Arsip Buku: The Uncertainties of Knowledge (2004)

The historical construction of the social sciences occurred within the tense framework that was created by the existence of "two cultures." But the two cultures first had to be created themselves. The absence of boundaries was double. There was little sense that scholars had to confine their activities to one field of knowledge. And there was certainly almost no sense that philosophy and science were distinct arenas of knowledge. This situation was to change radically sometime between 1750 and 1850, resulting in the so-called "divorce" between science and philosophy. We have ever since been operating within a structure of knowledge in which "philosophy" and "science" have been considered distinctive, indeed virtually antagonistic, forms of knowledge.

The Uncertainties of Knowledge by Immanuel Wallerstein. Temple University Press, 2004.

Yeltsin and Russian Tennis

From Guardian, April 25, 2007

Yeltsin's Legacy to Live Long After His Death

By GENNADY FYODOROV

Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Marat Safin and Maria Sharapova brought Russia tennis glory but it was keen player and avid fan Boris Yeltsin who helped to make the sport popular nationwide.

Russian tennis chief Shamil Tarpishchev said it was mainly because of the former Russian president that the game -- considered a bourgeois sport in the communist Soviet Union -- became a pastime that appealed to the masses.

Yeltsin, the man who dismantled the Soviet Union and led Russia in its first chaotic years of independence, died in Moscow on Monday from heart failure, aged 76.

"Yeltsin's name became synonymous with tennis in Russia," Tarpishchev told Reuters. "When he picked up a tennis racket in 1992 it was the most significant moment for our sport.

"It was a major landmark in Russian tennis history alongside the feat of Andrei Chesnokov when in 1987 he became the first Russian to win a Grand Prix event and Kafelnikov winning Russia's first grand slam title at Roland Garros in 1996."

Tarpishchev, who has captained Russia to two Davis Cup and two Fed Cup titles in the last five years, said Yeltsin's love of the game had a profound effect on Russian tennis.

"In large part due to him tennis has become what it is today -- not only one of the most popular sports in Russia, along with soccer and ice hockey, but also the most successful," he said.

Photographs of the president indulging in his hobby gave tennis an immediate appeal, prompting Russia's political and business elite to join in and enticing thousands of youngsters to take up the game.

Kafelnikov's triumph coupled with Anna Kournikova's looks, fame and fortune took the game's popularity to even greater heights. Then came Safin, Anastasia Myskina, Elena Dementieva and Svetlana Kuznetsova.

Siberian-born Sharapova, who stunned the sporting world by winning the Wimbledon crown in 2004 as a little-known 17-year-old, became another success story out of Russia.

But to be recognised as a truly national game in Russia, tennis, a highly individual sport, had to achieve something special to bring the whole country together.

That day came on Dec. 1, 2002 when Russia won its first major team trophy -- the Davis Cup -- by edging France 3-2 in the Paris final after an amazing comeback by Mikhail Youzhny.

Youzhny, a late substitute for Kafelnikov, beat Paul-Henri Mathieu in the deciding fifth rubber and became the first player in the event's 102-year history to win a match in the final after losing the first two sets.

Yeltsin was an integral part of that success.

Not only did he made the trip to Paris to support the team, he sat in the VIP box along with French President Jacques Chirac during the entire three-day encounter, cheering wildly at every winning point for Russia. In the most dramatic moments of the tie, Yeltsin, the self-proclaimed team mascot, punched the air in delight.

The moment Youzhny clinched the title, Yeltsin climbed over a courtside barrier to bearhug him and the rest of the squad.

Yeltsin, who was an accomplished volleyball player in his youth, later recalled that Davis Cup victory as his proudest moment in sport.

The image of Yeltsin hugging Russian winners became a familiar sight over the following years as the country captured the Fed Cup in 2004 and the Davis Cup last year on home soil.

He was not a fair-weather fan, like many politicians who show up only at awards presentations to be seen with winners.

Yeltsin once said he knew every Russian tennis player by name and he could also recite the names of most leading foreign players.

He had attended every major tennis event in Moscow for the last several years, except when he was ill.

Health problems prevented him from going to Russia's last two home ties, this month's Davis Cup quarter-final against France and last weekend's Fed Cup quarter-final against Spain.

The day after the Russian women routed Spain 5-0, he died.

Tarpishchev said Yeltsin's legacy in Russian tennis would live long after his death.

"We were very fortunate to have him around for all these years. He was one of our most loyal fans," he said. "While we all mourn his death, I'm sure Russian tennis will not only survive but will become even more successful in years to come." - Reuters

Ukraine: Ke Mana Selepas Revolusi?

Ukraine di Persimpangan

"Hakikatnya, Ukraine, negara kelahiran tokoh Marxist, Leon Trotsky itu terbahagi secara politik dengan agak jelas. Bahagian barat dikuasai Yushchenko manakala kawasan timur dan selatan yang berbahasa Rusia berdiri teguh di belakang Yanukovych. Sejak kompromi Yushchenko dengan Yanukovych, Ukraine bergerak dengan dua pusat kuasa yang sama kuat dan sentiasa bersaing dengan satu sama lain."

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The Other in Virginia Tech

From The Nation, April 17, 2007

Let It Be Some Other "Asian"
By ANDREW LAM

All across America, no doubt, non-Korean Asian-Americans are now heaving a sigh of relief. "Asian," after all, was the four-alarm-fire word we saw throughout the day after the shootings that took the lives of 33 people at Virginia Tech. The shooter was "Asian," the news reports said. But who was this "Asian," exactly?

Before the news identified the killer as Cho Seung-hui, a 23-year-old English major from South Korea, all ethnic backgrounds were up for grabs. A friend from a small college town on the East Coast, who is Chinese, called to say: "Please, please let it be some other Asian. We'll be in deep if it's Chinese."

In a popular Vietnamese chatroom, Vietnamese college students were writing to each other to speculate. One said, "I have a bad feeling. It might be Mi't (Vietnamese slang for Vietnamese)." Others wrote in advising each other on what to do.

The blogosphere buzzed with speculation on the identity of the killer. The waiting game was as tense as waiting to find out who the next American Idol might be. On another blog, debbieschlussel.com, Schlussel speculated that the shooter could be a Muslim Pakistani. "Why am I speculating that the 'Asian' gunman is a Pakistani Muslim? Because law enforcement and the media strangely won't tell us more specifically who the gunman is."

A Muslim Pakistani friend, an engineer who refused to have his name mentioned, emailed me to say, "If he's a Paki and Muslim, we might all just pack up and go home. I'm praying that he is some other Asian."

Let it be some other Asian! This was the prayer among so many Asian-American communities. And not just Asians.

"Every time there's an incident like this, every ethnic group is on pins and needles," said Khalil Abdullah, an African-American colleague. An Anglo shooter may be an individual, a loner, but God forbid a person of color goes on a shooting rampage. His whole tribe would be implicated. "I still recall my aunts when President Kennedy was assassinated. They were praying that it wasn't a Negro." Many ethnic communities do not feel that they belong to the core of the American fabric, Abdullah added. "The action of an individual can cancel out the good image of an entire group."

Case in point: A Virginia Tech student and Chinese-American blogger was initially thought by many bloggers to be the culprit. He was reputed to have a penchant for guns and many photos of himself posing with his rifles. More than 200,000 people have visited his sites since the shooting and many left angry, racist epithets against Chinese. He told ABC, "Right now, pretty much the Internet thinks it is me... I am just interested in trying to clear my name."

As a Vietnamese-American, I have always found the word "Asian" to be too generic to be a useful identifier. Asia is the largest continent with the largest and most diverse population in the world. In Asia, people identify themselves by their national or ethnic origin, not as "Asian."

Yet, in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre, many of us--including myself--used the word to refer to any other "Asian" besides us.

In the end it wouldn't have worked for very long. To be a minority in America, even in the 21st century, is to be always on trial. An evil act by one indicts the entire community. Whoever doubts this need only look at the spike in hate crimes against Muslims and South Asian communities after 9/11.

After the shootings, my best friend, a Korean-American lawyer in Washington, D.C., felt in his bones that somehow a Korean was responsible. He didn't know why. But, "one thing's for sure now," he said, "we can safely lay the model minority theme to rest."

Regarding the Creepiness of the Others

“Although Kazakhstan a glorious country, it have a problem, too: economic, social, and Jew.” – Borat Sagdiyev

There is one lesson from the film 300 - and a whole lot of other Hollywood films - and the controversy surrounding the images of the movie, that everyone should know very well by now: a mixture of politics, graphic violence and religion seldom fails to produce blockbuster hits.

The Rambo trilogy, The Passion of the Christ, Borat and now 300, to name just a few from a long list of political and religious themed films, have proven that politics and religion always generate huge interests, and of course subsequently, huge ticket sales.

But the most important ingredients could well be the use of a people to be depicted as a bunch of creepy, violent and barbaric race, a civilization that all should hate and fear, and should not hesitate in entering a coalition to go to war against them (because you are either with them or against them.)

The film 300 is doing exactly what this formula requires. The demeaning depiction of the largely faceless Persians not only provides something that everyone can hate, but plays very well in today's global political scenario.

People try to draw parallel between 300 and today's global politics and "the war on terror," trying to figure out whether Gorge W Bush is Xerxes or Leonidas.

Some accuse that Hollywood is declaring war on Iranians for making this film and releasing it at this particular time. Javad Shamghadri, cultural advisor to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reportedly said that the film 300 is an attack on the Iranian culture by Hollywood and the "American cultural authorities."

Whatever they choose to believe, it is not off the mark to think it is American soft power at work, demonizing Iran by thinly disguising it with an ancient civilization from more than 2,000 years ago.

From today's perspective, a group of faceless, mindless and deformed soldiers led by a heavily pierced and bling-blinged tyrant is indeed very creepy. And if that is not enough, some of the soldiers wear some kind of clothing that resembles what some Arabs and Taliban are wearing.

Sure, Arabs and Persians are not the same thing, but when you are on the creepy others list, it is a little tricky. And according to Jack Shaheen, a communication professor who wrote Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, it seems that Arabs will be on that list forever. From that association, now people can see that peoples on the creepy others list is all the same.

Of course, the makers of this film said that 300 is a work of fiction that should not be taken seriously. But a long history of who have been depicted as the others in Hollywood tells us otherwise. It is naive to take their statement at face value and believe it is about entertainment. As I have written before, when it comes to foreign policy, there is a limit to liberal Hollywood.

And as we can see from Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, it is very easy to make that list. As Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays the title character Borat Sagdiyev said to Rolling Stone, "And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater."

But Baron Cohen's explanation on why the Kazakhstan joke goes down well with many explains almost everything. "The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist -- who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old."

It plays very well because the place sounds very much like any faraway, undeveloped places that many in the West have in mind, pretty much like Timbuktu, where supposedly camels is the main mode of transportation, women cover their whole body in dark clothes and cool teenagers have only started watching The Breakfast Club and listening to Huey Lewis and the News. And it is exactly due to this reason that those Americans in the film fall prey to Borat's socratic irony.

And it also exactly because if this kind of ignorance, and even arrogance, for the popular culture industry, the end result will always be, in the words of Borat, "nice," and consequently, "great success!" - April 7, 2007

More Culture Wars

From Pop Matters, April 13, 2007

These Days, It isn't Only American Culture That is Affected
By JONATHAN LAST

Two recent stories from the Wall Street Journal point to a deep—and unexpected—revelation about the evolving nature of globalization, a term that we hear a lot but understand only dimly.

These stories may seem trivial, but they represent something quite grand: a striking change in the way American entertainment products get made and exported, and a shift in the nature of globalization.

The first article concerns the international airing of Apple’s ingenious Mac-and-PC ads, which run in many overseas markets. In Spain, France, Germany and Italy, the ads were simply dubbed in the native language. But in Japan and the United Kingdom, the ads were completely reshot. Native actors were used, and the focus of the ads was changed to reflect local sensitivities.

The U.K. ads poked fun at the European Union’s short workweek and long holiday schedule. The Japanese ads avoided making direct comparisons between Macs and PCs, which would have been considered in poor taste in Japanese culture. Instead, they poke fun by making the PC character overly, and unsettlingly, friendly.

The second piece, by Brooks Barnes, details the making of a new TV show in France. The show, Paris Enquetes Criminelles, is a remake of the successful American program Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Dick Wolf, the producer of Law & Order, has overseen the careful exporting of the show.

The American versions of Law & Order adhere to a detailed formula: Every show has five acts; information is parceled out in a pattern; detectives and district attorneys act in certain ways. Even the “kaching” sound operates by a rule: It is used only between scenes indicating a transition in the story line and no more than twice per act. Wolf compiled the laws of Law & Order into a thousand-page bible, which is being used to construct Paris Enquetes Criminelles.

The French show’s writers have tried to “translate” scripts from the American show—not just the language, but the ideas. Sometimes the translation is straightforward; other times it requires some re-imagining. For instance, they don’t do mafia stories (since there is no French mob), and they treat extramarital affairs differently, since the “sophisticated French” do not take such things seriously.

Once upon a time, when we talked about the effects of globalization on culture, we were referring to the export of Hollywood products, dubbed in different languages, to the far corners of the world. The buoyant, but depressing, model was the success of Baywatch, reruns of which were at one point being broadcast in Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Chile, and nearly every place in between.

Today, this traditional model of exporting American TV shows is still big business, last year generating about $8 billion in revenue. (By the by, foreign broadcasters have paid about $500 million for dubbed reruns of the Law & Order franchises over the years.)

Also, the importance of foreign box-office returns has likewise increased for movie studios. Where foreign receipts were once only an afterthought, today they can account for half—or more—of the total gross of many movies. Indeed, the selling of Hollywood movies abroad has influenced how they are made at home. It’s a major factor in the explosion of big-budget, high-concept action movies (which are easier to sell to foreign audiences) over the last 25 years.

Yet much more is going on now than just expansion of markets for American pop-culture products. What we are seeing, with the Apple ads, Paris Enquetes Criminelles, and a host of other examples, is the globalization of the entertainment industry becoming a two-way street.

Instead of finished entertainment products being pushed out of America and onto the rest of the world, we’re seeing artistic ideas being exported in both directions, from Europe and Asia to America, as well as the other way around.

About a decade ago, Hollywood began to rely heavily on importing concepts from foreign TV shows and movies, and remaking them in America. On the small screen, this meant importing and remaking shows such as Survivor, Big Brother, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Office. Foreign movies, such as Insomnia, Dark Water and The Grudge, were similarly remade by American studios.

As a sign of how successful this model of production has become, consider that this year’s Academy Award winner for best picture, The Departed, was a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs and that American Idol, which Jeff Zucker recently called “the most impactful show in the history of television,” began as a British show called Pop Idol.

This trend began as a simple business decision. Entertainment executives, always looking to divine signs that a product will succeed, latched onto the idea of buying properties that someone else had already paid to produce and that audiences had already validated. In other words, they decided to treat foreign markets, such as the Netherlands, or Britain, or Japan, like giant focus groups.

Consider the case of The Ring. The original movie, Ringu, was made in Japan for $1.2 million. It was a success over there, taking in $6.6 million. DreamWorks paid a (relatively) nominal fee to buy the rights to the property, and then remade it for $40 million. It made $129 million in America and $120 million overseas, including, oddly enough, $14 million in Japan.

The remake game isn’t new. For instance, John Sturges’ 1960 movie The Magnificent Seven was a retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 masterpiece The Seven Samurai, and All in the Family was based on the British series Til Death Do Us Part.

But what is new is the enormous volume of remakes and the fact that the pipeline now runs in both directions. Desperate Housewives will be remade in Ecuador; The Nanny, the long-canceled Fran Drescher sitcom, is set to be remade in Indonesia.

All of which is to say that globalization, at least in the entertainment industry, is evolving to include not just pre-made products, but ideas, formulas and syntax. This is an encouraging development. Having an Indonesian version of The Nanny may not be high art, but it’s probably better, from the standpoint of cultural integrity, than dubbed David Hasselhoff.

Of course, it’s possible to ascribe too much presence of mind to the entertainment industry. In a 2003 article on the remaking of Japanese movies, Tad Friend reported that, in 2001, Miramax executives purchased the rights to a Japanese kung-fu comedy called My Wife Is a Gangster after seeing a tape of the movie that didn’t even have subtitles. The producer who brokered the deal bragged that they bought it “without even knowing what the characters were talking about.”

Nonetheless, the evolution is a reminder that systems are complex; even when change is expected, it is often unpredictable.

Globalization has become one of the mantras of our day, but it is a process, not a thing. And none of us yet knows where it may lead.

Link to original article in PopMatters.com

Bahan Kempen untuk Sarkozy

"The main terrorist threat in France comes from Algeria." - Nicolas Sarkozy

Bagaimana Menggunakan TV

Kemenangan Moral Iran

"Dari sudut perang propaganda, kuasa tv telah berjaya dimanfaatkan sepenuhnya oleh Iran, menafikan dakwaan pihak yang menentangnya dan sekurang-kurangnya, menolak stereotaip yang dipersembahkan dalam filem 300."

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British Invasion

From The New York Times, April 8, 2007

On TV, Attitude Is More Important Than the Way the Vowels Sound
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

ENGLISH enunciation isn’t what makes Americans weak at the knees: it’s the cruelty behind the words. The British are breathtakingly callous when it comes to comedy, as is all too obvious in this era of Ricky Gervais and Sacha Baron Cohen. Try as we might, we can never quite match their flinty talent for trafficking in boorishness and scalding embarrassment.

A case in point is “House,” the hit television series that obliges one of Britain’s best and funniest actors, Hugh Laurie, to lose his clipped Oxbridge cadence and imitate an American accent, which he does flawlessly. Yet Mr. Laurie’s chief asset is not his voice but his bravado.

His character, Dr. Gregory House, is a flippant, sarcastic misanthrope who thrives on piercing his co-workers’ delusions of good will and affection. In a recent episode House, who does not bother to hide his addiction to painkillers, makes his friends and colleagues believe he has terminal cancer in order to enroll in an experimental treatment program and get drugs.

Many American actors play curmudgeons, but even the meanest tend to lose their nerve and go soft and cuddly once the audience embraces them: James Woods plays a shyster lawyer on “Shark,” but a cuddly one. Even Larry David has a few tender moments on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The British are better at holding a sneer.

The NBC version of “The Office” is very funny, but the boss, played by Steve Carell, is not quite as gloriously slimy and repellant as Mr. Gervais, who created the show and played the original lead on British television. He has moved on to “Extras,” on HBO, where he plays Andy Millman, an even more vile and pathetic loser. A would-be actor, Andy is surrounded by the pompous, the selfish and the inane. Once again it’s not the accent that captivates viewers; it’s his audacity.

Mr. Gervais’s British co-stars gamely go along. Kate Winslet once played herself as the star of a Holocaust film, a role she said she accepted only to win a long-overdue Oscar. “’I don’t think we really need another movie about the Holocaust, do we?” she said briskly to Andy. “It’s like, how many have there been? We get it. It was grim. Move on.”

Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley were absolutely fearless when they played drunken, self-absorbed and utterly deluded middle-aged women on the BBC comedy “Absolutely Fabulous.” CBS tried to imitate its success with “Cybill,” a pleasant sitcom that starred Cybill Shepard as an aging actress and Christine Baranski as her martini-swilling best friend. Americans can’t take their martini swillers straight up however: both women were watered-down versions of the British originals. Nobody in this country likes to be disliked, and American actors seem particularly scared of not being loved.

On television at least its not how British actors say it. It’s what they are willing to say to get a laugh.

Remaking Hollywood

"Nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus und vor Paris steht Micky Maus."
- Rammstein

Welcome to Hollywood. No, not the one in California, U.S.A. Today, as the recent Academy Awards has shown, Hollywood is everywhere. No matter where you are, you are already in Hollywood. OK, this may be an exaggeration but our globalized world is making this more and more the reality day by day.

Although the Academy is not doing away with the best foreign language film category anytime soon, or ever, the fast changing face of Hollywood and global popular culture is demanding a serious rethinking of the very idea of Hollywood, the ground zero of American popular culture.

Superficially, the recent Oscar had a very international feel to it, - especially with the hype surrounding films like Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima - although one may feel the hype could just be a sales pitch to attract a wider, global audience.

Helen Mirren won the best actress Oscar for playing an English Queen in The Queen while Forest Whitaker took home the best actor Oscar for his role as an African dictator in The Last King of Scotland. And for some reason, in recent years there has been some sort of Hollywood's fascination with Africa, although the focus is still on the continents numerous problems. But the global qualities is significantly deeper than portrayals of leaders of other faraway countries.

And consider these. The Departed, the film that finally won Martin Scorsese that very long overdue best director Oscar, was first made far away in Hong Kong. The huge blockbuster hit The Lord of the Ring trilogy was filmed thousands of miles away in New Zealand, a place better known for rugby and a destination for people who want to study English as a second language than films.

And how do we determine, for lack of a better word, the nationality of films like A Very Long Engagement, Joyeux Noel, Letters from Iwo Jima and many other films created by a pool of global capital and creative forces?

So has Hollywood gone global or has the world gone Hollywood? For me, both are true. Hollywood increasingly needs fundings, locations, creative people and perhaps most importantly, consumer to buy the tickets at the movies and the merchandise. In many cases, Hollywood films earn more overseas than in the United States.

In recent years, we have seen more than a handful of remakes in Hollywood. A very notable example was the rage with Asian horror films such as The Ring and Dark Water. We also see Rene Zelweger speaking a very British English in Bridget Jone's Diary and Kate Winslet convincingly plays an American in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And directors like Luc Besson and Jean-Pierre Jeunet have certainly provided a refreshing new style to Hollywood films, while big studios are looking outside the United States for funding. Describing this development, Jeff Berg, head of a talent agency in Hollywood once said, "Hollywood is now a metaphor, like Wall Street or Madison Avenue."

But it is also true that Hollywood has been guilty of Americanizing films from other cultures that the finished, remade products look very American. While this inevitably signals the success of American soft power on the global stage, the face of Hollywood, the ingredients that make Hollywood, is changing as well.

Hollywood loves the dramatic Hong Kong martial arts and the grandeur of Bollywood song and dance, while cinema goers elsewhere are seeing more and more Hollywood style chick flicks and romantic comedies, proving the attractiveness of the Hollywood formula. Hollywood and the rest of the world now increasingly learn and steal from each other while capital and talents from overseas are strengthening Hollywood.

This gives credence to the view that there is no American cultural imperialism, and what seen as American culture is actually global culture as the world has embraced American culture, and perhaps vice versa. Hollywood now is no longer only made of American culture but a panoply of global forces. Increasingly, Hollywood is as much global as it is American, which in turn makes a foreign film category a little absurd.

The whole world is now practically Hollywood. And even America. In the words of the great Rammstein, "We're all living in Amerika. Amerika ist wunderbar."

But this does not necessarily mean the end of diversity and that there are very few things to choose from. There are numerous other cultural products from all over the world, from East Asia to the Middle East to Western Europe. The fact that they are not in languages that we understand has never, and should not be a problem. As huge and ubiquitous Hollywood is, the rest of the world is never short of wonderful films. One only needs to look at the right places.