Benedict R. O. Anderson
August 26, 1936
– December 13, 2015
Benedict
Anderson, the Aaron L. Binenkorb Emeritus
Professor of International Studies, and a long time faculty
member of the Government department, died December 13,
2015, age 79 in Malang, Indonesia, apparently of heart
failure. Ben had retired from Cornell in 2002, and spent
most of his time in Asia, although he returned to his home
outside of Freeville every summer, and remained active in
Southeast Asian studies. An extraordinarily productive
scholar and writer, he had just finished drafting his last
book, A Life Beyond Boundaries: A Memoir (2016), which
appeared in print several months after his passing.
Ben gained broad international recognition for his 1983 book
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, one of the most influential
studies of
nationalism, that helped reshape how scholars think of the
origins and dynamics of nationalistic ideology. Most
students of nationalism had viewed nations as either old and
eternal, or ahistorical curiosities of the capitalist age. Ben
argued that nations were modern “imagined communities,”
that arose as a consequence of capitalism and the
explosion of the printed word, which served to unite mass
publics around a single vernacular language and a particular
sense of a community made up of people one would never
meet. His analysis firmly rejected the idea that nations were
eternal, but nevertheless insisted that even critical analysts
must take this peculiar idea of an “imagined” community
seriously. Even imagined communities may be meaningful.
Imagined Communities has been translated into over 20
languages and Google scholar today credits it with over
70,000 citations.
In addition to Imagined Communities, In the course of a long
academic career, Ben published several hundred
publications, mostly focusing on Southeast Asia, including
Java in a Time of Revolution (1972),
Language and Power:
Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (1990),
The Spectre
of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World
(1998), and Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-
Colonial Imagination (2005). Other influential publications
include “Old State, New Society: Indonesia's New. Order in
Comparative Historical Perspective,” published in the
Journal of Asian Studies
, and “The idea of power in
Javanese culture
,” published in his Language and power:
exploring political cultures in Indonesia.
Beyond his own
scholarly output, he gave generously of his time in
establishing Cornell Southeast Asia Publications as a
repository for influential, immersive scholarship on
Southeast Asia. With Audrey Kahin, he also nurtured the
Cornell-edited journal Indonesia, still the top outlet for
Indonesian studies across the humanities and social
sciences.
Ben was born in China in 1936, to an Irish father and an
English mother. His father was a commissioner in the
Imperial Maritime Customs Service, and the family was
forced to leave China in 1941, when it was invaded by
Japan. He studied at Eton and Cambridge University in
England, where he received first class honors in Classics in
1957. Ben came to Ithaca as a graduate student in the early
1960s. Under the tutelage of George Kahin, he turned his
focus on Southeast Asia, and began his teaching career in
the Government Department in 1967, never really to leave it
until his retirement in 2002. He was also active in leadership
roles in the Southeast Asian Studies Program, helping to
establish it as the premier center for the study of the
Southeast Asia in the US. For much of that time, he lived in
an old farmhouse outside of Freeville, 8 miles north east of
campus.
He arrived in Ithaca and to the Government Department
during the tumultuous years when Cornell was one of the
national epicenters of campus anti-Vietnam-war protest and
civil rights activism. Ben combined meticulous scholarship
with passionate political engagement. He became a vocal
critic of the Suharto regime in Indonesia. An essay entitled
“A Preliminary Analysis of the October 1, 1965, Coup in
Indonesia” (co-authored with Ruth McVey and Frederick
Bunnell), which challenged the official story of the
September 30 Movement and the anti-communist slaughter
of almost a million people in Indonesia and later came to be
known around the world as simply “The Cornell Paper”, led
to him being banned from that country from 1972 until the
end of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998.
Ben was a superb teacher for the Government Department,
with legendary courses on militarism, nationalism, as well as
Southeast Asian politics. A formidable intellect with little
patience for disciplinary boundaries, he served on a large
number of graduate student committees in and out of the
Government department. He was much esteemed by his
Government colleagues, despite his limited interest in much
departmental business. For instance, he was known for not
saying much at the Wednesday noon faculty meetings,
diligently working on the New York Times crossword
puzzle
—in pen—instead.
Anderson is survived by his brother Perry Anderson, his
sister Melanie Anderson and his two adopted sons, Yudi
and Beni.
Nic van de Walle, chair; Isaac Kramnick, Kaja M. McGowan
and Tom Pepinsky