Benedict Anderson has died. I’m hoping someone like Henry or Chris writes something more substantive in the coming days about his contributions. While I read Imagined Communities, it never touched me in the way it has so many other scholars and students. Reading people’s comments on Facebook and Twitter, I’m struck by how intellectually diverse his audience was, how ride-ranging his reach. All morning, people from so many different fields and persuasions have been testifying to Anderson’s impact upon them and their work. Which leads to a thought: I’d put Anderson up there with Clifford Geertz and, increasingly, Jim Scott as among the most influential scholars of the last half-century. All of them scholars of Southeast Asia. I’m sure other people have noticed this and/or perhaps written about this, so forgive my saying the obvious, but what is it about that region that has made it such a site of transformative scholarship and fertile reflection?
Update (10:45 am)
Somehow or other, it seems, Henry actually has already posted here on Anderson’s death. Weirdly, I only just saw it. Maybe he and I were writing at the same time? Anyway, read Henry.
{ 18 comments }
Ronan(rf) 12.13.15 at 5:08 pm
“I’m sure other people have noticed this and/or perhaps written about this, so forgive my saying the obvious, but what is it about that region that has made it such a site of transformative scholarship and fertile reflection?”
My speculation is that this can be explained mostly as a consequence of the war in Vietnam. It encouraged a generation of (a certain type of) researchers to have an interest in the region, and created an audience for their works (much like the middle easy today) that wouldn’t have existed in other less geopolitically important regions
LFC 12.13.15 at 6:01 pm
@Ronan
But given when they were born and started their careers, wouldn’t Geertz and B. Anderson decided to have focused on Indonesia before the Vietnam war, or to be more precise before the direct, major US involvement began in 1965? Or is it your speculation that the French war in Indochina and anticolonialism in general got them and others interested in the broader region?
It would also be possible to question Corey’s premise and note that those who started out being interested in Africa, say, during the era of decolonization produced some “transformative scholarship and fertile reflection.” (Or India and the subcontinent.)
It’s also possible that the Geertz/Anderson/Scott common regional interest is coincidence.
Ronan(rf) 12.13.15 at 6:06 pm
I dont know the specifics on when they developed an interest in the region,but my speculation could work another angle, ie against the idea that they were particularly exceptional researchers, but that their luck in studying a region that became so geopolitically important meant a number of institutional supports, more access to funding and greater ease at dissemeniatiing their research which might not (for example) have been open to someone researching in Africa at the time.
This is all speculation of course, but my starting point wouldnt really be why did the regiona attract such good researchers,but why are the good reseacrhers from the region so well known.
Ronan(rf) 12.13.15 at 6:09 pm
“disseminating”
Zamfir 12.13.15 at 6:50 pm
Not to pick on you personally, but it’s kind of amusing how ‘researchers from the region’ means ‘Americans who specialized in that region’. In a way, that reinforces your point.
LFC 12.13.15 at 7:15 pm
Since we’re engaging in speculation here, here’s my speculation: Assuming for the sake for the argument that Corey is right — and it seems like a reasonable judgment — that B. Anderson, Geertz, and J. Scott are “among the most influential scholars [in the social sciences] of the last half-century,” I’m not all that sure their regional specialization has much to do with it.
Geertz is a superb writer — just glance at the essays in The Interpretation of Cultures — and he came up with ideas and ways of putting them (e.g. thick description) that were picked up and widely used. Benedict Anderson was also a very good writer. Presumably Scott is too (though I really haven’t read him). So you have three people who were very smart and very good writers who started with a regional focus and then broadened the scope of their work so it became known beyond the boundaries of their regional speciality.
Although it is not really a precisely analogous case, I. Wallerstein started as an Africanist, but that’s not what most people associate him w/ today; it’s world-systems theory. As I say, not an exactly analogous situation, but perhaps scholars become influential because their work, for whatever reason, gets taken up beyond specialist boundaries. Whether they start out as, and/or remain, Africanists or specialists in SE Asia or India may be secondary.
That said, your speculation about sources of institutional support and access to funding is not nec. wrong. I just don’t know enough about the relevant history of ‘area studies’ and more broadly the social sciences to know.
LFC 12.13.15 at 7:17 pm
correction:
for the sake of argument
JRLRC 12.13.15 at 7:57 pm
You could say the same about social sciences and Latam: Hirschman, Linz, Przeworski, O´Donnell, Schmitter, Stepan, Nohlen. They all were/are some kind of “latin-americanists”…
LFC 12.13.15 at 8:57 pm
JRLRC @8
That’s a good point.
LFC 12.13.15 at 10:25 pm
Someone named Fuad Rahmat answered Corey’s question here and he seems to know what he’s talking about. Cites SEAsia’s diversity and peculiarities of its history. Also in first sentence Rahmat says basically the same as Ronan about funding for SEAsian studies during the CW/ Vietnam.
So possibly my speculation that their regional specialty is not that relevant is wrong. Still, there’s no way to be sure on an issue like this, short of probably a lot of research on the relevant writings, how they were funded, what questions they grew out of, their specific regional focus (Rahmat mentions the Malay peninsula) their reception, etc.
yastreblyansky 12.13.15 at 11:48 pm
F. Rahmat is very good, but I would go somewhat further in the same vein. My experience in Singapore in 1980 as a “cognitively” oriented theoretical linguist with little theoretical interest in the social side of language was that ideas one took for granted–say, that there’s such a thing as a homogeneous speech community–simply dissolved, and what normal linguistics described was a pathological situation; some huge revision of the premises seemed necessary. And as I started making friends with local anthropologists and sociologists, with the new interest, I found that lots of people were experiencing the same kind of sense of theoretical dislocation, and everybody was reading Geertz and Anderson (and the non-SEA specialist Eric Hobsbawm, whose “invented traditions” rhymed with Geertz and Anderson). Geertz on Javanese religion, where everybody was a Muslim but didn’t actually seem to practice Islam as much as local spirit worship and shadow puppet performances of Ramayana, had seen and understood the same kind of phenomenon, beyond diversity to, I don’t know, being able to see all those names of communities as a kind of local myth to explain the reality of and was a guide to how to think your way out of having all your assumptions exploded by this extremity, and Anderson as well. I don’t know if there’s anywhere in the world where mass interculturality is so dense and so “colorful” at the same time.
yastreblyansky 12.13.15 at 11:50 pm
damn it “explain the realities of real interaction” or something like that.
LFC 12.14.15 at 12:37 am
@yastreblyansky
that’s v. interesting and illuminating — thanks
ZM 12.14.15 at 1:10 am
“I’m sure other people have noticed this and/or perhaps written about this, so forgive my saying the obvious, but what is it about that region that has made it such a site of transformative scholarship and fertile reflection?â€
For a historiography subject I once tried to do an essay on the history of anthropology as a discipline (without ever having taken an anthropology subject… I’m sure you can guess how that turned out…) — and I think the particular turn in post-war anthropology is one factor not yet mentioned.
From Geertz famous essay on going to illegal events and then when the police came running away with the Indonesians which meant the Indonesians thought he was more approachable (as he could have stayed and told the police he was observing as an anthropologist from the US and shown his university card and not been arrested) you can sort of see a fundamental change that was happening in anthropology — the people being studied were no longer being thought of as kind of primitive objects following structures without much agency or subjectivity, and the subjectivity of the anthropologist was also being re-conceived of in a more reflexive way.
(Although I suppose this does not answer the question of why Asia instead of Africa or South America, but I couldn’t answer that since I never took any African or South American history subjects.)
I liked Imagined Communities when I read it for a subject, although I found reading a lot of those sort of books kind of heady and de-centring in a way.
Val 12.14.15 at 11:34 am
Not meaning to be rude, but a historic agreement has been completed in Paris, I think CT should attend to that.
Will G-R 12.14.15 at 4:01 pm
@11
Since Rahmat touched on the effects of Cold War funding imperatives on the prominence of SE Asia research, an interesting parallel there is that the rise of “cognitive revolution”-era generative linguistics (and the broader “good old-fashioned AI” computer science framework in which it was situated) also to a great extent seems to have been a matter of military-industrial imperatives. Funny to think of Noam Chomsky’s big break coming from the military’s desire to equip its soldiers with Star Trek-type translator machines, but I guess that’s the way the cookie crumbles. (Incidentally, the insta-translation-capable linguist character from “Star Trek: Enterprise” seems derived from a committed generativist’s fantasy as to how a research situation like yours might have happened, right down to the fact that the cultures whose languages she’s dissecting through generative-grammar principles are literally aliens.)
magari 12.14.15 at 4:23 pm
You can add to that list Anna Tsing and Tania Murray Li. Li’s most recent book on property relations (Land’s End)is very good.
Yastreblyansky 12.14.15 at 8:00 pm
@16 Thanks for the link!
Chomsky loves to write about Martian linguists, too, who are somehow capable of figuring out what’s going on with earth language without any metalanguage to work with, or concept of what communication is. (While his Martian journalist, a less metaphysical concept, is hardly distinguishable from Chomsky himself.)
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