On the cover of Benedict Anderson’s autobiographical A Life Beyond Boundaries (2019), we see two frogs and a half coconut shell. One frog is leaping out of the shell excitedly, while the other one is in the half shell, considering whether to follow its fellow amphibian. The book’s cover art comes from the well-known Thai (and Indonesian) proverb kop nai kala khrop (a frog in a half coconut shell). This saying refers to a frog that has been living in such a shell (kala) for so long that it believes the object is the entire world. This poor frog is deceived, but it is satisfied with staying in the little kala. A person is a kop nai kala khrop when they have a provincial mindset; this narrow-minded “person … has little knowledge and experience but mistakes himself to be otherwise.” “For my part,” Anderson remarks with relief, “I stayed nowhere long enough to settle down in one place, unlike the proverbial frog.” This kala is perhaps what philosophers and social theorists have called an ideology or, to use a somewhat more Marxian term, false consciousness.