For three days, we sat and talked in a breezy kitchen packed with unruly stacks of crime novels, scholarly journals, Asian newspapers, and doctoral theses. He lived in Freeville, eight miles east of Ithaca, in a spacious old farmhouse surrounded by grazing cattle and with a barn topped by a Javanese-style weather vane. In June 2001, when Anderson was 64, I traveled to upstate New York to profile him for Lingua Franca. “Being in Thailand,” he later said, “forced me to think all the time about if I had to write about Thailand and Indonesia in one space, how would I do it?” Anderson, who died in Batu, Indonesia, in December at the age of 79, overcame that challenge, and the result was Imagined Communities (1983), a classic analysis of nationalism that has been translated into 29 languages. Still, the period Anderson spent in Thailand was essential to his intellectual growth, as it forced him to think comparatively-which, at the time, was rare among area-studies scholars. The good times ended in 1976, when the military overthrew the civilian regime and publicly shot and hanged student radicals in downtown Bangkok. A heady interlude between dictatorships allowed Thai radicalism to flower. “It was a wonderful time to be there,” he later said. With Indonesia closed to him, Anderson journeyed to Bangkok in 1974. It was the beginning of an exile that would endure for almost three decades. In April 1972, Anderson was expelled from the country. The young scholar, entirely fluent in Indonesian, was being watched: A US embassy document from 1967 stated that Anderson was “regarded…as an outright Communist or at least a fellow traveler.” He also found himself under attack in the Indonesian press: The magazine Chas, which reportedly had ties to the country’s intelligence services, called him a “useful idiot” in a front-page article.

A radical printing collective in Australia published it as an orange-colored, 28-page pamphlet titled “Analysis of Responsibility,” with an admiring introduction by the translator.Īfter Sudisman’s trial, Anderson’s ability to do research in Java would eventually be curtailed. Probably you two are the only ones I can trust to make sure that what I said will survive.’ It was like an appeal from a dying man.” Anderson answered that appeal in 1975, when he translated Sudisman’s speech into English from a smuggled copy of the court transcript. He didn’t say anything, but I had such a strong feeling that he was thinking: ‘You have to help us. In 2001, Anderson told me that he “was so dignified, so calm, and his speech was so great, that I felt a kind of moral obligation” to do something: “As Sudisman was leaving the courtroom for the last time, he looked at me and Herb.

Sudisman, who received a death sentence, also maintained his composure.

Benedict anderson definition of nation