Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • “No Hadiah, Boss”

    Immigration at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport is frustrating for anyone. Last night, though, my arrival process was as smooth as I’ve ever experienced. From plane to taxi in 20 minutes flat, which includes purchasing my visa on arrival, standing in line at immigration, getting my bag, and customs. That’s faster than most US airports! Part of it could be that I arrived on a flight that landed at 11:25 PM, so the airport wasn’t as busy as normal. But still, a pleasant surprise.

    Some of my fellow travelers did not have such an easy time. Standing in the line right next to mine at immigration—or, to be honest, holding up the line right next to mine—was a group of 10 Arab men, presumably just off the flight from Doha. None appeared to speak Indonesian or English, but it was evident that they were displeased about something that was holding up their visas. The immigration agent, in classic bureaucratic fashion, sat there looking bored as the designated spokesman of the group attempted to communicate with him. The other 9 travelers talked loudly, sucked in their teeth (“tsk!”), waved their passports around, and generally tried to make their frustration known to everyone.

    I don’t speak any Arabic, but I did catch one key interaction. As I was speaking to the immigration officer in my line, the men started saying “hadiah.” In Indonesian, this means gift, and it’s obviously an Arabic loanword. The travelers’ spokesman got right into their immigration officer’s face and started saying “hadiah. hadiah.” I can only interpret this to mean that he was offering a bribe.

    I caught my immigration officer’s eye and smiled, and she said to me something to me along the lines of “it’s always like this with the Arabs” (orang Arab selalu begitu). Her colleague looked disdainfully at the Arabs’ spokesman and said “no hadiah, boss.”

    There is a larger commentary here, on relations between the Arab world and Southeast Asia. Some of my very favorite recent work by historians has looked at movements of people and ideas around the Indian Ocean (Laffan and Tagliacozzo), and I myself am writing a bit on Arabs in Java. Most of the existing work, though, adopts the perspective of the Southeast Asian looking at the Middle East. I’ve always thought that it would be important to look in reverse, at how Arabs and Middle Easterners view their Southeast Asian co-religionists and whether or not their has been a circulation of ideas from Southeast Asia back to the Arab world that parallels the travel of ideas from the Arab world to Southeast Asia. It would take someone with good knowledge of Arabic and local Southeast Asian languages to do this, but it would make for a fascinating contribution.

  • Change the Date of the APSA Annual Meeting

    There is a petition circulating to change the date of the APSA annual meeting. I have not signed it yet, although I probably will. I’m writing this post because I think that there are some things that have to change about how APSA works before the discipline benefits in the ways that the petition suggests, and those changes might not be popular.

    Some observations about how APSA is different from most other academic associations:

    1. Compared to, say, the AEA/ASSA, there are far more papers.
    2. Compared to every other association’s meeting that I’ve attended, panel attendance is very sparse.
    3. Only some departments do interviews at APSA.

    Why does this matter? Because one of the benefits of moving the date of APSA later is more of the job market activity there. If that happens, we will be encumbering a significant amount of time for a significant number of people, which can only hurt panel attendance further while complicating the scheduling of panels and papers. (On the AEA or MLA model, think several days entirely filled with 30 minute interviews in hotel rooms.) Should you present a paper if you’re on a search committee or on the job market? Who should be responsible for coordinating panel times and interview times?

    Probably the easiest way to fix this would be to restrict the number of papers presented at APSA, removing the expectation that every grad student and assistant professor will at least attempt to present one if not two papers. Despite the fact that almost nobody I know actually likes the current APSA format, I can’t imagine much support for making APSA more exclusive in this way.

    The point is that despite the many benefits that would come with changing the APSA date, there are some consequences that will affect how the annual meeting will work. Perhaps those changes will be good, but I will think more about them before I sign.