Free A Life Beyond Boundaries by Benedict Anderson

teasing me, and boosting my frail morale. We were together all the time in the classroom, the library, and of course the bars. Looking back, I realize that I learned as much from my fellow students as from my teachers, whom I usually met only in the classroom or the office. The teachers were very kind but extremely busy, and I didn’t feel like imposing myself.
    The Southeast Asia program was something else, because Kahin had the brilliant idea of asking the president of the university, whom he knew well, to allow him to use an abandoned fraternity house as the office space for the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project he had just started.Kahin got some of his students to put in steel pillars to hold up the sagging floors. He kept a downstairs office for himself, but the rest of the three-story building was turned over to the senior students of the program, whether they were Indonesianists or not. The lunchtime ‘brown-bag’ meetings were held here too. This crumbling building, which became legendary as ‘102 West Avenue’, somehow survived till the 1980s, when it was torn down to make way for a parking lot. So we had our own building, which was socially and psychologically very important.
    When I arrived, Kahin had organized a team of his senior students to produce a book called Governments and Politics of Southeast Asia under his editorship, the first such book published anywhere. So ‘baby Anderson’, who spent a lot of time chatting in the building, had everyday contact with senior students, some just back from Vietnam, Burma, the Philippines or Indonesia, who were full of fabulous stories and eager to share them. The core group in the building, however, were the Indonesianists, Herbert Feith, John Smail, Ruth McVey and Dan Lev, along with Selo Soemardjan, the already middle-aged secretary to the sultan of Jogjakarta, and a wise, kind and extremely friendly man. Ruth McVey stood out, not only by her intelligence and wide knowledge – she had early on been a Sovietologist and was fluent in Russian – but also because she was a woman. In those days Southeast Asia program members were 90 per cent male. Everyone was very nice to the ‘baby’.
    One other aspect of my intellectual life in those days was something that today is really hard to imagine. There was little to read on Southeast Asia that was in English andof high quality. (I did not learn to read Dutch till after I went to Indonesia.) There was of course Kahin’s previously mentioned masterpiece. There was Benda’s book, already mentioned too. In 1960, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s best book, The Religion of Java , became available, as well as shorter pieces by the same author. Neither Kahin nor Benda were especially interested in Java, and neither knew any Javanese. But Geertz opened my eyes to ‘culture’, Javanese culture, in a powerful way, which connected up with my European ‘cultural education’. There were also Bill Skinner’s studies of Chinese communities in Siam and Indonesia. Almost nothing first-class was available on post-independence Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam or Cambodia, except a few articles here and there. Even if we wanted to research, for example, Indonesian politics, there were few helpful studies available in English. The result was that we found ourselves in the position of anthropologists, studying things that were still largely unknown while relying on our curiosity, observation and daily chatting. That is why, all my life, I have kept up reading in anthropology and have been greatly influenced by it.
    Meantime, I was taking and enjoying classes in bahasa Indonesia under the supervision of John Echols and two Indonesian students. How happy I was to be studying an Asian language, with rules and sounds that did not exist in ‘my Europe’! I did not know then what I discovered later – that three years of classroom language study is not worth six months of