Benedict Anderson: A Personal Tribute

I came to know Ben Anderson rather late.

Sometime in 1987, in a Mister Donut coffee shop in Cebu City, Alfred McCoy, Michael Cullinane, and I decided to put up a panel for the annual Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Conference slated to take place in San Francisco in March 1988. I knew Mike and Al from the time they were doing doctoral fieldwork in Cebu and Iloilo, respectively, in a friendship that stimulated my interest in history and has lasted to this day. And so, as the “Visayan gang,” we were excited about having our own panel at the AAS conference in San Francisco. It was to be our “coming-out party.” “Showtime,” Al said in his engagingly histrionic way, and it was his bright idea to invite Ben Anderson as our panel discussant.

Already a legend in Southeast Asian studies with his work on Indonesia and Thailand, Ben had started at the time to do work on the Philippines. (He would publish later that year what may be his first full article on the Philippines, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” in the New Left Review [Anderson 1988]). Our panel on Filipino political families (which eventually formed the core of An Anarchy of Families [McCoy 1993]) was to be Ben’s first appearance in a Philippine panel at AAS.

It was showtime indeed. With high interest in the Philippines because of the “People Power Revolution” and Ben’s presence, our panel was assigned to the hotel ballroom for an unusually heavily attended presentation. I am still amused by the image I had of Al, Mike, and myself studiously taking down notes, like earnest graduate students, as Ben thoughtfully commented on our papers and suggested lines of inquiry for a comparative study of political families in Southeast Asia.

This was the first time I met Ben. We briefly chatted after the panel session and he graciously invited me to come to Ithaca for a talk, which I did a week or so later.

In the years after, we ran into each other mostly at conferences (Madison, Ann Arbor, Honolulu, Manila), and once in a surprise visit he made to Cebu where my wife and I had the privilege of having him as a guest in the house for dinner. The last time I saw him was in November 2014 when, in the company of Karina Bolasco, he showed up in a lecture on Nick Joaquin I was giving in Ateneo. (He was stranded in Manila, waiting for his Irish passport to be renewed so he could fly back to Bangkok.)

It was in the 1970s that I first came to know, if tentatively, of Ben’s writings when I started to read up on Indonesia. I had received a doctoral fellowship in comparative literature under Ford Foundation’s Southeast Asian Graduate Training Fellowship Program (1974–1977), and was programmed to go to the University of Indonesia. Like anyone coming into Indonesian studies from the outside, reading scholars like Clifford Geertz and Benedict Anderson was inevitably a must.

I never made it to Indonesia however. In a story too long to tell, for having been a political detainee in the early months of martial rule, I could not get a passport to travel and had to abandon any plan I may have had for becoming an Indonesianist. I would have missed Ben anyway had I gone to Indonesia. As I would learn much later, Ben was expelled from Indonesia in 1972 for cowriting the controversial “Cornell Paper,” which incensed the Indonesian government for its investigation of the “anti-Communist massacres” of 1965–1966 that marked Suharto’s rise to power.

One is awed by the stories one learns about Ben’s life and career. Born to Anglo-Irish parents in China, he had his early schooling in the US (where his family was stranded in the Second World War); studied at Cambridge in England; did his doctoral studies at Cornell; and lived in Indonesia in the 1960s in the politically heady days under Sukarno. Barred from Indonesia, he shifted to Thai studies in the midst of the fall of the...