Preeminent Southeast Asia scholar, University of Michigan professor emeritus of sociology and ICWA fellow (Southeast Asia, 1961-1964) Gayl Ness died peacefully at his home on July 4, his family said. He was 95.
He began his ICWA fellowship in newly independent Malaya (present-day Malaysia) studying economic development after having earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. One of his mentors had referred him to ICWA’s director Dick Nolte, Gayl wrote in his book An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times.
Nolte “sent me a book by Arthur Drucker to read and comment upon. I read it in a few days and sent a two-page comment… Then Nolte wrote to ask where I would like to go and what I wish to do.”
Gayl soon departed on a two-year fellowship to Malaya, later extended another two years. He wrote dispatches about Malaya’s growing education system, rubber production, rural development and expanding public infrastructure. From his base in Kuala Lumpur, he also reported on population growth, politics and social issues in Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Singapore.
Malaya’s sweeping changes had the potential to destabilize the new country, he said, with its uneasy balance of ethnic Chinese, Malaya and Indian populations.
“Not only in Malaya, but in all of Southeast Asia, all real attempts to get at the roots of poverty and to transform the old societies into new, dynamic ones, will carry the potential of communal conflict,” he wrote in 1961. “To keep such conflict from being destructive, to make it a stimulant for national growth rather than a haunting spector of violence and chaos, it is necessary that the leadership and the development programs of the new nations be rational and just, especially where the Chinese are concerned.”
Gayle’s wife Jeannine accompanied him and supported his research. His third son Yan was born on the fellowship in Kuala Lumpur.
On a visit to Saigon in 1964 to observe the implementation of a Malaya-inspired development plan, Gayl cautioned against expecting too much. “If the central government proves incapable of mobilizing at the top and of controlling its lower administrative ranks even for this rather limited program; it is unlikely that it will ever be capable of mobilizing sufficiently to defeat a foe of the calibre of the Viet Cong.”
By the time he completed his fellowship, Gayl had written a book-length manuscript about his experience, Bureaucracy and Rural Development in Malaysia. Berkeley published it in 1967.
On his return to the United States, he joined the University of Michigan’s sociology department, where he remained throughout his career focusing his research on the relationship between global population growth, economic development and environmental change. (More in his obituary in the Michigan University Record.)
He wrote seven books and consulted with the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific to improve population and development programs. He spent 10 years helping assess nominees for the United Nations Population Award. And he traveled to Southeast Asia almost every year until the age of 90.
“Exuberance and passion for life is what he shared with everybody, and lived by example,” Yan Ness said of his father, adding that he loved ICWA. “He said ‘they gave me some money and said go discover something about the world.’ There weren’t many days between the times he thanked the institute for what it gave him.”
Gayl remained a stalwart supporter of the institute and generously left ICWA a portion of his estate.
He was born in Los Angeles in 1929. He served in the US Army during the Korean War, stationed in France, where he met and married his first wife, Jeannine. She died in 2004.
He is survived by his second wife, Kathleen Bohn-Ness (nee Sheridan); four children: Marc Ness, Eric Ness (Sue Ness), Yan Ness (Judith Spaly-Ness), and Shanta Layton; six grandchildren; as well as Kathleen’s four children, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Top photo: Malaysian street scene 1963 (Don Christie, Wikimedia Commons)