On August 24, the Foundation for Social Sciences and Humanities Textbooks and Southeast Asian Studies Program, Thammasat University, will host a seminar in honor of the late Irish-born historian Benedict Anderson (1936-2015). Online preregistration for the seminar is available. As TU students of political science and history know, Professor Anderson wrote a highly influential book, Imagined Communities (1983), analyzing the origins of nationalism. Imagined Communities is in the collection of the TU Libraries as well as several other books by and about Benedict Anderson. These include Withdrawal Symptoms (1976), his most influential work in Thailand; Religion and Social Ethos in Indonesia (1977); Interpreting Indonesian Politics: Thirteen Contributions to the Debate (1982); In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (1985); Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990); The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (1998); Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia (2001); Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005); The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (2012); and Exploration and Irony in Studies of Siam Over Forty Years (2014). In some of these works, the range of references is unusually wide, including not just political science, history, and world literature, but also popular culture and film. Typically, Professor Anderson would take the time to get to know personally writers and filmmakers whose works he admired.
As TU students may also know, due to the generosity of Professor Anderson and his longtime friend and colleague, Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri, many books from Professor Anderson’s own personal collection were donated to the TU Library and are available on the shelves of the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room, Pridi Banomyong Library, U1 level, Tha Prachan campus. One of the themes of the event as described in A Life Beyond Boundaries will be an image familiar to any TU student who has seen it stamped inside books from the collection of Benedict Anderson and now in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room: a frog leaping away from a coconut shell. Professor Anderson wrote in his memoir:
Both [Thai and Indonesian people] have long had a fatalistic image of a frog who lives all its life under half a coconut shell…Sitting quietly under the shell, before long the frog begins to feel that the coconut bowl encloses the entire universe. The moral judgement in the image is that the frog is narrow-minded, provincial, stay-at-home and self-satisfied for no good reason.
Professor Anderson himself was unlike the frog, traveling widely even in childhood. In A Life Beyond Boundaries, he recalled his youthful studies, along with some recollections of libraries a half-century ago and today:
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In those days libraries were still sacred places. One went into the ‘stacks’, dusted off the old books one needed to read, treasured their covers, sniffed their bindings, and smiled by their sometimes strange, outdated spellings. Then came the best part, randomly lifting out books on the same shelf out of pure curiosity, and finding the most unexpected things. We were informally trained how to think about sources, how to evaluate them, compare them, dismiss them, enjoy them. Chance was built into the learning process. Surprise too.
Today, libraries are trying monomaniacally to digitalize everything, perhaps in the expectation that eventually books will become obsolete. Everything will be findable ‘online ’. Randomness is perhaps disappearing, along with luck. Google is an extraordinary ‘research engine ’, says Google, without irony in its use of the word ‘engine ’, which in Old English meant ‘trickery’ (as is reflected in the verb ‘to engineer’) or even ‘an engine of torture ’. Neither Google nor the students who trust it realize that late- nineteenth-century books feel this way in one’s hands, while early-twentieth-century books feel that way. Japanese books are bound one way, Burmese books another. Online, everything is to become a democratically egalitarian ‘entry’. There is no surprise, no affection, no scepticism. The faith students have in Google is almost religious. Critical evaluation of Google? We do not yet teach it. Many students have no idea that even though Google ‘makes everything available ’, it works according to a program. Nationalism and globalization do have the tendency to circumscribe our outlook and simplify matters. This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism. Hence, in the spirit of Walt Kelly as well as Karl Marx in a good mood, I suggest the following slogan for young scholars: Frogs in their fight for emancipation will only lose by crouching in their murky coconut half-shells. Frogs of the world unite!”
The seminar on August 24 in the Thammasat Liberal Arts Building, Tha Prachan, will feature presentations by Professor Tsuyoshi Kato of Kyoto University about translating A Life Beyond Boundaries into Japanese, Anan Krudphet, and Ajarn Charnvit. Other participants will be Ajarn Kasian Tejapira, professor of political science at TU, Ajarn Kanokrat Lertchusakul, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, and the historian Chris Baker, among others. Some of the ongoing inspiration found in Professor Anderson’s writings is in the reminders he offers about the importance of learning, and the way to look at problems that appear impossible to understand. At a lecture in 2012 at the 40th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology in New Delhi, India, Professor Anderson stated:
Our generation was perhaps the last that was trained to think “internationally” about culture internationally. One was supposed to learn to be “cultured,” which meant starting with Latin in primary school and moving on to ancient Greek, French, a bit of German, and some Russian (we didn’t really learn to speak these languages, just to read them). One was taught to admire Spanish painting, German music, Russian novels, translated Chinese classical poetry, Japanese movies (then at their international peak), etc…As a bookish child, I was a hungry fan of Conan Doyle’s endless Sherlock Holmes stories. If you have enjoyed the stories, you will remember that down-to-earth Dr. Watson never solves any puzzle because he is always thinking about material evidence. In a famous passage, Sherlock tells him that this is not enough. A detective has to notice what is absent, invisible. I don’t recall when I began to think consciously about absence, but I am fairly sure that in the 70s I started to asked students not to criticize what was wrong, muddled, or unscientific in this book or that article but rather to consider what was invisible in them.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)