Prominent intellectual Anderson dies aged 79

“This is to inform you that Ben Anderson has passed away in Java: the land and its people he loves most,” according to his close student and friend former rector of Thammasat University Charnvit Kasetsiri Sunday.
Anderson passed away on Saturday night of sleep apnea – a common disorder in which a person takes one or more pauses in breathing or has shallow breaths while sleeping – after a dinner with friends in a Surabaya hotel in Indonesia. His death was regarded among academics and intellectual as a great loss for Southeast Asian studies.
Born in 1936 in China’s Kunming to an Anglo-Irish father and English mother, Anderson was known as one of the Western academics who had deep knowledge of Southeast Asia. He was brought up in California, but studied in Eton College and later the University of Cambridge after he moved to Ireland.
His graduate work in politics at Cornell University detailed the political situation in Indonesia, the country where he was banned from entering for years during the Suharto regime.
One of his best books, “Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism”, was translated into more than 30 languages around the world, according to Charnvit, who edited and published the Thai version of the book in 2009.
In the book he interpreted how and why modern states have been able to mobilise popular attachment and participation in nation building.
Although Anderson has done a lot of work about Indonesia, his works about Thai politics and society were intensively studied among Thai academics and students to explain “nationalism” and the notion of state building in Thailand. Anderson was always seen in Bangkok and other provinces of Thailand discussing Thai society during the transition period.