A Life Beyond Boundaries

by Benedict Anderson

  The two main points I want to make about this article are, first, that I began making comparisons from a nationalist point of view, and within an East versus West framework long popular among Orientalists – but in this comparison I wanted to show that the Javanese or Indonesians can be seen as just as ‘rational’ as Westerners and other peoples, so long as we understand the basic assumptions of their thinking. Second, that taking this approach occurred by sheer chance: I happened to be both Bloom’s junior colleague and Moertono’s friend.

  For the next ten years, however, I really did nothing seriously comparative, and when I returned systematically to the question of comparisons, my outlook and interests were completely different. Even a brief look at ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ (1972) and Imagined Communities (1983) will immediately reveal how far apart they are. For sure, it was partly a matter of age. In 1972, I was thirty-six years young, still untenured, and recently expelled from Indonesia. In 1983, I was forty-seven years old, a full professor, newly appointed director of Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, and busy with the study of Siam. But the age difference was by no means the most important factor. Here I would like to jot down some notes about three powerful influences on me over that decade – in no special order.

  I was fortunate to have a more intelligent, slightly younger brother, known to the world as Perry Anderson, but within the family by his original Irish name, Rory. For a long time after I left for America, we did not keep in touch very well, except via my mother and sister. After graduating from Oxford in history, I think in 1959, he plunged into Marxist politics and intellectual life. Along with some of his Oxford friends, he quickly moved to work at the recently established New Left Review, to revive and modernize a leftist politics in the UK that had long become fossilized under the uninspiring aegis of the British Communist Party.

  The founders of the NLR were Edward Thompson, the great radical historian of rural and working-class England, and the Caribbean social thinker Stuart Hall, who would later become known as the founder of cultural studies. The ‘Young Turks’ had only affection and respect for Hall, but relations with Thompson were often difficult. He was a brilliant man, but English to his bones, and in some ways a ‘Little Englander’ with a traditionalist hostility to the intellectual traditions of Continental Europe. My brother and his friends believed strongly that British intellectual isolation had to be broken out of by 1) a massive importing (in translation) of the works of key Marxists beyond the Channel: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Debray, Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas, Bobbio and many others; and 2) making the NLR as internationalist as possible in the problems it addressed.

  Eventually a furious Thompson left, and the young generation took over. At the same time, Rory was busy working on his gigantic project of reframing the whole of ‘Western history’, which led to his path-breaking books Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), both of them fundamentally comparative. As a ‘good brother’, I read these books with awe and pride. They showed an encyclopaedic historical knowledge, a mastery of classical prose, and a formidable capacity to sustain a complex but clear argument across hundreds of pages, hundreds of years and dozens of countries.

  From 1974 I started to read the NLR from cover to cover and was profoundly re-educated in the process. Here I came into contact with the work of Walter Benjamin, which had a decisive impact on me, as readers of Imagined Communities will immediately recognize. On visits to London, I began to meet the NLR circle and make friends among them. I liked and respected no one more than Tom Nairn, the Scottish nationalist-Marxist who in 1977 published his polemic The Break-up of Britain, which caused a real uproar and led to a stinging attack from Eric Hobsbawm, then the leading figure among the older generation of Marxist historians.

  During this process, my brother and I became close again, as we have remained till this day, and he was my key counsellor in preparing the final version of Imagined Communities. Had I not had a brother like him, I am not sure what would have become of me. Through Rory and his friends at the NLR, I became more internationalist and no longer just an Indonesian nationalist.

  The second major influence on me was my Cornell contemporary and close friend James Siegel, who is today, in my opinion, the most arrestingly original anthropologist in the US. He had been one of Clifford Geertz’s last students before the famous man, enraged by the rowdy student radicalism of the late ’60s, abandoned teaching for an aerie at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, where for a long time he was practically the only social scientist. Jim and I had done fieldwork in Indonesia at the same time, he in Atjeh and I in Java. We first met in Medan, a city in northern Sumatra, in the spring of 1964, and immediately became friends. His thesis, published later as The Rope of God, was unlike any anthropological work previously written on Indonesia, and has always been one of my favourites.

  How he came to Cornell is an interesting story in itself. Around 1967, an anthropology post came up at Cornell for a young Southeast Asianist, and Jim, among a number of others, applied. In those radical days, candidates were no longer interviewed only by professors, but also by graduate students. When the final decision had to be made, most of the faculty were in favour of James Peacock, who had written a thesis on ludruk, the popular urban theatre of East Java, which he characteristically called Rites of Modernization, and which was published with the same title. This kind of Parsonian title did not help his cause with the students, for whom ‘modernization’ was an abandoned fetish. They voted overwhelmingly for Jim, and the faculty gave in.

  Jim was and still is one of my best friends. We often taught courses together, including one seminar in which we insisted that every student speak in Indonesian! It was he who seriously introduced me to high-class anthropology, including the inspiring Africanist work of the British Catholic Victor Turner. He also made me read Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, an extraordinary account of the history of ‘representation’ in the West from Homer to Proust. Our favourite class was a joint seminar on the fiction of Indonesia’s great writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was then still in one of Suharto’s gulags. Careful, close-up reading of fiction with a group of excellent students was quite new for me. Thanks to Jim, I began to think about how I could use my early training in Classical and Western European, as well as Indonesian, literature for a new kind of analysis of the relations between ‘imagination’ and ‘reality’ in the study of politics.

  The third influence came from students in the Southeast Asia program. They had little interest in the formal American concept of a giant Southeast Asia zone as such. But they acquired smaller types of solidarity among themselves. Anger at the long grim dictatorships in Buddhist Siam and Burma, Islamic Indonesia, the Catholic Philippines, etc., moved the youngsters to rejection. In English they could exchange information that was heavily suppressed in their home countries. They got used to making new comparisons that they had never before imagined.

  As for the comparisons typical of Imagined Communities, they were shaped by the book’s polemical intentions. Almost all the important ‘theoretical’ works written on nationalism after the Second World War were written and published in the UK (Miroslav Hroch’s pioneering comparative study of ‘small nationalisms’ in Central and Eastern Europe, written in German in Communist-governed Prague, had to wait a long time to be translated into English). Almost all were written by Jews, though of widely different political outlooks. On the far right was Elie Kedourie, who was born and raised in the old Jewish community of Baghdad, moved to London as a young man, and came under the influence of Michael Oakeshott, then Britain’s best-known conservative political philosopher. On the moderate right was Anthony Smith, a British-born practising Orthodox Jew, who taught history in London throughout a long career. Convinced that the Jews were the most ancient of nations, he consistently argued that modern nationalism grew out of long-standing ethnic groups. On the liberal left was the philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist Er
nest Gellner, a Czech Jew born in Prague, who made his way to London just after the end of the war. A sturdy Enlightenment liberal, he pioneered the so-called constructivist view of nationalism, arguing that it was strictly a product of industrialization and modernity. On the far left was the grand historian Eric Hobsbawm, of partial Jewish descent, born in colonial Egypt and substantially educated in pre-Nazi Austria. Hobsbawm was a constructivist as well as a communist, and made a striking contribution to the growing debate on nationalism in the UK with The Invention of Tradition (1983), a collection he compiled with Terence Ranger. The odd man out was Tom Nairn, strictly Scottish, and a New Left Marxist radical.

  All these people lived either in London or in nearby Oxford or Cambridge, and they all, more or less, knew each other. All except Nairn were very attached to the UK, partly because it was largely uncontaminated by fascism and violent anti-Semitism, and partly because the state, including England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, was felt to be more like supranational (if now defunct) Austro-Hungary than standard European nation-states such as France, Italy and Sweden. All these men were basically Europe-oriented, even if Gellner studied in the Maghreb and learnt some Arabic, while Kedourie wrote a lot about his native Iraq, and obviously knew Iraqi Arabic well.

  This then was the wide, but very ‘British’ circle at which Imagined Communities was aimed. The debate was really triggered by Nairn’s polemical The Break-up of Britain, which argued that the UK was a fossilized, conservative and imperialistic relic of the past, doomed to break up into its four constituent underlying nations, with Scotland leading the way. The book was strongly attacked, especially by Hobsbawm, who declared that no true Marxist could be a nationalist; Marxism had been committed from the start to internationalism. I liked the book very much, for its own sake, but also as an Irishman (Southern Ireland, after centuries of English colonial rule, had only won its independence, by armed struggle, in 1922). I did not think of Imagined Communities as a strictly academic book, and it never occurred to me at the time that it would eventually have a wide international audience.

  Many people have complained that Imagined Communities is a difficult book and especially difficult to translate. The accusation is partly true. But a great deal of the difficulty lies not in the realm of ideas, but in its original polemical stance and its intended audience: the UK intelligentsia. This is why the book contains so many quotations from, and allusions to, English poetry, essays, histories, legends, etc., that do not have to be explained to English readers, but which are likely to be unfamiliar to others. There are also jokes and sarcasms only the English would find amusing or annoying. For fun I always titled British rulers as if they were ordinary people, e.g. Charles Stuart for Charles I, but used the standard format for foreign kings (Louis XIV). A radical English feminist once wrote to complain about this ‘discrimination’. Of course I was pleased. When in the late 1980s two of my best students, Shiraishi Takashi and Shiraishi Saya, decided to translate the book into Japanese, I reminded them that it was not originally intended for Japanese readers, so that they should feel free to substitute appropriate Japanese quotations, allusions and jokes where they liked. I think they were happy to have this freedom.

  Imagined Communities was formed in a wider polemical framework than The Break-up of Britain. The first target was the Eurocentrism I saw in the assumption that nationalism was born in Europe and then spread out in imitated forms to the rest of the world. But it was also plain to me that nationalist movements had their historical origins in North and South America, as well as Haiti, and that these movements could not be explained on any ‘ethnic’ or linguistic basis.

  The second target was traditional Marxism and liberalism. Nairn had rightly argued that this kind of Marxism had largely sidestepped nationalism, and had never been able to explain its vast world-historical power. But he had not really attempted to offer a Marxist solution to the problem. I had become convinced that a solution was possible if one took into account the peculiarity of printed books, which began to be published in large quantities in Europe in the sixteenth century. Books were certainly commodities produced by early capitalism, but they were also containers and purveyors of ideas, emotions and imaginings, unlike beer or sugar. Classical liberalism had the same failings.

  The final target was a powerful tradition that treated nationalism as if it were just another ‘ism’ alongside liberalism, Marxism, socialism, conservatism, etc. – i.e. purely a system of ideas, or an ideology. This way of looking at nationalism could not begin to explain its enormous emotional power, and its ability to make people willing to die for its sake.

  This framework of the book helps to explain some typical forms of comparison that I employed, which were radically different from those used within the East-West format of ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’. Where before I had been interested mainly in difference, this time I concentrated on similarity. The long chapter ‘Creole Pioneers’, on the Americas, is a good example. Most of the existing work on nationalism in the US either simply insisted on its exceptionality or linked it to British traditions. So I decided to compare the early US with the welter of new nationalisms in Spanish America and put it at the end of the chapter rather than at the start. I enjoyed anticipating the annoyance that would be caused by calling Franklin and Jefferson ‘Creoles’, as if they were simply an extension of patterns everywhere visible south of the US border, and commenting that Simón Bolívar was a more impressive figure than George Washington. In the same manner, I deliberately brought together Tsarist Russia with British India, Hungary with Siam and Japan, Indonesia with Switzerland, and Vietnam with French West Africa. (Many years later I enjoyed classifying Taiwanese nationalism as a late form of Creole nationalism.) These comparisons were intended to surprise and shock, but also to ‘globalize’ the study of the history of nationalism. Although I still like them, they are not much like the kind of comparisons done in mainstream ‘comparative government’, which are usually based on statistics and surveys.

  It was not until much later, in fact after I finally retired, that I began to recognize the fundamental drawback of this type of comparison: that using the nation and nation-states as the basic units of analysis fatally ignored the obvious fact that in reality these units were tied together and crosscut by ‘global’ political-intellectual currents such as liberalism, fascism, communism and socialism, as well as vast religious networks and economic and technological forces. I had also to take seriously the reality that very few people have ever been ‘solely’ nationalist. No matter how strong their nationalism, they may also be gripped by Hollywood movies, neoliberalism, a taste for manga, human rights, impending ecological disaster, fashion, science, anarchism, post-coloniality, ‘democracy’, indigenous peoples’ movements, chat-rooms, astrology, supranational languages like Spanish and Arabic, etc. My realization of this serious flaw helps to explain why my Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005) focused not only on global anarchism towards the end of the nineteenth century, but also on global forms of communication, especially the telegraph and the steamship.

  Because my framework had now changed, so did the style of the comparisons. Although ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ and Imagined Communities were very different works, they had in common a strong longitudinal thrust. In the former, the reader moves across three centuries of Javanese history, while in the latter she is taken from the invention of print-capitalism in the fifteenth century to the anti-colonial movements of the mid-twentieth. In Under Three Flags the dominant impulse is latitudinal. The basic time-frame is marked, not by centuries, but by decades, just four of them between 1861 and 1901. What interested me most was how political and literary developments such as anarchism and avant-garde writing were visibly linked, in what Walter Benjamin called ‘homogeneous, empty time’, in Brazil, Cuba, the UK, Belgium, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Russia, South Africa, Japan, China, Oceania and the Philippines.

  This kind of study
required a new kind of narrative structure, more like that of a novel serialized in a newspaper than the ordinary type of scholarly historical work. The reader is invited to leap back and forth between Naples, Tokyo, Manila, Barcelona, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Brussels, St Petersburg, Tampa and London. The emphasis is on contemporary learning, communications and coordination in connection with ideologies and political activism, thanks to the speed of telegraphic communication across state and national boundaries. Some Frenchmen were learning from some Americans and Belgians, some Chinese from some Filipinos and Japanese, some Italians from some Spaniards and Russians, some Filipinos from some Germans and Cubans. And so on.

  While the general stress was on simultaneity and similarity, nonetheless the core of the book is an analysis of the contrast between global anarchism and local nationalisms. The nicest emblem for this contrast emerges from an investigation of the big wave of assassinations during the period, stretching from Buffalo, New York, to Harbin, Manchuria. Nationalist assassins always tried to kill ‘their own’ hated state leaders, while anarchist assassins very often targeted not only their local oppressors but notorious political leaders in other countries.