The Art of Noticing

Among the links that circulated in the wake of Benedict Anderson’s death in December 2015, one brings up a 1994 interview aired on Dutch television in which he explained, in sly equanimity, that nationalism is all about love. As Anderson spoke, the interviewer nodded, as if relieved. It’s easy to boil Imagined Communities down to a simple message: nations are imagined as bands of brothers. It’s also easy to read Anderson’s masterpiece as suppressing differences in tracing a history in which a cultural model born in South America gives shape to political struggles throughout the world. A bevy of critics have done just that. But in doing so, they have missed something critical in Anderson’s scholarship that his remarkable memoir, A Life Beyond Boundaries, makes plain: his passion for the peculiar. For me, and perhaps for others who have learned from him in various ways, Benedict Anderson’s most important legacy may have been his curiosity — his art of noticing connections that others might miss. Whereas analyses spark analyses, memoirs spark memories. In this essay, using Anderson’s memoir as a starting point, I offer some reflections on how it felt to be trained in this art.

I must begin with a caveat. I was not quite Anderson’s student. He was gone during my first two years of graduate school, and, when I asked him to be on my committee, he refused, although he read and commented on everything I sent him and was more than kind to me as I moved forward in my career. But I still had a sufficient share of the anxiety of influence to jump on the bandwagon, I’m sad to admit, when my colleagues at the University of Chicago, where I spent the first decade of my career, began engaging in the fashionable sport of Anderson-bashing back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. John Kelly, with his partner, Martha Kaplan, was completing Represented Communities (2001), which challenged Anderson’s chronology and what they thought of as his romanticism. They argued that the nation was the product of the post–Second World War period of decolonization, the top-down creation of the United Nations, not the outcome of struggles from below. In the Chicago history department, Steven Pincus was gearing up to attack Anderson from the opposite end of the timeline. The first nation was not born in Latin America, Pincus declared, but in England, in the Glorious Revolution, a much underestimated episode in the history that gave rise to the West (Pincus 2011). Taking another tack, my colleagues Michael Silverstein (2000) and Susan Gal (2014) brought the arsenal of linguistic anthropology to bear on the problem. Not only were nations not what Anderson imagined; neither were languages, which didn’t exist in a discrete, self-contained form until nineteenth-century states worked to standardize what were in fact mixtures of tongues (see also Gal and Woolard 2014a and 2014b).

Then there were the feminists and the post-colonial theorists, who were also outraged by what they thought Anderson’s paradigm lacked. I was impressionable. I was a turncoat. When I turned my dissertation “Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: Power, History, and Difference in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia” (Rutherford 1997) into a book (Rutherford 2003), I gave it a new subtitle: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier. I saw my material as showing how the people of Biak — denizens of a distant and troubled corner of Indonesia — managed to participate in Indonesian institutions without adopting Indonesian points of view. I called their practices “anti-national” and explicitly discussed how my findings diverged from what Imagined Communities might lead us to expect.

Anderson read my book. And was nice enough to tell me how much he liked it. I was surprised, but then I felt stupid. Anderson was intellectually generous, but there were limits; none of my teachers suffered...