Sociologist Wertheim's legacy to Indonesian studies lives on

By Herb Feith

YOGYAKARTA (JP): W.F. Wertheim, the founder of modern Indonesian studies in Holland, died last week at the age of 91. Like others who die at an advanced age, much of his story has faded from public memory. In Indonesia he has long been less widely known than he should be.

Wertheim, a historically oriented sociologist, was Holland's counterpart to America's George Kahin. The first edition of his Indonesian Society in Transition came out in 1950, just ahead of Kahin's Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, and each was a foundational work on which many others built.

Wertheim, too, was a creative organizer. One striking result of this was the publication in the 1950s and 1960s of eight volumes of Dutch scholarship on Indonesia from the prewar period which Wertheim, as a leading professor at the University of Amsterdam, had arranged to have translated and edited.

But Wertheim belonged to an earlier generation of specialists on Indonesia. While Kahin's involvement began only at the end of World War II, Wertheim arrived in Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1931. Within a few years he was teaching at its law school. In 1940 he was appointed to the small Visman Commission, a prestigious government body formed to examine the colony's constitutional future.

Whereas Kahin spent most of World War II in the American army, where he learned Dutch, Wertheim spent most of it in Japanese prison camps in Java.

Each of the two was an active partisan of the Indonesian republic during its revolutionary struggle for independence. Each of them continued to be academics in engaged style. In 1951, Wertheim declined an invitation to teach in Indonesia. His decision protested the Sukiman government inviting the Nazi- tainted Hjalmar Schacht to Indonesia as an economic adviser. Echoes of Dr. Tjipto Mangoenkoesoemo, who accepted a decoration from the colonial government for his contributions to the eradication of the plague, then mocked the honor, arguing that the basic causes of infectious disease were political.

As professor of sociology and modern history of non-Western peoples at the University of Amsterdam, Wertheim played a controversial part in moving Holland's Indonesia scholarship away from its colonial moorings. His approach to Indonesian nationalism, which he saw as emancipatory and part of a more general Asian renaissance, did not make him popular among the scholars who had been training colonial civil servants. But it laid the foundation for Holland's present position as a major center of development studies.

In the Soeharto years, Wertheim gave active support to Dutch and other European organizations publicizing the plight of political prisoners in Indonesia. He also wrote frequently about the tumultuous events of Oct. 1, 1965, and specifically on Soeharto's mysterious interactions on the eve of the abortive coup attempt with Col. Latief, a former subordinate and key member of the group of plotters.

One of my favorite stories about Wertheim involves a prewar student of his who became the famous Prof. Djokosutono, a prominent constitutional adviser to president Sukarno and Army chief Abdul Haris Nasution. Djokosutono was a shy and perfectionist undergraduate who kept postponing the oral part of his final examination. One day, Wertheim and his colleague Logemann went to where he was staying and asked him to join them on a drive. They drove around chatting about a variety of things, and a few days later Djokosutono received a formal note from the law school. He had passed his oral examination!

Like many other scholars and teachers, Pak Wertheim will be remembered for the encouragement he gave to those who went on to become scholars and teachers in their own right. One of those was the late Yale historian Harry Benda, who met Wertheim when they were both in Japanese prison camps in Java. Benda embarked on undergraduate studies in New Zealand because of Wertheim's encouragement and example, and went on from there to Cornell.

Another is the Bogor rural sociologist Sajogjo, who as Kampto Utomo was Wertheim's assistant and doctoral supervisee when the latter taught at Bogor in 1956 to 1967. In recent decades Sajogyo has become famous for his research on poverty and his innovative methods of measuring its range.

When the transnational history of Indonesian studies in the post-World War II era is written, Wertheim will emerge as a central figure. And if there is ever a history of the radical stream within that tradition, he will rank as one of its most inspirational members.

The writer, an Australian political scientist, is currently a visiting lecturer at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.