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Recollections About Southeast Asian Studies at the ANU Benedict J. Tria

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Recollections About Southeast Asian Studies at the ANU Benedict J. Tria Southeast Asian Studies at ANU – Personal recollection Recollections about Southeast Asian Studies at the ANU Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, July 2019 From January 1984 through December 1985, I was a Senior Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change (PSC), Research School of Pacific Studies (RSPacS). From February 1992 through October 2008, I was a Professor in PSC (and its Head of Department, 1992‐ 2007). The school’s name then was Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS). Before going to the ANU My growing concern during the early 1960s with the United States government’s actions in Laos and Vietnam started my interest in Southeast Asia. I was an undergraduate majoring in political science at Whitman College in the state of Washington, USA. Whitman had attracted me because it was a small liberal arts institution not far from my home state, Montana, and because it gave me a nice scholarship, which I desperately needed in order to go beyond high school. For courses at Whitman in political science, history, and economics, I did papers about Vietnam and Laos as well as the Philippines; my senior thesis analyzed Philippine political development. For graduate school, I wanted Cornell or Yale but neither university accepted me. My second choices, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW‐M), admitted me but only the latter offered some financial assistance, so I went there in the Fall of 1965 as a MA student in the Department of Political Science. A year later I was admitted to the department’s PhD program. My minor field was Southeast Asian Studies, which required learning a language and taking courses in fields beyond political science. I wanted to learn Vietnamese. At Whitman and UW‐M, I became highly critical of US policies and wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. I read much about those countries and joined anti‐war organizations and teach‐ins while at the UW‐M and at the University of Hawai’i where I started teaching in 1971. At UW‐M in 1966, Southeast Asian language choices were Chinese (on the grounds that it was used in some parts of the region) and Indonesian. Vietnamese wasn’t yet taught there. (Only later did the university offer additional Southeast Asian languages.) I enjoyed five semesters of Bahasa Indonesia; and in 1967, during my second year of language courses, I was anticipating doing PhD dissertation research in Java in mid or late 1968. Agrarian and peasant politics were the subjects within Southeast Asia that most interested me. I did papers on those topics in political science courses taught by Charles Anderson, Henry Hart, and Fred Von der Mehden and in history courses taught by John Smail. Fred and John were scholars of Southeast Asia; Charlie and Henry were scholars of Latin America and South Asia, respectively. All four professors inspired me to pursue in‐depth research on the people, practices, and politics of whatever dissertation topic I chose. Stressing the same was James C. Scott, who joined the Department of Political Science during my third year of graduate school and became the chair of my dissertation committee. My first dissertation topic concerned the Nahdlatul Ulama in rural Java. Being refused a research visa in 1968 for that subject, however, forced me to consider a topic about Indonesia that didn’t involve living among villagers. I decided, instead, to continue to emphasize agrarian politics but switch countries. A paper I had done on the Huk rebellion for one of John Smail’s courses had raised major questions about rural unrest in the Philippines that existing literature could not answer. Jim Scott and John suggested I take my dissertation research in that direction. But for that I needed to know Tagalog. Jim, John, and Fred somehow found money to hire Elena Reyes, a native Tagalog speaker who was a PhD student in UW‐M’s English department, to teach her language during the Fall semester of 1968. I ended up being her only student. She pressed me hard. Having studied Indonesian helped me to pronounce Tagalog words, but the grammar was extremely different. Elena’s effective teaching, however, got me to a level at which I could begin to use the language. I’m forever grateful for that funding of Tagalog instruction and all financial aid I received. Without scholarships and fellowships I would not have completed undergraduate and graduate degrees. Summer jobs, occasional part‐time work by my wife and myself , and gifts from parents and grandparents were insufficient to finance my education. Money from Whitman College and its alumni, the US government’s National Defense Title IV and Title VI programs, the Mid‐West Universities Consortium for International Activities, and the Foreign Area Fellowship program was essential for launching my academic career. From late March 1969 to December 1970, I lived in Quezon City and Central Luzon while researching the Huk rebellion. It was a challenging, often frustrating, but usually rewarding adventure. I returned to UW‐M with more than enough quality material to write a dissertation. I was still writing it when I began teaching in the Fall semester of 1971 in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii (UH) in Manoa, Honolulu. Getting that position was a godsend because the department appreciated teaching and research on Asia and the university had considerable resources for Southeast Asian studies. At UH, I could occasionally teach courses on Southeast Asia and was the supervisor or advisor to several MA and PhD students researching topics in that region; several of those students were from countries there. I also worked with colleagues across the campus to bolster Southeast Asian studies at UH. In 1975‐1977, I chaired UH’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and, in 1986‐1987, directed its Center for Philippine Studies. In the early 1980s, a group of us organized and raised money for the First International Philippine Studies Conference. Later that decade I secured grants to finance scholarly exchanges between UH and the University of San Carlos in Cebu City and to mobilize a dozen international scholars to analyze local Philippine politics. While at UH I was also active and had some leadership positions in the Association for Asian Studies and the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, which became Critical Asian Studies. Sabbaticals from UH and fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to complete publications about the Huk rebellion and do new research in the Philippines. At the ANU In 1981 or 1982, during a visit to Honolulu on his way to the US mainland, Jamie Mackie, an Indonesianist with research interests in the Philippines as well, alerted me to fellowships in the Department of Political and Social Change (PSC), which he had helped to establish at the ANU. In 1983, I successfully applied for a two‐year Senior Fellowship there. Greeting my wife Melinda, our daughter Jodie, and me at the Canberra airport when we arrived January 1984 was Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, a political scientist we knew in the Philippines. Dodong was on leave from the University of the Philippines while holding a fellowship in PSC. In addition to him and Jamie, PSC’s faculty were Ron May, who emphasized Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, and Bill O’Malley and Ken Young, both Indonesianists. By late 1985, Dodong had returned home to the Philippines, but political scientists Harold Crouch, researching Indonesia and Malaysia, and Kevin Hewison, a Thailand specialist, had positions in PSC. The department’s PhD students with Southeast Asia interests emphasized Indonesia. In 1983, Jamie and Bill had joined Indonesianists elsewhere in RSPacS to initiate the Indonesia Update, which became an annual event and a model for ANU “Updates” about other Asian countries. In my two years with PSC, I mostly did additional research for, and started to write, a book about village politics in the Philippines. By the time I returned to the ANU in early 1992, this time on a permanent basis, I had finished that book and some additional publications on the Philippines. I had also decided to get serious about doing research in Vietnam. While still at UH and during a summer in Hanoi, I had started to learn Vietnamese. I continued to learn at the ANU by taking a class in the Faculty of Asian Studies. Also valuable for my language learning while at the ANU was Phạm Thu Thủy, a half‐time research assistant in PSC who, besides helping me and other faculty with our projects, conversed with me in Vietnamese and corrected things I wrote in that language. Thủy and her partner Ngô Văn Khoa organized numerous Saturday gatherings of people, many from the ANU, who wanted to practice their Vietnamese. During these sessions, our group, which Thủy named “Hồn Việt” [spirit of Vietnam], talked in Vietnamese about films, short stories, and other materials that she and other participants prepared or presented. PSC, established in 1978, was one of the last departments created in RSPacS. Anthony Lowe told me that the planning for PSC began while he was RSPacS’s director (1973‐1975) and resulted from a compromise between those in the school who sought a department of politics and others who wanted a department of sociology. By 1992, PSC emphasized contemporary political, sociological, and historical issues in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, and the Pacific, particularly Papua New Guinea. The department had three permanent faculty members: Ron May, Harold Crouch, and myself (replacing Jamie Mackie, who had retired, as head of department).
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