Fortunately, he seemed to adjudge me as competent, and so I only had the pleasure of his good humor and sharp wit for the nearly 35 years that I knew and worked with him.

Daniel was born in Flores in 1945 – he would always highlight the year when speaking of his age – and thus there was nearly a 20-year difference between us. But in many ways, we were both shaped by the experience of having to initially undertake intellectual work in the context of the authoritarian New Order regime.

Of course, we were shaped by it in different ways.

His “natural” milieu were the intellectuals who had come together in the 1960s and 1970s, originally supportive, if only ambiguously, of the New Order’s modernization project but who came to disdain its repression, corruption and imbecilic – and therefore intellectually insulting – propaganda.

I was too young to have been part of the student protests of the 1970s but was shaped by involvement in the (often more peripheralized and, therefore, more radical) small student and NGO groupings of the next decade.

We first came together when I took up various roles within LP3ES in the mid and late 1980s.

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