Ben Anderson died in Surabaya, Indonesia, on Dec 11, slightly short of his 80th birthday. Southeast Asia has lost one of its great scholars. This book, published last year, is a collection of his main writings on Siam.
Between 1977 and 1985, Anderson published three essays that remain among the most read and referenced studies of modern Thailand. All three focus in different ways on the extraordinary period from the student uprising of October 1973 to the bloody coup and massacre of Oct 6, 1976. All three -- included in this book -- are also fascinated by the political role and cultural stance of the Bangkok middle class and the position of the Thai monarchy.
In "Withdrawal Symptoms: Social And Cultural Aspects Of The October 6 Coup", Anderson examined the interplay between the American impact on Thailand, the power of the Thai military, and the political stance of the middle class. The essay ends, rather prophetically, by flagging "the process whereby the right gradually concedes, almost without being aware of it, that it is engaged in civil war".
In the introduction to "In The Mirror", a collection of short stories in translation, he delved deeper into the rapid creation of a new middle class in the "American era", and the appearance of a radicalised cultural vanguard. In "Studies Of The Thai State: The State Of Thai Studies", Anderson took Siam's proud claim of evading colonialism and turned it on its head -- finding this "success" responsible for the parochialism and pervasive conservatism in Thai politics and its study.
In 1990, he added a fourth stellar article on Thailand, "Murder And Progress In Modern Siam", which argued that the rise of political violence, especially over elections, signalled that democracy had at last caught the attention of a larger constituency than the students and intellectuals, and "something really new is now in place".
Anderson was best known as a scholar of Indonesia. He turned to studying Thailand and the Philippines after being banned from Indonesia by Suharto's government. He learned Thai and Tagalog as well as Bahasa Indonesia, making him truly a scholar of the region. In 1983, he published Imagined Communities, a world-spanning study of nationalism that has since been published in 25 languages (including Thai) and made him world-famous. Although labelled as a political scientist, he was fascinated by culture of all kinds, especially literature, performance, painting and film.
The collected Thai works of the late Ben Anderson, Exploration And Irony In Studies Of Siam Over Forty Years, by Benedict Anderson, edited by Tamara Loos.
He had a unique talent for inserting the reality of everyday life into academic study. He did sophisticated analysis without a word of jargon. The huge success of Imagined Communities was due not only to what the book said, but how it was expressed.
In the introduction to this collection Tamara Loos traces the author's intellectual biography, starting with a peripatetic childhood, an Eton-Cambridge education in the Classics, and a somewhat chance transition to Cornell University and the study of Southeast Asia in 1958. After retirement from Cornell, Anderson divided his time between homes in Ithaca and Bangkok. The latter part of this collection contains essays and fragments on Thailand that appeared between 2006 and 2013. Whereas the 1976 coup was inspiration for the first set of essays, the 2006 coup hovers in the background of the second set. The middle class and the monarchy are again in the centre of the frame.
And, depressingly, many of Anderson's themes still work despite 30 years of extraordinary change in Thai society.
This second batch of essays is not overtly about politics. There are two articles on film, particularly a long discourse on the reception of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2004 film Sat Pralaat (Tropical Malady), an essay on public iconography from statues to billboards, and some shorter squibs. As Loos notes in her introduction, and Anderson in a bridging essay, the radicals that fascinated Anderson in the 1970s had grown up and calmed down by the 2000s. The spirit of defiance was now to be found among women overthrowing male bias, gays cheerfully upending cultural stereotypes, and cultural radicals bamboozling the guardians of middle-class values. These essays appeared first in Thai, mostly in the cultural journal An, and only later in English translation.
People who were taught by Anderson at Cornell University remember it as an extraordinary though rather nerve-racking experience because he challenged the students to justify everything they said or wrote. Young students who met him in recent years were amazed to find that this world-famous author was a warm, approachable man who was genuinely interested to hear what they thought, or to read what they had written, and especially to engage them in long debates. "Ajarn Ben" was fascinated by politics, entranced by culture (especially film), and amused by life.
Tamara Loos has done a great service by bringing Anderson's works on Thailand together in one place, and providing many little-known biographical details.
Ben Anderson was a great scholar, a great teacher, and a great human being.
