Anderson died in his sleep during a visit to the city of Malang, Indonesian media reported. The cause of death was not immediately known.
"This is to inform you that Ben Anderson has passed away in Java: the land and its people he loves most," Thai historian Charnvit Kasetsiri, Anderson's close friend and colleague, said in an email to fellow scholars. Indonesians reacted with an outpouring of tributes on Twitter and Facebook.
"Many readers of 'Imagined Communities' did not know that his knowledge of Southeast Asian languages gave him insights into Indonesian, Thai, and Philippine political culture and history," said Prof Craig J Reynolds of Australian National University.
Anderson's influence was not limited to the sphere of theory, as he engaged with the contentious issues of the day with a rigorous analysis and dry wit that inspired his students.
Born to Anglo-Irish parents in 1936 in Kunming, China, Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson grew up in California and was educated at Cambridge and Cornell, where he studied Southeast Asian politics.
His early specialization in Indonesia turned out to be both a curse and a blessing. On one hand, a near-forensic analysis of Indonesia's bloody 1965 coup that he wrote with fellow scholar Ruth McVey led to him being banned from the country until 1999.
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