Read Online A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson - Free Book Online
Authors: Benedict Anderson
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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, filmand writing or translations in English. This has made it possible to teach quite novel courses (in English), on, say, âSoutheast Asian Filmâ, âSoutheast Asian Popular Cultureâ, âSoutheast Asian Fictionâ, âContemporary Southeast Asian Artâ, 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 USâs 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 periodof 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 âour countriesâ. 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 âour countriesâ 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 Soekarnoâs post-revolutionary Indonesia. (Or were we attracted to Indonesia by its leftist politics?) Students going to Thailand were much more conservative, since there the
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, filmand writing or translations in English. This has made it possible to teach quite novel courses (in English), on, say, âSoutheast Asian Filmâ, âSoutheast Asian Popular Cultureâ, âSoutheast Asian Fictionâ, âContemporary Southeast Asian Artâ, 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 USâs 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 periodof 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 âour countriesâ. 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 âour countriesâ 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 Soekarnoâs post-revolutionary Indonesia. (Or were we attracted to Indonesia by its leftist politics?) Students going to Thailand were much more conservative, since there the
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