1,720,993 research outputs found
Special Issue : Media/Politics in Indonesia [Editors]
No full textEmma Baulch and Julian Millie are editors of this special issue
Gesturing elsewhere: the identity politics of the Balinese death/thrash metal scene
No full textThis essay explores the political significance of Balinese death/thrash fandom. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a death/thrash scene in Bali paralleled growing criticism of accelerated tourism development on the island. Specifically, locals protested the increasing ubiquity of Jakarta, 'the centre', cast as threatening to an authentically 'low', peripheral Balinese culture. Similarly, death/thrash enthusiasts also gravitated toward certain fringes, although they rejected dominant notions of Balinese-ness by gesturing elsewhere, toward a global scene. The essay explores the ways in which death/thrash enthusiasts engaged with local discourses by coveting their marginality, and aims to demonstrate how their articulations of 'alien-ness' contributed in important ways to a broader regionalism
Creating a scene: Balinese punk's beginnings
No full textThe promotion of alternative music by deregulated television\ud
and recording industries, together with the increasingly felt presence of the metropolis, converged on Balinese cultural and physical landscapes in the 1990s. Mirroring developments in broader society, a regionalist discourse, which polarized notions of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, emerged among Balinese youth in the context of the local band scene. For certain musicians, musical authenticity\ud
was firmly rooted in a cultural and geographical locale, and was articulated by their abhorrence for socializing at shopping malls. In contrast, these Balinese alternative (including punk) musicians sought authenticity in a metropolitan elsewhere. This article is a case study of the indigenization of a ‘global’ code in a non-western periphery. It contests arguments for the ‘post-imperial’ nature of globalization, and demonstrates the continued salience of centre–periphery dialectics in local discourses. At the same time, the study attests to the progressive role a metropolitan superculture can play in cultural renewal in the periphery
Making scenes : Reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali
No full textIn 1996, Emma Baulch went to live in Bali to do research on youth culture. Her chats with young people led her to an enormously popular regular outdoor show dominated by local reggae, punk, and death metal bands. In this rich ethnography, she takes readers inside each scene: hanging out in the death metal scene among unemployed university graduates clad in black T-shirts and ragged jeans; in the punk scene among young men sporting mohawks, leather jackets, and hefty jackboots; and among the remnants of the local reggae scene in Kuta Beach, the island’s most renowned tourist area. Baulch tracks how each music scene arrived and grew in Bali, looking at such influences as the global extreme metal underground, MTV Asia, and the internationalization of Indonesia’s music industry.\ud
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Making Scenes is an exploration of the subtle politics of identity that took place within and among these scenes throughout the course of the 1990s. Participants in the different scenes often explained their interest in death metal, punk, or reggae in relation to broader ideas about what it meant to be Balinese, which reflected views about Bali’s tourism industry and the cultural dominance of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital and largest city. Through dance, dress, claims to public spaces, and onstage performances, participants and enthusiasts reworked “Balinese-ness” by synthesizing global media, ideas of national belonging, and local identity politics. Making Scenes chronicles the creation of subcultures at a historical moment when media globalization and the gradual demise of the authoritarian Suharto regime coincided with revitalized, essentialist formulations of the Balinese self
Genre Publics: Aktuil Magazine and Middle-class Youth in 1970s Indonesia
No full textPage range: 85-114This article attempts to change our thinking about the formation, development, and growth of the middle class(es) in Indonesia during the early Suharto regime. In the dominant story about the formation of the Indonesian middle classes, a particular configuration of economics and politics caused the formation of the middle class, and shaped identities, values, and behaviors. According to analysts, these middle classes were heavily dependent on the state, and politically ineffectual. To challenge that notion, this essay studies how the pop music magazine Aktuil (1967–84) addressed its readers, and shows how this treatment allowed certain people to feel as if they were part of a tangible social entity that inhabited a middle social space, between the state and the masses. This is an important and necessary intervention that recognizes the significance of media and popular culture in the construction of identities. The author positions Aktuil in the context of the radical reorganization of the press and of popular music, which enabled the quiet evolution of the Indonesian middle class—a cohort constituted not only by musical taste, but also by the practice of reading. Aktuil gave rise to a virtual social entity heralded into being by overlapping modes of address, that is, those that touched not only on a rhetoric of print, but also on discourses of popular music genres. By proposing that the middle class was a virtual entity, the imagination of which was enabled by the reorganization of the press and of popular music, this essay departs from a dominant perspective that attributes to the state a pivotal role in the tangible growth of the middle class in the 1970s
[Book review] "Networked affect" edited by Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit
No full textWhat is a productive way to approach social networks in order to understand how questions of agency and affordance are playing out in the everyday of contemporary capitalism? Networked Affect addresses this question via a selection of essays that closely scrutinize how entities implicated in the reproduction of social networks—software, sites, platforms, file types, code, nonhuman materials, and human bodies, for example—affect one another. The volume draws on an emerging body of affect theory and its philosophical antecedents (especially Gilles Deleuze and Baruch Spinoza) to shed light on social networks’ historical place and significance..
Mobile phones: Advertising, consumerism and class
No full textOne of the major challenges facing scholars seeking to investigate the political and ideological formations manifest in contemporary Indonesian public life is the coincidence of two significant phenomena with distinct historical roots: regime change and change to the ecologies of media technologies by which public life is produced, circulated and sensed. For the large part, scholars have sought to negotiate this challenge by treating new media technologies as neutral equipment that plays no role in shaping ideological and political formations beyond its technical capacities. Major studies of contemporary Indonesian politics sketch a continuum on which historical change is forged very much beyond the technological, and in which regime change in 1998 and decentralization in 2004 feature as major turning points shaping the contours of public life in the present. \ud
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In this chapter, I develop an alternate historical frame for analyzing the ideological implications of the spread of new media, arguing that we cannot hope to grasp these by positioning the digital in a post-authoritarian frame – the predominant one for analyzing political change in contemporary Indonesia. There is little doubt that post-authoritarianism is aptly applied to studies of the intricacies of formal dimensions of Indonesian democracy in the 21st century. But to accord it primacy in the study of digital change is limiting; when we hitch study of digital Indonesia to an agenda that seeks to understand emerging forms of political organisation by looking at society through the lens of elections, parties, opposition movements, and states, we forego the opportunity to understand emerging forms of political organisation by looking at society through the lens of media technologies. In other words, we forego the opportunity to understand political change with theories of media change. \ud
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The chapter draws on such theories to consider how media change precipitates political change. It does so through a focus on an important part of Digital Indonesia as we know it today: hape. The widely used vernacular term – an acronym for hand phone – in this chapter denotes both the historical roots and the social and political implications of mobile phones’ rapid uptake in the latter part of the 2000s. I trace hape’s beginnings to a set of post-Cold War media deregulation packages that included but was not limited to the telecommunications industry, and consider its place not as a singularly revolutionary object, but as one that rode the wake of cultural changes already set in motion by the spread of other new media technologies and contents, most notably, advertising funded television. I understand hape, then, to inhabit a broader “new technological paradigm” (Castells); a function of a “post-developmentalist” (Ong) reform process begun in the late-1980s, and the social and cultural consequences of which unfolded over the next couple of decades – coinciding with, and to some degree being shaped by, regime change. I aim to sketch the architecture of this paradigm, to examine the ideas about what it means to be digitally connected emerging from it, and to analyse the nascent forms of political organization it is generating
Music for the Pria Dewasa : changes and continuities in class and pop music genres
No full textThis paper presents Rolling Stone Indonesia (RSI) and places it in an historical context to tease out some changes and continuities in Indonesian middle-class politics since the beginning of the New Order. Some political scientists have claimed that class interests were at the core of the transition from Guided Democracy to the New Order, and popular music scholars generally assert that class underlies pop genre distinctions. But few have paid attention to how class and genre were written into Indonesian pop in the New Order period; Indonesian pop has a fascinating political history that has so far been overlooked. Placing RSI in historical perspective can reveal much about the print media’s classing of pop under New Order era political constraints, and about the ways these modes of classing may or may not have endured in the post-authoritarian, globalised and liberalised media environment
God Bless come back : new experiments with nostalgia in Indonesian rock
No full textThis article discusses the production of an Indonesian rock past through a case study of the 1970s rock band God Bless, which has been gradually ‘coming back’ since the middle of the 2000s. In doing so, the article documents this comeback, analyses shifts in the band’s position vis-à-vis nationality, and places these shifts in the context of the industrial and aesthetic transformation of Indonesian popular music over the past decade or so. Furthermore, it considers how the range of nostalgic productions associated with the comeback might be understood not only in light of the scholarship on nostalgia, but also the political environment it inhabits
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