A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜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 Australianaborigines 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 becamepolitically 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