Tom Pepinsky

Category: Language

  • We Are…KPK!

    Jokowi’s young presidency is in the midst of a serious political crisis. Here is Andreas Harsono from Human Rights Watch.

    On Friday, members of Indonesia’s National Police – widely considered one of the country’s most corrupt government institutions – arrested Bambang Widjojanto, deputy chairman of the official Corruption Eradication Commission, or KPK. (For the record, Widjojanto was an intern with Human Rights Watch in the 1980s.)

    That arrest was remarkable not just because the National Police have been a long-time target of the KPK’s anti-corruption efforts. The timing also smacked of political revenge, as the arrest occurred just nine days after the KPK declared Commissionaire Gen. Budi Gunawan — President Joko Widodo’s sole candidate for National Police chief – to be a graft suspect.

    In a country rife with official corruption, KPK is one of the very few political institutions that has garnered the public’s trust. That fact has made it a target, as Indonesia’s most powerful people seek to weaken or destroy the institution (on the previous KPK scandal of 2009, see Ehito Kimura, Christian von Luebke, and Simon Butt).

    This post, though, isn’t about this latest KPK crisis. It’s about the headline on the cover of Indonesia’s weekly magazine Tempo: KPK Adalah Kita.
    kpk-adalah-kita

    KPK Adalah Kita literally means “KPK Is Us.” At first glance, this looks like a simple appropriation of Je suis Charlie, another fun little instance of today’s globalized media landscape. But that’s not the right interpretation. KPK Adalah Kita actually harkens back to Indonesia’s presidential campaign in summer 2014. Specifically, to this:

    Jokowi-JK-Adalah-Kita56

    Jokowi adalah kita [= Jokowi is us] reflected the notion that Jokowi represented regular Indonesians, not the elite political classes. Perhaps a more accurate translation would be “Jokowi is one of us.” And the image of the gecko confronting the crocodile, scorpion, snake, and other creepy crawlies on the Tempo cover is harkens back to the last KPK scandal, during which the following image circulated widely.

    Cicak-vs-buaya

    The gecko (cicak) here is next to the crocodile (buaya), and this reads “I am the gecko who bravely battles the crocodile.” A more evocative translation that resonates with English speakers might be “I’m the little guy who bravely fights against the machine.” It’s bad news for Jokowi’s presidency if he is now viewed as part of the machine.

    This is Part 1 of two posts. Tomorrow, in Part 2, I will get into the weeds about translating KPK Adalah Kita as “We are KPK” versus “KPK is us.” Stay tuned…

  • -Isms Are Out, -ities Are In

    To start off 2015 on a light note, I refer you to a recent post on academese over at Savage Minds. It seems that at least in anthropology (the purview of Savage Minds), -isms are out, and -ities are in.

    “I am an –ism person,” Temma Kaplan, Rutgers historian said to me. “I don’t do –ity.”

    I gave her a knowing look.

    “It used to be all –isms. Now everything is –ities,” she said.

    “But you can’t get a job in women’s studies without working on an –ity.” I said, “–ities are the thing these days.”

    She sighed and shrugged.

    It goes on like this.

    But you will be au courant if you abandon the –ism and go with the –ity. The worldview of an individual subject becomes “subjectivity.” The imposition of certain social norms is “normativity.” The close reading of literary texts for the influences of previous texts is “intertextuality.” As with the old -ism, you should probably use these in plural as well: “subjectivities,” “normativities” and “intertextualities.”

    How about in political science? Does seem to be the case that the -isms are no longer au courant, especially when it comes to mid-level theorizing in international relations. But other -isms—positivism, constructivism, behavioralism, institutionalism—continue to thrive.

    We also have not yet embraced the “weighty -ity” the way that other disciplines have. For example, we political scientists should be all over “governmentality” but we don’t agree exactly what this means. The only weighty -ity words that I encounter with any regularity are “performativity” and “intersectionality,” and of these two, only intersectionality has entered my own research lexicon. (There are other -ities like rationality and heteroskedasticity, but I don’t think that these are what the anthropologists are on about. Although I do think that rationality, at least, has the grad-school-argument-inducing qualities that the other weighty -ities have.)

    Should we jump on the weighty -ity bandwagon, come on in for the big win just like the anthropologists? Should we say that the mode of scholarly inquiry characterized by concern over causal identification is, say, experimentality? Should we consider the ways of being constrained by the committee structure in Congress as, uh, institutionality? Maybe the conditions of monetary unions without fiscal unions reflect incentive incompatibilitality?

    Think these sound lousy? Perhaps you are subject to the bionormativities of ordinary language as a mode of communicality:

    Don’t worry if you’re not entirely sure what a term means; with the correct combination of prefixes and suffixes, you will most likely arrive at something that at least appears fashionable, if not profound. When you deploy terminology that might mean any number of different things, you ensure that no one knows exactly what, if anything, you are arguing.