Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Urbanization, Ethnic Diversity, and the Rise of Indonesian

    As part of a multi-year project on language shift in contemporary Indonesia, Abby Cohn, Maya Ravindranth, and I have been using the incredible census data provided by IPUMS to study what factors determine whether Indonesians speak Indonesian at home. The data are remarkable in that they comprise a 1% sample the 2010 Indonesian census—which means that our sample size is 2,358,774 individuals. And better yet, anyone can access these data.

    One thing that sociolinguists know is that urbanization leads to language shift in multilingual societies. In the Indonesian context, this means that speakers of ethnic languages like Javanese, Sundanese, Batak, and so forth will shift to speaking Bahasa Indonesia, the country’s national language.

    But what’s going on here? Is this a consequence of urbanization itself, and the accompanying process of “modernization” of everyday life that (1) expose you to media in the national language and (2) lead to shifting identities away from regional/ethnic to national? Or is it a consequence of the ethnic diversity found in urban areas, which lead speakers of different languages to encounter one another more regularly and thus increase the benefits of speaking a common national language? In principle these two processes are distinct: you could have urban areas without ethnic diversity, or rural areas that are highly diverse. The neat thing about Indonesia is that it is so big and heterogeneous that we have instances of urban and rural districts that are both homogenous and diverse. This allows us to distinguish the two effects from one another.

    Because we know the district (kabupaten or kota) in which every individual lives, and we know his/her ethnic group, we can calculate a district-level measure of ethnic diversity (using a so-called Ethnic Fractionalization index [PDF]). We also know whether or not each individual is classified as living in an urban residence or not, so we can use that to calculate the fraction of each district that is urban. Both of these measures range from 0 to 1. Comparing each of the 494 districts recorded in the 2010 census, here is what we find.

    The good news is just how varied Indonesian districts are. There are ethnically homogenous, wholly urban districts (Kota Blitar, on Java) as well as ethnically homogenous, entirely rural districts (Nias Barat, off the coast of Sumatra). And looking to the right side of this scatterplot, we see a range of incredibly diverse districts, all of which are on Papua, that range from highly urban to highly rural.

    From there, we fit a hierarchical/multilevel logistic regression model in which we predict whether or not an individual speaks Indonesian at home as a function of a range of individual-level characteristics (age and its square, gender, religion, education, etc.) as well as district-level urbanization, ethnic diversity, and their interaction. We then predict, based on the results of that model, the probability that an individual speaks Indonesian as a function of their district’s ethnic diversity and at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles of district urbanization. Here is what we find.

    If you live in an ethnically homogenous district, the likelihood that you speak in Indonesian at home is very low, no matter how urban that district is. But as ethnic diversity increases, so does the likelihood of speaking Indonesian—and especially so in urban districts. This shows very clearly that the relationship between urbanization and language shift in a diverse country like Indonesia really does depend on whether or not urbanization comes with increasing ethnic diversity. And although the relationship between ethnic diversity and language shift is largest for urban districts, this relationship is substantively quite large in rural districts too.

    Note, though, that to reach such a conclusion, you need a really diverse country like Indonesia that allows you to separate urbanization from ethnic diversity empirically. Thanks, Indonesia.

  • Jewish Refugees and the Resettlement of Mindanao

    Ria Sunga recently contributed a short essay on Jewish refugees in the Philippines to the Refugee History blog. The essay is full of interesting details, including the observation that under the Japanese occupation during World War II, Jewish refugees were not interned because the Japanese… considered them to be Germans.

    Having (expired) German passports, the Japanese did not intern them, unlike those with Allied nationalities in the Philippines.

    Internment conditions under the Japanese occupation were notoriously hard. It is remarkable that the small Jewish refugee population in the Philippines appears to have been spared.

    Perhaps even more interesting is the so-called “Mindanao Plan,” which called for Jews to be resettled in the Philippines large and restive southern island of Mindanao.

    Tauber and many other Jews sent letters to the Philippines, applying to enter under a special immigration programme that proposed a Jewish agricultural settlement on the southern island of Mindanao. The ‘Mindanao Plan’ was conceived after the Evian Conference, led by American President Franklin Roosevelt. The Conference sought a solution to the ‘Jewish refugee problem’, which included proposals for establishing agricultural settlements in underdeveloped regions. These plans extended to the Philippines. In 1939, Quezon agreed to resettle 10,000 refugees in Mindanao over ten years under certain conditions, including that refugees took naturalisation papers and that they would not become public charges. It was the only such plan to be seriously considered in Asia (though a similar resettlement plan was proposed by the Dominican Republic).

    The idea of resettling Jews in some “empty” territory is not new: see Madagascar, Birobidzhan, Alaska, and the Kimberley. What makes the Mindanao case interesting is that it follows a longstanding policy that Mindanao needs to be “settled.” This policy dates to the early American colonial period, addressing the legacy of incomplete control of Mindanao by the Spanish. In the words of Wernstedt and Simkins, Mindanao under the Spanish had

    failed to participate in any significant degree in the economic or political development of the Philippines.

    Indeed, Mindanao is not like other regions in the Philippines: it has a large Muslim population (termed the Moros by the Spanish, a term that persists until today), and successive colonial and post-colonial government have conceived of the region as something of a colony of the Philippines. Writes Abaya‐Ulindang (PDF),

    the Americans believe in resettling farmers from Luzon and Visayas to assume their role as model citizens of the natives in the course of interacting with them. Conceived as part of the Filipinization policy of Governor General Harrison to make a ‘Filipino out of the Moro’, the agricultural colonies were created at the end of the pacification campaign of Pershing.

    The Resettlement Policy brought Catholics from Luzon and the rest of the Philippines to Mindanao. It is an important driver of the Moro conflict, which pits some of Mindanao’s Muslim population against the majority-Catholic Philippine state. Indeed, current Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte grew up in Davao, but was born on Cebu.*

    That the Philippines’ Jewish refugees were slated to settle in Mindanao is an interesting footnote to the longstanding problem of figuring out how to incorporate Mindanao into the Philippine state. In this, it parallels the idea of using Jewish refugees from Europe to populate other “peripheral” regions in the USSR, US, and Australia. As in the cases of Alaska and the Kimberley, the main political obstacle was the fear that the Jewish refugees might not stay put in the periphery. But relative to those two cases, the Mindanao Plan appears to have been relatively more serious; had the Pacific War not broken out, it might even have been implemented.

    NOTES

    * Duterte’s former wife is of German Jewish ancestry but to my knowledge has no connection to the Jewish refugee community.