In political science, students are supposed to come up with a hypothesis to be confirmed or disconfirmed within the coming year. This time limit is a bad idea, since it is too short to attempt anything rather difficult. The demand for a hypothesis is often a bad idea too, because it implies from the start that only two general answers are possible: yes or no. Scale is always a problem. If a student says he wants to study sexual ideology and practice in the Meiji period, he will usually be told something like this: ‘Stick to sexual ideology, find an interesting decade, and confine yourself to Tokyo. Otherwise you will never finish and get a job.’ This kind of advice is not unreasonable, given the real financial and market constraints, but it is not likely to encourage bold or ambitious work.
The ideal way to start interesting research, at least in my view, is to depart from a problem or question to which you do not know the answer. Then you have to decide on the kind of intellectual tools (discourse analysis, theory of nationalism, surveys, etc.) that may or may not be a help to you. But you have also to seek the help of friends who do not necessarily work in your discipline or program, in order to try to have as broad an intellectual culture as possible. Often you also need luck. Finally, you need time for your ideas to cohere and develop. As an illustration, the research that resulted in Imagined Communities began when I asked myself questions to which I had no answers. When and where did nationalism begin? Why does it have such emotional power? What ‘mechanisms’ explain its rapid and planetary spread? Why is nationalist historiography so often mythical, even ridiculous? Why are existing books on the subject so unsatisfactory? What should I be reading instead?
I started out with only two certainties. Firstly, that part of the answer must lie with world-transforming capitalism. But Marx did not pay much attention to print-capitalism, while fine scholars like Elisabeth Eisenstein paid a lot of attention to print but not a lot to capitalism. So? Secondly, that another part of the answer had to involve the rejection of the standard European idea that nationalism developed out of old ethnic groupings, since this idea could not explain either the early nationalisms of the Americas, or the late nationalisms of the Third World anti-colonial movements. Rory advised me to read Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s masterpiece L’apparition du livre, which described brilliantly and in enormous detail the early marriage of capitalism and print, and Jim Siegel kindly gave me a copy. The inspiring work of Victor Turner, particularly his unsettling semi-psychological concept of the ‘pilgrimage’, gave me the clue I was looking for as a key to the mystery of Creole and anti-colonial nationalism.
I had long been in love with Walter Benjamin’s enigmatic ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, especially his difficult idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time’. But I wasn’t thinking of using it at all until Jim (again) gave me a copy of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. The most fascinating sections were those on antiquity and the Middle Ages, which revealed a conception of time utterly alien to the modern world. This book then led me to the master French historian of the Middle Ages, Marc Bloch, and later to David Landes’ then recent book on time and clocks.
Finally, a complete accident. I was talking casually with an Americanist friend of mine when the conversation turned to the topic of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was a huge international success. He told me something very instructive about its domestic reception. Pro-slavery critics had mercilessly attacked the book as sheer fiction, if not pure lies. Mrs Stowe was so stung by these criticisms that she published a huge book containing all the documents on which she had relied for writing the novel. But very few people had any interest in buying it. This in turn made me think of Emile Zola’s Germinal, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Eduard Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar and a few other novels which had an enormous political impact when they were first published. They are still read today, and yet no one other than a professional historian is eager to read about the ‘facts’ on which these grand fictions were based.
Was there then a sense in which one could think of fictions as being more real than reality? If so, then how could they seem so super-real? Was it only because of their content, or did it have something to do with the novel’s inner form? Out of these odd influences I finally saw how Benjamin’s notion of homogeneous, empty time might help me. The paradox of super-real fiction made it possible to think about nationalism along the same lines. So, a German political economist (Marx), three French historians (Bloch, Febvre and Martin), a British anthropologist (Turner), a German philologist (Auerbach), an American novelist (Stowe) and a German philosopher and literary critic (Benjamin) – all were crucial to the formation of Imagined Communities, yet none of them was particularly interested in nationalism. But in them collectively I found the tools I needed to solve (so I thought) the problem I had originally been incapable of grasping.
Can it properly be said that my book is interdisciplinary? Marx, Benjamin and Stowe, all long dead, were not professors, and I am not sure how far the three Frenchmen and Auerbach, all professors, thought of themselves as representing disciplines, even if Turner, in all probability, did. But Imagined Communities makes no systematic attempt at building a supra-disciplinary perspective (though Marxism is always there). Does the book then belong within one discipline? It certainly doesn’t belong to history, since it is not based on archival or other primary sources. Political science? Only one or two political science books are mentioned in the bibliography. Nonetheless, it is all about a single political force, and the underlying framework comes directly out of my training in comparative politics.
There is still another way of thinking about interdisciplinary studies, which has been hinted at already. All disciplines, simply to be disciplines, have to think of themselves as having boundaries and certain kinds of internal rules, even if these change over time. In doing so, they follow the much larger logic of the ever-expanding division of labour in industrial and post-industrial societies. In principle there is nothing wrong with boundary formation and the creation of internal rules and standards, so long as they are consciously seen as practices pragmatically devised to further the whole field of scholarly endeavour.
The analogy with sports is clear: If you play tennis, you use a round ball and a net, and there are rules about the size of the former and the height of the latter, as well as demarcated spaces in which you can gain points. You are not allowed to hit the ball with your arms, legs or head. If you play football, the ball has to be much bigger, and you need to have goalposts of a specific, arbitrarily decided height; you may use your head and legs, but not your hands. The space in which you play is much larger than in tennis, is differently demarcated, and the rules governing ‘scoring’ are quite detailed. But these rules have also changed over time. If you like playing both tennis and soccer you have to know the different formats and rules. No one thinks of playing ‘intersports’, and everyone knows when he or she is no longer playing the game.
This kind of consciousness is much less common in academia, because academic life is supposed to be about seeking truth rather than having fun (the boundaries and rules are set up for this purpose). When I first suggested to my colleagues that we should offer a course on the history of political science, and found that no one thought it a good idea, I interpreted the resistance in practical terms. Perhaps they thought we had no one who could devise and teach such a course? It turned out that this was not necessarily the case. The problem was how to interpret the relationship between ‘political’ and ‘science’. If one emphasized political and bracketed ‘science’, then the course would have to start with Plato and continue through to, say, Fukuyama. But if one did the reverse, the history would not go back much more than a hundred years, when the term was invented in the context of a very American merger between public administration and constitutional law. The department would have found it difficult to come to an agreement on this. In spite of the complete failure of my proposal, I think all disci
plines should offer at least one really good course on their histories, however conceived, to make students thoroughly aware of the origins and zigzag development of the intellectual walls that largely define them.
Of course there are alternative methods for breaking down disciplinary fences. One is to introduce into the graduate curriculum, forcibly if necessary, fine works in other disciplines or even outside all standard disciplines, especially if these are written by foreigners. The students will then not only pick up some different technical vocabulary and learn new concepts, but will have chance to look at their own (nationally inflected) disciplines from the outside and in a comparative manner. Another method is to try to develop courses that will attract students from different disciplines and, if possible, nationalities. In my experience, students often learn as much from discussions and arguments among themselves as they do from listening to professors. Nothing is more likely to get students to stop thinking creatively than a combination of national egotism and disciplinary myopia.
And what of audience, style and creativity? It is obvious that graduate students start their training by writing papers for their teachers. Prior to that, their writing may be clear and even elegant, or clumsy and muddled, depending partly on talent but mostly on what they have learned in high school and as undergraduates. They are not yet inside the discipline, and they usually write, however naively, as persons. Anyone can read what they compose. But graduate students in the disciplines, especially if professionalism is well advanced, change their writing style fundamentally. As they proceed in their studies, they discover some key things about their future readerships. They are typically told that they are supposed to write primarily for other members of their disciplines, colleagues, editors of disciplinary journals, potential employers and eventually their own students. Their prose should reveal immediately the guild to which they belong.
The influence of this environment can be very strong, and is most visible in the use of (current) disciplinary jargon, excessive citations of previous works in the discipline which do not enlighten the reader but simply perform the rites of membership, and conformity to a kind of impoverished standardized language. Writing for a large, generally educated public, so they are often told, inevitably entails simplification, ‘popularization’ and lack of technical sophistication (that is, it is too easily comprehensible). They also learn that whenever possible the books they eventually write should be published by university rather than commercial presses, since this will ensure that their pre-publication reviewers will be people like themselves, not unpredictable outsiders. Hence, consciously or unconsciously, they are encouraged to employ a prose style which is often much worse than the one they used in high school or as undergraduates. Many continue to write in this way until they retire.
Furthermore, in most universities the everyday power of the disciplinary departments encourages members to take themselves very seriously, such that you feel that the word ‘discipline’ – whose history goes back to the self-punishing rigours of medieval monks intent on subjugating the body as the enemy of the soul – should really always be spelled with a capital D. ‘Frivolity’ and irrelevant digressions are therefore frowned upon. I learned this lesson quite soon after I arrived at Cornell. Still thinking like an undergraduate, in my early papers I included jokes and sarcasms in the main text and, in the footnotes, anecdotes and digressions I had enjoyed in my reading, as well as personal comments. In a friendly way, my teachers warned me to stop writing like this: ‘You are not at Cambridge now, and you are not writing a column for a student magazine. Scholarship is a serious enterprise, anecdotes and jokes rarely have scholarly value, and no one will be interested in your “personal opinions”.’ It was really hard for me to accept this advice, as in previous schools I had always been told that, in writing, ‘dullness’ was the thing to be avoided at all cost. Later I sometimes frivolously thought: ‘Now I understand what traditional Chinese foot-binding must have felt like.’ But eventually, at least after gaining tenure, I escaped. Java in a Time of Revolution (respectably published by Cornell University Press) has no jokes, few digressions and not many ‘personal comments’. But Imagined Communities (published ‘commercially’ by Verso) is full of them.
The obvious point is that breaking down unnecessarily high disciplinary walls usually improves a scholar’s prose, decreases dullness, and opens the way to a much wider potential readership. This does not mean ‘dumbing down’. Books by great stylists like Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Bloch, Maruyama Masao, Eric Hobsbawm, Ruth Benedict, Theodor Adorno, Louis Hartz and many others are often difficult, but they are always a pleasure to read.
To the last page of this chapter, my friend Yoshi adds the following comment:
We think and express ourselves by language if we are novelists or scholars. Between the two, novelists, or generally speaking artists, are usually more innovative and creative than scholars because they are supposed to break out of conventional ideas and expressions. In contrast, scholars tend to become complacent in their world, surrounded and protected by their disciplinary jargons. Jargons can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. Their use facilitates communication among scholars and certifies the professional credentials of their users. But they may also become a prison which constrains the way scholars conceive and express ideas. Thus the question of audiences and prose style goes beyond the simple question of not being dull; it is closely connected with creativity and innovation. It is in this context that the significance of interdisciplinary studies must be appreciated.
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* In 1969 women in the US held 17.3 per cent of professorships, by 2008 the figure was almost 40 per cent, according to the New York Times (3 July 2008).
Chapter 6
Retirement and Liberation
In 1986 the US federal government passed a law which in principle prohibited forced retirement based on advanced age. Thereupon retirement ceased to be applied to tenured university professors. It was lucky, however, that Cornell University had instituted a ‘phased retirement’ system a few years before my heart attack in 1996, at the age of sixty. I decided to take advantage of this and follow the advice of my doctors, partly to make way for younger scholars. Thus, for the next five years, before full retirement, I taught only half the academic year, stopped accepting new graduate students, and quit all administrative work. It then became possible for me to start spending about half of each year at Cornell and the other half in Southeast Asia. At that point I was still banned from Indonesia, so I decided to settle in Bangkok, in easy reach of the capitals of Southeast Asia, and not too far from Taiwan, Japan and India. In this way, I could still work hard at Cornell’s magnificent library in the summer and autumn, yet escape Ithaca’s long dark winters and icy springs.
Two nice events showed me that many people thought my career was coming to an end. In 1998, the American Association of Asian Studies awarded me its annual prize for ‘distinguished lifetime achievement’. A friend suggested that in my acceptance speech I should say something about Asian studies and, more generally, area studies. I told the audience that what differentiated area studies specialists from scholars in other disciplines was the emotional attachment we feel to the places and people we study. I then gently pushed my two teenage adopted Indonesian sons, Benny and Yudi, to stand beside me on the platform to show what I meant. The assembled Asianists responded with sympathetic applause. I felt like crying with happiness.
In 2000 I was awarded the annual Fukuoka prize for academic contributions to the study of Asia, which is usually given to someone on the verge of retirement, or over it. By a piece of luck, the grand prize that year was awarded to the great Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who had been imprisoned by the Suharto dictatorship for twelve years without trial in the penal colony on the island of Buru. In fact, Pramoedya had been repeatedly nominated for this award in the last decade of the Suharto dictatorship, but Fukuoka was too afraid of the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and the Foreig
n Ministry too afraid of Suharto, to give the Indonesian his well-deserved due.* Thanks finally to the Fukuoka committee, however, we now had a chance to be together for several days, after years of semi-clandestine correspondence.
For many men, retirement is, initially at least, a rather painful time. The days can seem very long without a regular work schedule, frequent drinking sessions with colleagues and friends, and regular trips to the golf course. But teachers and scholars are often an exception to the rule. If they no longer teach, they can attend conferences, give speeches, contribute papers, pen reviews and even write books. Many also keep in close touch with former graduate students, since the teacher-student bond is something one can find the whole world over. In this way, academic retirees can also follow new trends, look for new research agendas, and find new problems to ponder over. In fact, they have more time to think than their younger colleagues, who are immersed in administration, committee assignments, teaching, advising, and sometimes buttering up the government officials in control of research funds. Retirees can also, if they wish, free themselves from disciplinary and institutional constraints, and return to projects left undone in the distant past.
I have pursued a number of avenues since my retirement in 2001. As a teenager, I had often dreamed of being a novelist, though I soon realized I had no talent. But when I started on the project that eventually became Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005), my childhood literary instincts were reawakened. I had always felt a strong political sympathy with anarchists, and for a time had taught Cornell undergraduates about Bakunin and Kropotkin. But it was only when I realized that the period in Philippine history that interested me most – the last two decades of the nineteenth century – coincided almost exactly with the period between Marx’s death and Lenin’s rise, when international anarchism was at the height of its prestige and influence, that I began to see a way to ‘globalize’ early anti-colonial nationalisms.
A Life Beyond Boundaries Page 14
