A Life Beyond Boundaries: A Memoir by Benedict Anderson

Author:Benedict Anderson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-04-26T04:30:00+00:00

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* Published in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 9:3 (July–September 1977), pp. 13–30. A belated follow-up was my only book on Siam, In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era (Bangkok: Duang Kamon, 1985).

Chapter 4

Frameworks of Comparison

In my early days at Cornell, use of the concept of ‘comparison’ was still somewhat limited. I do not mean that comparisons were never made; they were made all the time, both consciously and (more often) unconsciously, but invariably in a practical way and on a small scale. Even today, in the Cornell College of Arts and Sciences, there is only one department (comparative literature) that uses the term in its title, and this department did not exist in the early 1960s when I left for Indonesia to undertake fieldwork.

Historians, anthropologists, economists and sociologists rarely thought systematically about comparison at all. The political science department was a partial exception, since it had a subsection called ‘comparative government’, to which I belonged. But the comparisons my classmates and I studied were primarily focused on Western Europe. The reason for this was understandable. European countries had for centuries interacted with one another, learned from one another, and competed with each other. They also believed that they shared a common civilization based on antiquity and different Christianities. Comparisons seemed both simple and relevant.

For me, the odd thing was that comparative government did not cover the US itself, which was the preserve of a different subsection called American government. On one level, this division was easy to understand in practical terms. The undergraduate students, thinking about future careers as politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers and so on, were overwhelmingly interested in courses about their own country’s politics. The same ‘nationalist’ interest can be found in most countries. My department was dominated by Americanists because of student demand. A less obvious factor was the pervasive ‘frog under the coconut shell’ mentality created by what I call ‘official nationalism’. The US has two important neighbours, Mexico and Canada, but there were no courses on these countries’ politics, and, right up to the point of my retirement in 2001, it was rare to find a student who could name either the president of the former or the prime minister of the latter.

One of the central myths of American nationalism has long been ‘exceptionalism’ – the idea that US history, culture and political life are by definition incomparable. The US is not like Europe, not like Latin America, and absolutely not like Asia. Needless to say, this fancy is absurd. In different ways, depending on which countries in what periods are relevant, the US is perfectly comparable, especially with Europe, South America, Japan and the British Dominions of the Empire (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and so on). Another aspect of this perspective is its deeply ingrained provincialism. Hence the strong resistance to the logical case for including American politics within comparative politics.

One could plausibly add two other factors that are more specific. The first is the institutional history of the study of politics in the United States.

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