Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Singapore, Stomach First

    People often talk about Singapore as a place where people are obsessed with food. Before yesterday I hadn’t been to Singapore in a couple years, so part of me forgot about this. Or at least thought it was a little exaggerated, as lots of places are obsessed with food. Italy, France, and so forth. But seriously, Singapore is obsessed with food in a way that I don’t think is comparable to other places. Maybe it’s a consequence of the fact that Singapore is so, well, orderly and boring. There’s no politics to talk about, no real economic woes to talk about (although Singapore is getting hammered by the crisis in GDP terms, unemployment is still only around 3%), the weather is essentially the same all the time (hot and humid, or not quite as hot but more humid, or raining), the traffic is usually pretty OK by regional standards, there’s no really old history (the city was a fishing village until 1800) and so forth. So what else is there to talk about besides what to have for lunch? I think that standard Singaporean day revolves around (1) eating and (2) thinking about where to eat next. There are many, many, many food blogs dedicated to Singaporean food.

    This bothers me not in the slightest, of course, because I’ve seen all the tourist things there are to see in Singapore. Moreover, I love to sample local food, and I had two sets of great tour guides to show me where to go. So what did I do on this trip? I caught up with old friends and ate good food. I focused on South Indian food this trip more than Southern Chinese food, which is Singapore’s number one specialty. The problem is often that Chinese food has shellfish in it, so I have to be careful to stick to pork and fish. I can’t eat lots of things like chili crab or prawn whatever or really authentic char kway teow. Plus, this one place that we wanted to try for dumplings was closed for renovations so we substituted banana leaf rice for pork-intensive dumplings. I ignored Malay and Peranakan food entirely because, well, it’s often so close to Sumatran food and that’s normally better here (or in Malaysia itself) anyway. The pics and descriptions are here (they start with my most recent meal in Jakarta, but the Singapore pictures are a few in). Below is the pretty front garden of my friends’ place, which is a great and quiet retreat from the disorganized hustle and bustle of downtown Jakarta.

    A Leafy Front Garden in Singapore

    5-24-09

  • IndolaysiaPORE

    I’m going to Singapore this evening for a quick 24 hours. The reasons are totally personal: to see two sets of old friends and to take a break from noisy/boisterous/crazy Jakarta and enjoy a day of good old law-and-order Singapore. The trip is easy, just a 1:15 flight from Jakarta. Depending on the time of day, it can actually be faster to get from Soekarno-Hatta to Changi (airport to airport, that is) than from central Jakarta to Soekarno-Hatta. I’m taking JetStar Asia, a good low cost airline out of Australia, and the entire trip will come in well below US$100.

    So I won’t be blogging tomorrow, although I’ll report on my trip (and, yes, my meals) on Sunday. For now, here’s something I’d like to hear some thoughts from all 2 of my readers about.

    People who write on Indonesian Islam often face the accusation that they are partisan or otherwise non-objective in the way that they handle modernist and/or conservative Islamic groups here. I have faced this criticism myself, and it makes me uncomfortable as well as defensive. It normally has one of the following forms. (1) You (foreign researcher) are taking sides in the debate about what is good for Indonesian Islam. (2) You are so seduced by romantic, orientalist version of mystical syncretic Javanese culture and court Islam that you can’t treat alternative viewpoints (i.e. a more textual or literal version of Islam) fairly. (3) You are getting all bent out of shape and worried about the possibility of some Islamic threat that isn’t really there, so you’re turning what are really marginal groups in to bogeymen. Such a criticism is extremely powerful, because if it’s true then it means that you as a researcher are not able to separate your beliefs from your work. A big no-no. It’s not that your findings are wrong, it’s that you are a bad researcher.

    The way around this is to insert some sort of caveat into whatever you write that says “I am not making any sort of normative claim about…” or “of course, interpretations of Islam vary, and I do not wish to be construed as claiming that all Indonesians…” or “even a low-probability event is still something that is worth understanding…” Or something like that. Sound familiar?

    The thing is, I hate those silly caveats. I don’t want to start off every article with defensiveness. It is obvious, at least to me, that we can do research on the different types of Islam and the future of political Islam in Indonesia without making normative judgments about these topics. It also seems reasonable to think that one might want to study how progressive Muslim groups respond to conservative ones, what their beliefs about their opponents are, and that one can do that without judging one to be better than the other. At a certain point, there are some people who are just going to be offended, or who are going to attribute motives that don’t exist, no matter what. It’s not the job of the researcher to respond to them, it’s their job to engage with the research on a substantive level.

    Here’s an analogy. Let’s say I want to study if bananas have more potassium than apples. Do I need to write a paragraph saying that I’m not taking sides in the great “apple-versus-banana-for-breakfast” debate? I guess my objection is to having to respond preemptively to what I view as a type of hypersensitivity about certain topics. This issue isn’t just particular to Islam in Indonesia, of course. Imagine the hurdles facing an economist who wants to write on the effect of race on economic outcomes. Or political scientists writing about the Israeli lobby. I want to also say that I’m not arguing that words don’t matter or that what is called “political correctness” is bad. Words do matter, I firmly believe this, and I think that we should within reason try to be sensitive to the power that words can have. I see this as something different, not that the choice of words is inappropriate, but that the choice of subject has to be conspicuously framed in a certain way.

    So I guess my question is, am I just a big baby? Should I just write the silly caveat and move on? Or is there an argument that we should put our foot down, that we need not be bound by what others might interpret about our motives? If the research is analytically solid and the conclusions drawn from it are properly bounded, shouldn’t that be enough?