from the Preface:

When Imagined Communities was originally written twenty years ago, in 1982-83, I knew no Spanish or Tagalog, and had only spent one week in the Philippines. I had gone there early in 1972, to visit my old friend Joel Rocamora, who then introduced me to his cousin Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo. It was already pretty clear that something like Martial Law was on the horizon. Dodong assigned two of his young followers to take me, more or less under cover, to the outskirts of Gapan, so that I could meet some of the Hukbalahap veterans living there semi-underground. (Only later did I learn that these charming kids were eventually murdered by some of just these veterans.)

Nonetheless, I had begun to be drawn to the Philippines as early as the 1960s when reading, with endless laughter and fascination, Lolo Jose’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.

A few months after my visit to Manila and Gapan, I was kicked out of Indonesia by the Suharto dictatorship, and I remained banned for another 27 years. It was obvious to me that I had to “diversify” beyond Indonesia. I could then have returned to the Philippines, but Martial Law was declared that September, and I made a vow to myself that I would not go to Manila again until Marcos’s dictatorship had fallen.

By a stroke of suerte in October 1973, there was a popular uprising against the Thanom-Praphat military dictatorship in Bangkok, and for the next three years Thailand was an exciting, free, and dynamic place to be. So I opted to go “comparative” by studying Buddhist, monarchical, uncolonized Thailand, after 15 years of work on Muslim, Republican, and ex-colonial Indonesia.

However, in the mid-1980s, it was becoming obvious that the Marcos regime was crumbling, and many of my best students at Cornell University were deciding to work on the Philippines, for political as well as scholarly reasons. I more or less tagged along behind them, making my second visit to Manila in 1987, and using a Fulbright-Hays grant to spend much of 1989 and 1990 in the country.

It was an exciting time to be there, even if much of my time was taken up with improving my minimal Tagalog as well as teaching myself Spanish. The marks of this first immersion in Philippine society are clear in the revised and expanded edition of Imagined Communities which appeared in 1991, and still more so in the three chapters devoted to the country in my recent The Spectre of Comparisons (1998). To Indonesia and Thailand, I was now able, even if amateurishly, to add the Catholic-Muslim, twice-colonized Philippines to my comparative reach. And I was enormously happy to be able to steal the very title of my book from Lolo Jose’s memorable coinage: “el demonio de las comparaciones.”

Audio:

Benedict Anderson’s Remarks at the Launch of the Philippine Edition of Imagined Communities, February 2003

Text:

Excerpt from the Preface to the Philippine Edition of Imagined Communities (reprinted with permission from Anvil Publishing)

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Download Audio:

Imagcommanderson.mp3