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Placing popular culture in serious contexts
Dewi Anggraeni , The Jakarta Post , Melbourne | Sun, 10/12/2008 9:50 AM | Bookmark
Popular Culture in Indonesia; Fluid identities
in post-authoritarian politics
Edited by Ariel Heryanto
206 pages
Routledge, 2008
Most people subconsciously draw a line between reading for pleasure and reading for learning. And when seeking information readers also keep a mental partition between books on popular issues and those of scholarly analysis.
Viwed in this context, Popular Culture in Indonesia; Fluid identities in post-authoritarian politics, edited by Ariel Heryanto, has an unusual appeal to it. The book promises a world where pop culture and politics not only intersect, but influence and leave marks on one another.
Popular Culture offers analysis into the interconnectedness of television content, films and live performance with issues of identity. It also points to other factors, such as the political power driving the social dynamics and the sweep of global trends which often determine the movement of popular culture.
Each chapter in the book, two of which are written by Heryanto, are an important segment in the spectrum of the topic yet can be read individually.
In Chapter 1, Heryanto draws on a 1978 film (Selamat Tinggal Jeanette) and the rise of Inul Daratista, a dangdut (a blend of local, Indian and Arabic music) singer-dancer to fame and controversy in the 21st century to examine this theme of interconnectedness.
While the film may be primarily intended for entertainment and the plot fairly simple, once fleshed out a great deal of the underlying social attitudes and contemporary values are revealed.
The Inul phenomenon, still fresh in popular memory, is even more gripping to read about. And when the intriguing aspects surrounding and shaping it are put under a magnifying glass, they reveal a lively power play involving human insecurity, corporate graspingess and political astuteness. Here Heryanto also makes a perceptive observation about how Inul was robbed of her capacity to maintain control over her audience. Raised to new heights of fame by sophisticated media environments, her ability to decide on her appearance, movements and song choice suddenly fell into the hands of others.
Interestingly, in the end, Inul herself comes out as an individual having more integrity than many would have previously attributed to her.
David Hanan looks at the rise of the teen movie in Indonesia and compares it to a similar development in Thailand over the past 20 years. In the backdrop Hanan paints the emergence of consumer class culture in the suburbs of the cities leading to an audience of baby boomer teenage consumers interested in films about themselves.
Hanan selected two Indonesian films, Catatan Si Boy (Boy's Diary) and Ada Apa Dengan Cinta? (What's Up With Love) and two Thai films, Kling Wai Kon Phor Son Wai (When In Trouble, Get Away Fast: That's What Dad Teaches Us) and Girlfriends as points of discussion. We learn about popular culture used as a reinforcing tool by the politically powerful, see the reflections of attitudes among the middle-class young and observe camaraderie found in girls' and boys' friendships.
While there are differences between the Indonesian and Thai scenes, they are minor compared to the differences between their worlds and those of the young people in the United States and other Western countries.
One of the interesting base motifs in the book is that in relation to the ethnic Chinese.
Heryanto points out in Chapter 4 that in the mid 1990s, there was "a curious absence of the ethnic Chinese in the official corpus of Indonesian national literature, and the absence of any mention of the social tensions that arise from the unsettling position of this ethnic minority". Since 1998 however, after the racialized violence against the ethnic Chinese in May 1998, a new recognition of Chinese Indonesians and their contributions to the nation and social problems began to appear in contemporary literature, fine arts and films. Despite this development, Heryanto observes, Chinese ethnicity continues to be an issue in Indonesia.
While Chinese ethnicity still stands out, we begin to question what parts of this ethnicity the non-Chinese population find unacceptable when we read Rachmah Ida's "Watching Meteor Garden with urban Kampung women in Indonesia" in Chapter 5. In her study of Asian Mandarin programs on Indonesian television, Ida focused her research on how a kampung community in East Java reacted to Taiwanese soap opera Meteor Garden.
The popularity of the telenovela, which has a value-weighted storyline, a definite body language and unmistakably Chinese appearances of the characters, seems to indicate that the audience did not connect them with the allegedly negative stereotypical images of the ethnic Chinese around them. Conversely, those negative images perhaps came from other aspects idiosyncratic to some ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, or specifically in East Java.
Another question worth asking then is whether Chinese ethnicity is the core of social suspicions, or are the behaviors and economic status of certain ethnic Chinese the source of their objection? Was it this objection which inevitably spread and generalized the whole population in its entirety?
In the chapter titled "Fame, Fortune, Fantasi", Penelope Coutas looks closely at how the audience is overwhelmed and manipulated yet still interacts with the powerful media spin of wide-reaching programs such as Indonesian Idol, Akademi Fantasi Indosiar and Kontes Dangdut Indonesia.
Edwin Jurrikns examines satirical television programs Republik Mimpi and Republik BBM -- acronym for Benar-benar Mabuk -- in his chapter, resulting in a very informative and entertaining read.
In total, there are nine chapters which come together to fulfill the book's promise to show a world where two different regions of life merge together.
