in their case in response to a growing anti-American nationalist sentiment. Otherwise there were only a few Japanese scholars, mostly writing in a language I could not read. And there were practically no Spanish scholars interested at all.

  Ever since my 1957 arrest by Franco’s Guardia Civil locals for indecent behaviour on Spain’s north coast, I had always enjoyed reading about Spain, and wished I knew the language. From my earliest days teaching on Southeast Asia, I had always got my students to read English translations of José Rizal’s brilliant, late-nineteenth-century Spanish-language novels. Now appeared an opportunity to make up for lost time. I would teach myself to read (if not speak) Spanish by arming myself with dictionaries and reading, line by line, Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, in the way I had used Javaanse Volksvertoningen two decades earlier to learn Dutch. The task turned out to be fairly easy thanks to my knowledge of Latin and French.

  My Filipino fieldwork was basically historical, and I spent a lot of time in Manila’s libraries. I wanted above all to get into the minds and hearts of the great generation of Spanish-speaking intellectuals and activists who were behind Asia’s first militant nationalist movement. But despite this historical focus I had not lost my passion for exploration and adventure. I was very lucky to find a superb mentor in Ambeth Ocampo, who for me was a living encyclopaedia on the nineteenth-century Philippines. We made countless trips together to well-known and, better still, little-known historical sites in Luzon, putting landscape back into history. Ocampo was, and still is, catholic in his interests: architecture, painting, poetry, folk culture, food, old customs, forgeries, religion, murders, as well as politics. He was (and is) also completely fluent in Spanish. Later on I travelled all over the country with my great friend Henry Navoa, a very bright man with little formal education who trained me in understanding everyday life among ordinary people.

  I began to realize something fundamental about field-work: that it is useless to concentrate exclusively on one’s ‘research project’. One has to be endlessly curious about everything, sharpen one’s eyes and ears, and take notes about anything. This is the great blessing of this kind of work. The experience of strangeness makes all your senses much more sensitive than normal, and your attachment to comparison grows deeper. This is why fieldwork is also so useful when you return home. You will have developed habits of observation and comparison that encourage or force you to start noticing that your own culture is just as strange – provided you look carefully, ceaselessly compare, and keep your anthropological distance. In my case, I began to get interested in America, everyday America, for the first time.

  Most scholars, myself included, manage to go back, regularly or irregularly, to the country, if not the region, city or village, where they did their original fieldwork. This revisiting encourages a widening and deepening of their knowledge and the opening up of new perspectives. When people ask me what happens if one cannot follow up on youthful fieldwork, I reply that one can always turn to the study of nearby countries, in my case Siam and the Philippines. When I am asked how I maintained my ties with Indonesia, I like to say it was possible only because of the help of five people.

  The first of them is Ben Abel, a Ngadju Dayak from Central Kalimantan (Borneo), who is still to this day my dearest friend. Ben came to Cornell under unusual and unhappy circumstances. He had been a student at the department of economics in his local university, and at the same time served as an assistant to its rector because he was good at speech writing. He was then assigned (more or less) by the rector to help, as translator and research assistant, one of our anthropology students who wanted to do her dissertation on the Ngadju. In due course, she married him and brought him back to the US. He worked for a while as a gas station attendant, but unfortunately the marriage broke down, leaving Ben in a deep depression. In an effort to help, I managed to get him a job in the grand Echols Collection on Southeast Asia in the Cornell graduate library. He took to the work like a duck to water, but also used it as an opportunity to read a great deal of the Indonesian materials that poured in. Because he is interested in almost every aspect of his country, he has developed a vast network of personal contacts and sources, both inside and outside Indonesia. Today, I am sure he is the best-known Southeast Asian librarian in the world.

  Ben got married again, this time very happily. He and his wife, Eveline Ferretti, an ecologist with Indonesian ties, moved into the house next to mine, where they raised two lovably naughty German-Indonesian-American boys. He has constantly kept me abreast of developments in Indonesia, put Kalimantan on my radar, and given me countless ideas and leads. Thanks to the generosity and broadmindedness of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, he was able to spend six months in Japan, continuing his own research and getting to know many interested Japanese scholars and students.

  Second and third were two young brothers, Benny and Yudi, whom I brought to America as adopted sons and put through late high-school and college education. They are sons of an old friend from my student days. For a long time, before their English was fluent, we always spoke in Indonesian at home, so that my command of bahasa Indonesia did not deteriorate. They gave me many glimpses of the experiences and thinking of youngsters from small towns who grew up under the Suharto regime, to which I would never otherwise have had access. We had many years of happiness together, and through them my old affection for Indonesia remained strong.

  Fourth and fifth were Pipit Rochij
at Kartawidjaja and I Gusti Njoman Aryana (aka ‘Komang’), two ‘eternal students’ in Berlin. I first met them in the mid-1980s in Amsterdam, when, after a long journey by car, they arrived to join the audience for a talk I was giving on the fatal ‘coup’ of October 1965 and its consequences. Their appearance immediately caught my eye. Pipit was dressed entirely in black and had the wicked smile of an experienced troublemaker. The Balinese-handsome ‘Komang’ (which means ‘third child’ in Balinese), with his long bushy black hair, beard and moustache, looked like a late-nineteenth-century anarchist or an early-twentieth-century Bolshevik (later we took to calling him ‘Aryanovich’). They asked me to come to Berlin to give a similar talk, and it was there that I got to know them well.

  In those days, before the fall of Soviet and East European communism and the reunification of Germany, Berlin was an odd place, still divided by the Wall, and an island of fun surrounded by a decaying East Germany. Because it was so far from West Germany, and its future uncertain, the West German political and business elite shunned it, and it became largely a student half-city. Whole floors of prewar mansions could be rented cheaply, and Komang in particular had a gorgeous multi-room apartment, shared with his German wife, which became a meeting place for disaffected Indonesian students. The Suharto dictatorship was represented only by a small, corrupt consulate, effectively headed by an agent of Bakin, the state intelligence apparatus.

  Supported by Komang, Pipit created and led the only aggressively successful defiance of the Suharto regime anywhere. When the consulate tried to put pressure on recalcitrant students by endlessly delaying the renewal of their passports, Pipit borrowed a small baby from one of his married friends, made sure it was not fed, and took it to the consulate. A gentle pinch of the infant’s behind produced screams of hunger and rage which so alarmed the bureaucrats that they hurriedly renewed the passports simply to get some peace and quiet. When Pipit became the target of menacing anonymous midnight telephone calls, he hit back by phoning, separately, the Bakin agent and his wife in the small hours to inform each of them of the adulteries their spouses were committing. The anonymous calls then stopped.