A Life Beyond Boundaries (4 page)

There is one other, more professional, sense in which I was part of a ‘last cohort'. I arrived in the US in 1958, just before American university life underwent a fundamental change, analogous to what occurred in the UK. In the early and middle 1960s, the great machine that we call ‘theory' was beginning to become visible. It began with the now antique ‘behaviourist' revolution. Although I do not think that ‘theory' came very naturally to a pragmatic, down-to-earth people, it had crucial effects. It made each discipline more eager to distinguish itself from its sisters and to set about inventing its own jargon.

When I studied in the US, this change was barely under way, so none of my teachers complained if I took courses in history or anthropology. But by the late 1960s this was already becoming difficult. The irony is that, thirty years later, American scholars started to talk eagerly about multidisciplinary approaches without realizing that these might have already existed more than a generation earlier.

This is not to say that the changes that occurred after I reached adulthood were not positive in many respects. All I want to emphasize is that I finished my studies just as those changes were setting in. Coming out of the last generation before they became normalized, I was in a position to observe them from a distance, rather than being formed by them.

As it turned out, fate worked out differently than I originally expected. It did not take long for me to be enticed by the beautiful natural setting of Cornell, and by George Kahin's lecture classes on Indonesia, Southeast Asia and US policies in Asia. By the end of my first year at Cornell, I realized that I had finally decided what I wanted to do in life: become a professor, do research, write and teach, and to follow in Kahin's footsteps in my academic and political orientations. I will say more later about Kahin, who was not only an excellent scholar but also a man of conviction and energy.

So I stayed on. My mother was happy that I had finally settled down, though she complained about my being so far away from her and my brother and sister. So I wrote to her nearly every week, and every year returned home for Christmas and during the summer holidays. She wrote back to me regularly too, and my aunt Celia sent me clippings of crossword puzzles which were generally more difficult to solve than their American counterparts.

Though I was attracted by Kahin's lectures on Southeast
Asia early on in my stay at Cornell, it took me a few months to adjust to American graduate student life, and still longer to understand how unique a place Cornell University was in those days, with its Southeast Asia program. To explain the nature of this uniqueness, it is necessary to leave Cornell for a while and consider the sudden rise, after the Second World War, of what the Americans came to call area studies.

Before Pearl Harbor the United States had been isolationist, despite its aggressive policy of worldwide economic expansion. It will be remembered that despite Woodrow Wilson's strenuous efforts, the US had rejected membership of the League of Nations. It had only one significant colony, the Philippines, and was often embarrassed, as a former colony itself, to be in the game of ‘European' and Japanese colonialist imperialism. By the mid-1930s, a schedule had already been set for Filipino independence in 1946. America had a huge, modern navy, but an insignificant army and air force. Its direct political interventions were mainly confined to what it regarded, under the Monroe Doctrine, as its ‘own backyard': Central and South America, a part of the Caribbean, and a big chunk of the Pacific. The American scholarly world mirrored this larger picture. Since so many Americans originated from Europe, and since the prestige of European scholarship was high, there were plenty of US scholars who studied the main countries of Western Europe – the UK, France, Germany and Italy. The Soviet Union was also studied because it was regarded as a powerful ideological enemy. In Asia, the only countries of general concern were
China and Japan. The latter was studied mainly because of its military power, which threatened to rival America's in the Pacific region. In the case of China, a strong early interest was stimulated by the large number of American missionaries who worked there from the end of the nineteenth century. In the late 1940s, as the Chiang Kai-shek regime fell apart, many Chinese scholars, reactionary and liberal, first class and mediocre, fled to the US and there substantially increased the influence of anti-communist sinology. Unlike scholars from Japan or other Asian countries, many of them entertained particular political agendas. Allying with American scholars of China with similar ideological perspectives, they were to form a major and influential faction in American academic associations with Asia.

There was some work done on India, but it was mainly confined to books read by students of Sanskrit, influenced by European Orientalism, rather than works on contemporary colonial India. Almost no one, except an anthropologist or two, studied Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia or Southeast Asia. For Southeast Asia (except for the Philippines) the number of serious specialists could be numbered on one hand: Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson (Bali), Cora Dubois (Alor) and Rupert Emerson (Malaya). As late as 1958, when I began studying in the Cornell department of government, the small faculty was dominated by Americanists. One professor handled the Soviet Union, another Western Europe. George Kahin was responsible for the whole of Asia. No one taught Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa or the Middle East.

The Second World War changed everything in a very dramatic fashion. The US suddenly became the world hegemon. Germany and Japan were completely defeated, and Britain and France, though on the winning side, were so drained by the costs of their participation that their position as world imperialist powers rapidly declined. By the 1960s, their colonial empires had largely disappeared. Only the Soviet Union remained, and it was still a regional rather than global power. Where America had stayed out of the League of Nations, it now became the central organizer of the United Nations, symbolized by the location of its headquarters in New York. Under these new conditions, the more powerful American elites became acutely aware of how little they knew about many parts of the world in whose politics they now expected to play a key role. All the more so since decolonization was happening at a furious pace in both Asia and, a little later, in Africa.

The rise of area studies in the postwar United States directly reflected the country's new hegemonic position. The state began to put a lot of financial and other resources into the study of
contemporary
politics and economics in countries outside Western Europe, much less into studies of history, anthropology, sociology, literature and the arts. As the Cold War set in, there was a growing interest in policy studies, particularly with regard to the threat, real or imagined, of what was still understood as ‘world communism'. In this expansion of scholarship the driving forces were the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon. But very large private institutions, especially the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, also played
an important role, partly offsetting the ‘policy' focus of the state.

Senior officials in these foundations, often highly educated people who had grown up under the long reign of President Franklin Roosevelt, were more liberal in their outlook than state functionaries, and somewhat less obsessed with combating ‘world communism'. Many of them believed in the importance of deeper, historically based scholarship, which was more likely to develop healthily in open universities than in state-related agencies. They were also much more aware of the need for long-term planning, and the urgency of developing adequate research libraries and the efficient teaching of languages which, before the war, had barely been studied.

How was ‘Southeast Asia' seen by Western eyes? The Chinese written language had long contained the word
nan-yang
, a vague geographical term meaning something like ‘southern region' but also connoting ‘water'. It thus signified the southern region oriented from Beijing and reachable via waterway or seaway. At various times it could refer to China's own southeastern coastal provinces, the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos, and the Malay peninsula – but not land-accessible Burma and Laos. In Japanese, its cognate,
nampo
, acquired in the Meiji period a clearer and more political meaning, covering Southeast Asia as we know it today, but also a large part of the Western Pacific over which Japan was to rule as a mandate after the First World War.

The first Western scholar to use the term ‘Southeast Asia' in a fully modern sense was the great Burma expert
John Furnivall, who published his
Welfare and Progress in Southeast Asia
in 1941, just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. But the decisive change came during the war, with the creation of Louis Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command, an Allied force designed to ‘liberate' all of Southeast Asia except the American Philippines – which was left to Washington. The SEAC not only (briefly) restored British colonialism in Burma, Malaya and Singapore, but played a major role in aiding similar efforts by the Dutch in today's Indonesia, and the French in Indochina. Still, the Command was abolished soon after the war came to an end.

‘Southeast Asia' initially came into permanent general use via the United States, which, like Japan before it, had ambitions to dominate the entire region between India and China. The European empires had been content to divide the region among themselves, and focused their concerns on their own colonies. This big political change inevitably had a fundamental impact on scholarship.

Before the war, almost all the best studies concerning different parts of Southeast Asia were the work of scholarly colonial bureaucrats, not professors in metropolitan universities. These bureaucrats lived in particular colonies for many years, often knew some of the local contemporary or classical languages, and sometimes married or had affairs with native women. (A small minority were homosexuals, but had to hide this as much as possible.) They usually regarded their scholarly work as a kind of hobby, and were mainly interested in archaeology, music, ancient literatures and history. On the whole, these were fields
in which they could say what they wanted. Undertaking political or economic studies was less popular because the authors usually had to toe the line of the colonial regime.

Most importantly, they normally studied only one colony – the one to which they were assigned – and had little interest in, or knowledge of, the others. The one major scholar who wrote a systematic comparative work, John Furnivall (
Colonial Policy and Practice
, dealing with British Burma and Dutch Indonesia), did so only after leaving the bureaucracy. Thus by the 1950s and early 1960s, fine American work on Southeast Asia was still so scarce that my generation had to depend a lot on the scholar-bureaucrats, and learn to read French or Dutch to do so. We all read Furnivall and Luce on Burma, Mus and Coedès on Indochina, Winstedt and Wilkinson on Malaya, and Schrieke, Pigeaud and van Leur on Indonesia.

This pattern was almost completely reversed in postwar America. From then on, virtually all the scholarship on the region was conducted by professors and graduate students, with little or no bureaucratic experience behind them. Their occupation and busy schedules meant that they could rarely spend any real length of time in the field. Many of the first generation never acquired a solid mastery of languages such as Burmese, Vietnamese, Khmer, Tagalog, or even Thai and Malay-Indonesian. A number did marry Southeast Asian women, but they usually took their wives back to the United States.

There was also a major shift in disciplinary foci, reflecting the priorities of the US state. Political science became very important, followed by economics, then anthropology
(Washington was interested in tribal and minority rebellions) and modern history. Serious interest in literature and the arts was rare.

One other feature of the American scene is also worth a brief mention. Except in the case of the Philippines, the US possessed almost no colonial archives from which scholars could work, which naturally encouraged a focus on the contemporary. In the UK, the Netherlands and France, the vast 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.

‘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 Australian
aborigines 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 became
politically 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.