Individual Paper
5. Transmitting Knowledges: Institutions, Objects and Practices
This paper is about the intellectual biography of George McTurnan Kahin, an academic from the United States of America who brought most of the early 1950s-1960s researchers from Cornell University to Indonesia. Although he was known for his activism against the Vietnam War, Kahin was the pioneer of Indonesian studies in America. Most of his academic initiatives gathered much data and analysis on Indonesian cultural, social, and political conditions of post-World War II Indonesia. As a historical paper, this research used historiography as a research method deriving the sources from Kahin’s autobiography, his students’ writings about him, and several Dutch newspapers regarding his activities during his doctoral research and written periodically starting from his academic endeavor until the impact of his legacy towards Indonesian studies. This paper aims to elaborate on how Kahin built a community of academia that has the same interest as him and evolved into an international network of researchers which bred a new generation of Indonesianists from his institution, Cornell University. These Indonesianists preserved the study of Indonesia and in turn, became references in Indonesian studies throughout the world.
Reza M. Hikam
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa/East-West Center, Indonesia