Is there legitimate textual borrowing?  Setiono Sugiharto  ;   An associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University; Chief editor of the Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching

JAKARTA POST,  22 Februari 2014

                                                                                                                        

                                                                                         

                                                                                                                       

Academic turmoil recently hit the Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University (UGM) following allegations of plagiarism by its faculty, adding to a long list of academic dishonesty among scholars in the country. A noted economist from the prestigious state university, Anggito Abimanyu, now director general for the haj and minor haj at the Religious Affairs Ministry, has been accused of doing a copy-paste job without proper acknowledgement in his recent opinion piece published in the country’s largest daily, Kompas. Anggito’s sentences and paragraphs in the piece were alleged to bear close resemblance to those written by other authors for the same newspaper. In a statement appearing in The Jakarta Post (Feb. 18), Anggito said he had erroneously referred to some articles in a folder on his personal computer. Even if his testimony is true, this is still a case of plagiarism due to sheer neglect. It is interesting to observe here that such a case of plagiarism is less likely to occur among professional writers or highly experienced scholars like Anggito. Instead, plagiarism of this type is most common among novice writers or scholars and inexperienced student writers. It often takes the form of so-called patch writing — copying a source text with slight modifications in both structural and lexical patterns. While referencing or textual borrowing is very common in the academic world, the rules governing how linguistic elements or ideas belonging to other writers can be borrowed and then reproduced remain fuzzy. For one thing, it is often difficult to define with precision what constitutes a plagiaristic act, as textual borrowing practices vary from one culture to another. For instance, in a culture where submission to authoritative voices is highly encouraged, verbatim imitation of texts is not considered taboo and is seen as something that is not supposed to be avoided. In fact, exact copying is encouraged in order to show respect to the ones who have the authority of knowledge. In this respect, the perception of plagiarism emanating from the Western perspective is incompatible with practices of textual borrowing from other cultural vantage points. The imposition of such a one-sided perspective can often do a disservice to a writer hailing from another cultural tradition. Another point is the notion that originality never exists. To what extent, for example, could the article that was deliberately copied by Anggito be considered a purely original product of its authors? It is important to understand here that the act of communicating through written language is tantamount to the act of knowledge making. And the process of making knowledge never takes place in a social vacuum, but it is socially bounded. The ideas we generate both orally and in written language can never be devoid of the accumulation of experience from our social encounters with other people. This suggests that there is no such thing as the notion of originality. With this in mind, it seems fair to say that we all are in fact “plagiarists”, with a varying degree of the ability in manipulating language. That is, we can never construct knowledge, and hence generate ideas, free from daily social encounters. We owe a great deal to our collaborations with others in the process of making knowledge through a written medium. Thus, the texts that we create are not the product of our individual knowledge, but rather the overt manifestation of our collaborative knowledge and shared biases and subjectivities with other people. In the end, we can say that what distinguishes “expert plagiarists” from “novice plagiarists” lies in the former’s linguistic maturity in shaping the ideas as such so as to appear original and in manipulating linguistic elements that can help them build up these ideas and mask them from the appearance of a mere imitation of other’s ideas. As for the charge of plagiarism against Anggito, it is unfortunate that he couldn’t play elegantly with words, shaping and manipulating them adroitly so as to create an “original” text of his own. He has in fact fallen victim to his ignorance of the standard citation conventions and can therefore be subsumed under the category of “novice plagiarists”. ●