DONDENA Seminar - Tom Pepinsky

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"Modernization and Identity: Evidence from Every Indonesian Name"

SPEAKER: Tom Pepinsky (Cornell University) 

ABSTRACT: 

Modernization is a central force of social change in the contemporary era, yet the character of that change remains widely debated in the social sciences. On one hand, modernization is associated with the rise of national identity, but on the other hand, attendant processes such as religious change and urbanization it can increase the salience of primordial identity categories like race, ethnicity, and religion. The core challenge in disentangling the effects of modernization at the micro-level is measuring individual behavior at scale in ways that can be associated with differential processes of modernization over time and space. Leveraging over 240m observations from the 2010 Indonesian census, we develop a semi-supervised method for characterizing the social categories encoded in individual names. We document that the spread of national schools led to a spread in national-style naming practices, and that the spread of religious institutions caused a rise in Islamic naming practices. We discuss the implications for literatures on modernization, identity, and social change. 
 

BIO: 

Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor in the Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University, and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He specializes in comparative politics and international political economy, with a focus on emerging markets and a special interest in Southeast Asia. Currently, he is working on issues relating to identity, politics, and political economy in comparative and international politics.