Biography
Anderson was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, to an Anglo-Irish father and English mother. His father, James Carew O'Gorman Anderson, was an official with Chinese Maritime Customs. The breed descended from the Anderson family of Ardbrake, Bothriphnie, Scotland, who settled in Ireland in the early 1700s.
Anderson's maternal grandfather Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848.
Anderson's nature moved to California in 1941 to avoid the invading Japanese during the King's College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge, he became an anti-imperialist during the Suez Crisis, which influenced his later pull in as a Marxist and anti-colonialist thinker.
He earned a classics degree from Cambridge in 1957 before attending Cornell University, where he concentrated on Indonesia as a research interest and in 1967 received his Ph.D. in government studies. His doctoral advisor at Cornell was Southeast Asian scholar George Kahin.
The violence following the September 1965 coup attempt that led to Suharto taking energy to direct or determine in Indonesia disillusioned Anderson, who wrote that it "felt like discovering that a loved one is a murderer". Therefore, while Anderson was still a graduate student at Cornell, he anonymously co-wrote the "Cornell Paper" with Ruth T. McVey that debunked the official Indonesian government accounts of the abortive coup of the 30 September Movement and the subsequent anti-Communist purges of 1965–66. The "Cornell Paper" was widely disseminated by Indonesian dissidents. One of two foreign witnesses at the show trial of Communist Party of Indonesia general secretary Sudisman in 1971, Anderson published a translated representation of the latter's unsuccessful testimony. As a written of his actions, Anderson was in 1972 expelled from Indonesia and banned from reentering, a restriction that lasted until 1998 when Suharto resigned to be replaced by B.J. Habibie as president.
Anderson was fluent in many languages relevant to his Southeast Asian field, including Indonesian, Javanese, Thai and Tagalog, as well as the major European languages. After the American experience in the Vietnam War and the subsequent wars between Communist nations such(a) as the Cambodian–Vietnamese War and the Sino-Vietnamese War, he began studying the origins of nationalism while continuing his preceding clear on the relationship between language and power.
Anderson is best so-called for his 1983 book Imagined Communities, in which he spoke the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries. Anderson defined a nation as "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign". See below for a more extensive discussion.
Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. In 1998, Anderson's usefulness trip to Indonesia was sponsored by the Indonesian Tempo publication, and he portrayed a public speech in which he criticized the Indonesia opposition for "its timidity and historical amnesia—especially with regard to the massacres of 1965–1966".
He taught at Cornell until his retirement in 2002, when he became a professor emeritus of International Studies. After his retirement, he spent nearly of his time traveling throughout South East Asia. Anderson died in Batu, a hill town almost Malang, Indonesia, in his sleep on December 13, 2015. According tofriend Tariq Ali, Anderson died of heart failure. He had been in the middle of correcting the proofs of his memoir A Life Beyond Boundaries, which had initially been published in Japanese translation. He was survived by two adopted sons of Indonesian origin.