An anthropologist professor herself, Doreen Lee, in her research paper, “Anybody Can Do It: Aesthetic Empowerment, Urban Citizenship, and the Naturalization of Indonesian Graffiti and Street Art”, exposes the supremacy of street art and graffiti to the political movement in Indonesia. Lee’s purpose is to depict the recent spread and creation of the street art through media during the post-New Order Indonesia. She has established a very professional tone in order to appeal and provoke the thoughts of her arguments with her fellow scholars in the same field, particularly. Lee begins building her credibility with personal anecdotes and reputable sources, citing convincing facts and statistics; however, her lack of emotional appeal on most part of her essay inevitably weakens her credibility and ultimately, her argument. Lee begins her paper by first laying out the background information about the involvement of youth in the street art movement. Later on she continues by discussing the cultural urban interventions and the communication within the society through public spaces. These factors (street art and graffiti) then bind together to take effect on the rise and fall of Indonesia’s president during the Reformation period. Lee suggests that, even with the Indonesia’s political agenda that happened, the youth of downtown Jakarta have paved a path for themselves to express their opinions through street art message. Throughout her piece, Lee uses many strong sources that strengthen her credibility and appeal to ethos, as well as building her argument. These sources include, “The Graffiti Subculture”, “collection from Propagraphic’s End of the Year Project”, and also Nirwan Dirwanto’s exhibition catalogue (Lee 307). Citing these sources boosts Lee’s credibility as an anthropologist by showing she has done her homework and has provided facts and statistics, as well as expert opinions to support her claims. Not to mention that she also includes her own personal experience that she attended the Wall Street Art exhibition in South Jakarta, Indonesia so that she herself experience the environment of street art first hand and can correlate with her issue in the paper (Lee 305). Finally, Doreen Lee is an assistant professor of anthropology in Northeastern University, United States and got her post doctorate degree from Cornell University. Getting to know the background of the author, Doreen Lee, is an agent to make Lee’s paper more trustable and convincing. Furthermore, Doreen Lee continues to prove her credibility by creating an academic diction through the usage of specific vocabulary and phrases in order to maintain her level of education. For instance, “discernable aesthetic”, “inconsequential scribbles” and “bifurcation of public spaces” (Lee). These set of specific words is an effective diction as it is shaped by some clear, concrete and exact words. She also incorporates some Indonesian vocabulary in her paper like “coret-coretan”, “rakyat” and “seni jalanan” to instill some sort of connection to the readers on how Indonesian communicate through street art and graffiti (Lee). Using these type of vocabularies distinguishes her from any other people that wants to investigate the same topic. In addition, using these type of words enables Lee to invoke a professional tone when reading her paper. With this strategy of using strong and exact vocabularies, Lee successfully prove her credibility as an educated anthropologist and put herself on the driving seat to continue building up her arguments and opinions. Adding to her ethos appeal, Lee uses strong appeals to logos, with many facts and statistics and logical progression of ideas. Before proceeding with the correlation of street art and politics in Indonesia, she introduces
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This assumption might come from her lack of observation and her urge to maintain her credibility as an anthropologist. In addition, her remarks could be possibly misinterpreted as a statement to justify the ravaging of public spaces caused by non-benefiting graffiti. This flaw of oversimplification weakens Lee’s essay in general. While she successfully points out the usage of public spaces to relate with the political agenda in Indonesia, that “street artist sees an underutilized and empty wall under the sign of neglect” (Lee 319), she still has lacks the evidence to show that all the street artists competing for the public spaces share the same goal to publicly show their
This assumption might come from her lack of observation and her urge to maintain her credibility as an anthropologist. In addition, her remarks could be possibly misinterpreted as a statement to justify the ravaging of public spaces caused by non-benefiting graffiti. This flaw of oversimplification weakens Lee’s essay in general. While she successfully points out the usage of public spaces to relate with the political agenda in Indonesia, that “street artist sees an underutilized and empty wall under the sign of neglect” (Lee 319), she still has lacks the evidence to show that all the street artists competing for the public spaces share the same goal to publicly show their