Jessica Peng: I would like to begin by asking you to reflect upon the trajectory of your scholarship over the years (perhaps, alongside changes that have taken place in Indonesia) and share how it has led you to ask the questions that you do in this book. More specifically, how do you see this book relating to and/or departing from your earlier work?
Joseph Errington: I left college with an interest in generative grammar, then the emerging high theory of Language. But I wanted also to engage with a little-known ‘exotic’ language: Javanese, to which I had casual exposure via the performing arts. A glitch in class scheduling during my first quarter of graduate work at the U. of Chicago gave me an opening to take Michael Silverstein’s still new course on language and culture. Under his mentorship I shifted away from formalist paradigms at the core of linguistics to broader, semiotic issues of form and meaning.
Only towards the end of my 3rd year of graduate classwork did I come to grips with the need, prior to fieldwork, for fulltime language study: Indonesian (with John Wolff at Cornell) and then Javanese (at Gajah Mada University in Indonesia). This kind of lengthy pre-research preparation would likely be impossible now, but served me as a point of a transition from theory to particulars, and a resource for continuing research.
After a year of study in the lively town of Jogjakarta, Java, I moved to Surakarta, a royal polity which had been transformed by nationalist dynamics into a bit of a provincial backwater. Conversations with older (primarily male) members of the town’s old elite often shifted from language and etiquette to the reasons polite Javanese had become a kind of museum curiosity: widely respected, but little known or used. I became impressed by the ways change/variation in everyday talk was a diffuse, intimate, intersubjective dimension of large-scale social change. As a point of convergence between linguistic biography and social history, within and across generations, this became a recurring interest in my later work on Javanese/Indonesian bilingualism, and the kinds of Indonesian described in this book.
Jessica Peng: As is captured by the title, Other Indonesians: Nationalism in an Unnative Language, your book examines speakers of “other-than-standard” Indonesian, a language you suggest ought to be understood as “unnative” (cf. non-native). It is through this vantage point of exploring this overlapping linguistic feature of other-than-standard and unnativeness in provincial towns that you consider how Indonesian enables its speakers to express themselves as members of a national community in pluralistic ways. I wonder if you can explain what you mean when you describe Indonesian as an unnative language. Further, what are the affordances of focusing on those who speak nonstandard varieties of this unnative language to questions of nationalism?
Joe Errington: Native speaker intuition led me to unnative as a term of art before I figured out how English grammar made it more accurate than nonnative. But its peculiarity gives it rhetorical value for signalling the need to bracket ideologies of native speakership that lack fit with the Indonesian case. It had an empirical payoff also for framing fine-grained features of biaccentual usage in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 4 this accuracy/awkwardness tradeoff played played out in a review of comparative/theoretical approaches to languages-and-nations. I thought about framing these issues in broadly Bakhtinian terms, but finally decided that Schutz’ quasi-Weberian vocabulary helped make social dimensions of the issue clearer.
If nothing else, this usage helps identify some of the less obvious naturalizing effects of linguistic nativeness ground for senses of national belonging.
Jessica Peng: Across your analysis of other-than-standard language use among college students in Kupang (Chapter 2) and Pontianak (Chapter 3), I was struck by the ways in which more socially marginalized members of Indonesian society were found to be more oriented towards the regime of the standard. In Kupang, for example, newcomers to the city speak about the values that people back in their rural hometowns place on standard Indonesian. I loved the example of the young newcomer who reminds herself to “flick her tongue” whenever she returns to Alor as to not bring her putatively bad, urban habits of speech back home. Meanwhile, the ethnic Chinese in Pontianak, as a population that has long been perceived as foreign in Indonesia, predominantly use standard Indonesian. I wonder if you can discuss if and how social marginality figures into people’s orientations to the regime of the standard and reflect upon what these examples might suggest about the senses of national belonging felt by these variably marginalized members of the nation?
Joe Errington: Your query raises a paradox darker than that thematized in the book, one illustrated by the Chinese of Pontianak, described in chapter 3. Some of the most marginalized members of the nation are also those whose use of the national language fits best with the the regime of the standard. Others live in geopolitically peripheral regions, like NTT, and Papua. The overtly racial discrimination against fluent Papuan speakers provides obvious, depressing conclusion that hierarchies of language competence may license but do not serve to weaken hierarchies of phenotype.
Ben Anderson the Indonesianist knew this, and might have referred it to his distinction between nationalism and racism. Peripheral persons may invest themselves in idea(ls) of a nation biographically through their descendants, who can acquire its language natively as an instrument/symbol/claim to membership. But such competences, and quasi-official version of nationalism they presuppose, are vulnerable to racist categories–inherited in Indonesia from the Dutch era–that presuppose eternal essences and threats of contamination.
An upside of this paradox, if there is one, might be Indonesian’s value for overt political mobilization on a subnational basis, as among Dayaks in Kalimantan. Like the original patriots, they deploy standard Indonesian less to eliminate longstanding prejudice than mitigate its effects. But they do so in circumstances of marginalization different from those that oppress other groups.
Jessica Peng: At the end of the book, you offer an exciting, revised perspective of the Indonesian story, suggesting that while the widespread state institutionalization of “good and true Indonesian” (Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) during the New Order era “began as a project oriented to the kinds of modernity found in the West,” the project “has had the unintended result of enabling a plurality of Indonesians” (p. 92). You further suggest that this plurality of Indonesian might serve as “a harbinger for other nations’ ongoing linguistic engagements with globalization” (p. 78). I’d love to invite you to say more about what the Indonesian case might teach us about the possibilities of “plural unities,” as well as share how you hope readers (of various kinds and across different contexts) might take up the insights put forth in this book.
Joe Errington: To keep the book brief, and open to a wider audience, I did not develop this comparison with Silverstein’s (2016) notion of logocratic nation-states (prototypically, the US). The absence of such a logocracy, I note in chapter 1, leads some to regard Indonesian as peculiar or perhaps deficient. But it enables also local senses of national belonging.
In post-new Order Indonesia, as in other nations, post-print mediatizations of (national) languages are circulating—being produced and perceived—through multiple voicings, both plural and translocal. In chapter 4 I cite sociolinguistic research in Europe which suggests that these dynamics are eroding print-literate logocracies. But because Indonesia(n) never had this kind of logocracy it might provide a model for other languages which are more overtly plural and less obviously emblematic of shared national identity.
2016 Standards, styles, and signs of the social self. Keynote address, Conference on “Language, Indexicality, and Belonging: Inaugural conference on linguistic anthropology,” Stephen Leonard et al., organizers. Somerville College, University of Oxford, 8 April. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 9(1). https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso9_1_2017_134_164.pdf/.
CaMP Anthropology 