A Life Beyond Boundaries (11 page)

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 Rochijat 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.

The two youngsters and their friends also produced a torrent of scabrous mimeographed bulletins, full of scandalous news and sarcastic articles about the Suharto clique. These they first sent to the lower consulate staff (who enjoyed them very much), and only later to the Consul himself. Pipit was and is an amazingly gifted and fearless satirical writer. He believes that ‘everything can be said' and is brave enough to carry it out. His articles, written in a mixture of formal Indonesian, Jakarta slang and Low Javanese, exploited Javanese wayang-lore, Sino-Indonesian kung-fu comic books, scatology and brazenly sexual jokes to make his friends laugh their heads off and his consular enemies shake with impotent rage.

The most important of his articles was one I later translated as ‘Am I PKI [Indonesian Communist Party] or non-PKI?' In this searing personal text, Pipit described, with plenty of black humour, his brush with the massacres of the left in 1965. His kindly Muslim father had been the manager of a large state-owned sugar estate in East Java and was harassed by the local communist-controlled sugar workers' union. As a teenager very loyal to his father, Pipit was furious with the PKI and also with some of his high school friends who ended up as executioners in the autumn of 1965.

But the horror haunted him. In his article he described how regular customers at the local brothel stopped going there when they saw the genitals of communists nailed to the door, and he recalled rafts piled high with mutilated corpses which floated down the Brantas river through the town of Kediri, where he lived. He had come to Germany to study electrical engineering, but influenced by radical German students he soon abandoned his studies for a career as a vocal enemy of the Suharto tyranny. Later he was able to use his friendships with people in the Socialist Party to help block moves by the consulate to punish Indonesian students who stepped out of line.

Meeting Pipit, Komang and their friends was for me very exhilarating. We became very close and have remained so till today. I learned a lot from them both about how to write engagingly in Indonesian, and began to write in the same sardonic mixed-language style they used. We agreed that, under the political circumstances, we would write about everything political in sexual terms, and everything
sexual in political language. For example, General Benny Moerdani, commander-in-chief of the Indonesian National Army in the mid-1980s, ‘got erections' from imagining he might be made vice president of Indonesia. One result was that I worked briefly as a satirical columnist for an Indonesian weekly before military intelligence clamped down on the publication.

In 1967 Sudisman, the last secretary-general of the PKI, was finally arrested and sentenced to execution by a high military court. I attended the trial every day, and was very impressed by Sudisman's courage and dignity, and by his last defence speech. I got a copy of the speech, translated it into English, and had it published quickly in Australia. In one acid passage the secretary-general spoke of the many colonels who never became generals, whom he nicknamed ‘Moss Colonels'.

These five men and boys gave me friendship, ‘fathership' and political solidarity, as well as teaching me a great deal. Thanks to them, I was able to continue some kind of useful Indonesian fieldwork over the twenty-seven years of my banishment. In the process, I came to realize that nothing is better for a scholar than being blessed with such deep and enduring attachments, which are often so much more valuable than lonely library research.

In my early days at Cornell, use of the concept of ‘comparison' was still somewhat limited. I do not mean that comparisons were never made; they were made all the time, both consciously and (more often) unconsciously, but invariably in a practical way and on a small scale. Even today, in the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences, there is only one department (comparative literature) that uses the term in its title, and this department did not exist in the early 1960s when I left for Indonesia to undertake fieldwork.

Historians, anthropologists, economists and sociologists rarely thought systematically about comparison at all. The political science department was a partial exception, since it had a subsection called ‘comparative government', to which I belonged. But the comparisons my classmates and I studied were primarily focused on Western Europe. The reason for this was understandable. European countries had for centuries interacted with one another, learned from one another, and competed with each other. They also believed that they shared a common civilization based
on antiquity and different Christianities. Comparisons seemed both simple and relevant.

For me, the odd thing was that comparative government did not cover the US itself, which was the preserve of a different subsection called American government. On one level, this division was easy to understand in practical terms. The undergraduate students, thinking about future careers as politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and so on, were overwhelmingly interested in courses about their own country's politics. The same ‘nationalist' interest can be found in most countries. My department was dominated by Americanists because of student demand. A less obvious factor was the pervasive ‘frog under the coconut shell' mentality created by what I call ‘official nationalism'. The US has two important neighbours, Mexico and Canada, but there were no courses on these countries' politics, and, right up to the point of my retirement in 2001, it was rare to find a student who could name either the president of the former or the prime minister of the latter.

One of the central myths of American nationalism has long been ‘exceptionalism' – the idea that US history, culture and political life are by definition incomparable. The US is not like Europe, not like Latin America, and absolutely not like Asia. Needless to say, this fancy is absurd. In different ways, depending on which countries in what periods are relevant, the US is perfectly comparable, especially with Europe, South America, Japan and the British Dominions of the Empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on). Another aspect of this perspective is its deeply ingrained provincialism.
Hence the strong resistance to the logical case for including American politics within comparative politics.

One could plausibly add two other factors that are more specific. The first is the institutional history of the study of politics in the United States. One clear relic of this history is that there are still a number of political science departments that call themselves departments of government (Harvard and Cornell among them). Their lineage derives from the merging of law (mostly ‘constitutional' law) and public administration, both eminently concerned with the practicalities of governance. In Europe the lineage was quite different: departments of philosophy, sociology, economics and politics based on the grand tradition of Machiavelli, Smith, Constant, Ricardo, Hegel, Marx, de Tocqueville, Weber and so on. My department had a subsection called Political Theory, which was usually taught by a European scholar. Its range extended from Plato to Marx, but included no Americans.

The second factor is that Americans are a practical and pragmatic people, not naturally given to grand theory. A quick glance across the social sciences and humanities for the ‘great theorists' of the past century makes this abundantly clear, whether in philosophy (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Levinas, etc.), history (Bloch, Braudel, Hobsbawm, Needham, Elliott), sociology (Mosca, Pareto, Weber, Simmel, Mann), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard) or literary studies (Bakhtin, Barthes, de Man, etc.). All these foundational figures are European. The grand American exception is Noam Chomsky,
who revolutionized the study of linguistics, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Milton Friedman in economics, though Keynes may last longer. Of course, this does not mean that contemporary US universities are not obsessed with ‘theory', only that the ‘theory' either comes from outside America, is modelled on economics (which has a strong theory-orientation important for understanding the functioning of modern society), or is underpinned by America's egalitarianism: ‘everyone', so to speak, ‘can and should be a theorist', though history shows that individuals genuinely capable of producing original theory are rare. My own experience as a student at Cornell occurred before ‘political theory' really took hold. My thesis (1967) could almost have been written in a history department. But by then what was later remembered as the era of ‘behaviourism', understood as making the study of politics ‘scientific', was on the rise.

The thirty-five years I spent as a Professor of Government at Cornell taught me two interesting lessons about US academia. The first was that ‘theory', mirroring the style of late capitalism, has obsolescence built into it, in the manner of high-end commodities. In year X students had to read and more or less revere Theory Y, while sharpening their teeth on passé Theory W. Not too many years later, they were told to sharpen their teeth on passé Theory Y, admire Theory Z, and forget about Theory W. The second lesson was that – with some important exceptions like the work of Barrington Moore, Jr. – the extension of political science to comparative politics tended to proceed, consciously or unconsciously, on the basis of the US example:
one measured how far other countries were progressing in approximating America's liberty, respect for law, economic development, democracy, etc. Hence the rapid rise, and equally rapid fall, of an approach that today looks pretty ‘dead' – modernization theory.

Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong! In its innocence, this kind of ‘look at me' theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high rates of murder and divorce in the US, its hugely disproportionate Black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption, and so on.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant in American politics and (European) comparative politics obliged me to study a great many texts that I would not otherwise have read. The undergraduates in those days were 90 per cent American and knew very little about Europe. To help them, I found it useful to make constant comparisons between the US, the UK, France and Germany. I myself took graduate courses on the Soviet Union, Asia, the US and Western Europe. Finally, the format of the Southeast Asia program forced me not only to start thinking across the region in a comparative sense, but also to read across disciplines, especially anthropology, history and economics. At the time, I did not have a high level of consciousness about all this – it was all fun because it was so new to me.

My gradual introduction to comparative thinking, however, was quite bookish and ‘intellectual' until I went to Indonesia. There, for the first time, my emotional and political leanings came into play in my work. Yet the main effect was not to make me think more theoretically in any general sense. Rather I found myself becoming a kind of Indonesian (or Indonesian-Javanese) nationalist, and feeling annoyed when I ran into bullying American officials who clearly looked down on Indonesians, had no time for Soekarno and were very anti-communist, to the point that when Soekarno angrily uttered his famous anti-American phrase, ‘To hell with your aid!', I felt like cheering.

It was still from within this framework that I wrote my first explicitly comparative work, a long article entitled ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture', published in 1972 in a book titled
Culture and Politics in Indonesia
, edited by Claire Holt. This essay had an unlikely origin. One day, as I was sitting in my office with the door open, two senior professors walked by, chatting loudly on their way to lunch. The man doing most of the talking was Allan Bloom, who much later published a best-seller called
The Closing of the American Mind
. He was a rather fascinating and even intimidating figure. Unashamedly effeminate, and clearly favouring his male over his female students, he was nonetheless a charismatic conservative lecturer, and a first-class scholar in the field of political theory (Plato to Marx). At the University of Chicago he had been among the top students of Leo Strauss, the famous political émigré from Nazi Germany and a principled philosophical
conservative, many of whose pupils (especially bright and ambitious Jews) went on to lead the neo-conservative movement in American political life under Reagan and the two Bushes, as well as in the best universities.

What I overheard Bloom say was this: ‘Well, you know that the ancient Greeks, even Plato and Aristotle, had no concept of “power” as we know it today.' This casual, lunch-hour comment seeped into my mind and stayed there. It had never occurred to me that the two philosophical masters, whom we were always told to revere as the founders of ‘Western Thought', had no idea of power in their heads. Dubious at first, I rushed to the library to consult a Classical Greek dictionary. I could find ‘tyranny', ‘democracy', ‘aristocracy', ‘monarchy', ‘city', army', etc., but no entry for any abstract or general concept of ‘power'.

This set me thinking about power in the context of Java and Indonesia. Not long before there had been a heated polemic between the Swiss journalist Hubert Luethy and Clifford Geertz, in the notorious CIA-supported magazine
Encounter
. It took place between late 1965 and early 1966, when the massacres of the communists and their sympathizers were raging in Indonesia after the attempted coup of 1965. Luethy had started it by writing an acerbic essay on the ‘irrationality' of Indonesian political life and discourse. Properly annoyed, Geertz replied with a stinging retort entitled ‘Are the Indonesians Mad?', which strongly defended Indonesian rationality, not on theoretical grounds but on the basis of his long experience of doing fieldwork in Java. Geertz was already a famous figure at the time, and the dominant influence in American anthropology;
along with Kahin and Benda he was one of the three most important senior figures in Indonesian studies. As a good Indonesian nationalist I was of course on Geertz's side, but I was starting to think about a more systematic and historical study of ‘rationality' in terms of political theory.

It so happened that my favourite Indonesian fellow student in the mid-1960s was a middle-aged, white-haired historian called Soemarsaid Moertono, whom we all affectionately called ‘Mas Moer'. ‘Mas' is a Javanese term of address, a little more formal than ‘big brother' but close to its meaning. He was a real old-fashioned Javanese gentleman, a fine historian, a kind and witty man, a natural democrat, and with an endearingly childish side to him. He would often tell us the story of the first morning that he woke up in Ithaca to find the town blanketed in snow. He was so enchanted by this strange beauty that he hopped out of bed barefooted, ran downstairs in his
sarong
, and jumped happily into the snow, completely forgetting that it was ice-cold. Our student offices were next door to each other, so we chatted all the time, and he showed me the drafts of his MA thesis on aspects of traditional Javanese royal rule (published eventually as
State and Statecraft in Old Java
). He knew the Javanese sources very well, and there were dozens of riveting and strange passages in his text. No doubt the strangest of all was the story, solemnly related in the chronicles, of what happened at the death in 1703 of Amangkurat II, an unsuccessful Javanese monarch of the late seventeenth century who had not designated an heir. As the claimants and courtiers surrounded his deathbed, one of them, Prince Puger, noticed that the dead
king's penis was erect and at its tip there was a glowing drop of liquid. He rushed to drink it up, and the penis subsided. The chronicler added that this showed that the
tédja
, or magic light of kingship, had passed to the prince, who became Amangkurat III.

Since I was quite sure that the Javanese were as rational as anyone else, I wondered what basic assumptions must have been in play to make this odd story reasonable. Remembering Bloom's remark, it occurred to me that, like Plato, the Javanese might have no abstract concept of power as a relationship strictly between human beings. Conversations with Moertono confirmed that this was the case, yet at the same time they had a clear concept of ‘concrete' power, a kind of
mana
immanent in the cosmos, and detectable in magical objects, spirits and human beings (including their sexual organs).

This seemed to me the key which could open the door to pursuing Javanese rationality step by step, social field by social field (taking in bureaucracy, diplomacy, taxation, agriculture, etc.), and help explain the behaviour and aspirations that Luethy had deemed irrational. One could then go back to the West and see many similarities prior to the arrival of Machiavelli, the first Western philosopher of politics to exclude anything ‘divine' or ‘magical' from his thinking. (From what assumptions did his rationality derive?) It was also probable that in many parts of Asia one could find an outlook not too distant from that of the pre-modern Javanese. The irony was that Bloom and Moertono, on the same campus at the same time, were entirely unaware of each other's existence.

When writing the final version of ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture' – conceived as a study in comparative political philosophy – I tried to anticipate and forestall the easy reaction of most Western readers: ‘Well, the Javanese were and are primitive, and we are not.' Luckily, I had help from Max Weber, who introduced the concept of ‘charisma' into modern sociology, though he had great difficulty in explaining it clearly and systematically. Hitler, Reagan, Mao, Evita Peron, de Gaulle, Soekarno, Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Lenin and Khomeini: what rationality lay behind their hold on people's imaginations? Was there a substratum of old ways of thinking about ‘power' (
mana
, tédja) even in cultures that thought of themselves as completely modern? Much later on I was gratified to learn that Reagan never made important decisions before his wife had telephoned her fortune-teller, and that the top leaders of today's Chinese Communist Party eagerly consult astrologers and
feng shui
masters – out of the limelight, of course.