8 th Euroseas conference Vienna, 11–14 August 2015

— Patronage, Populism, and Power: Elections and the Media Industry in Indonesia 
Vera Altmeyer (Roskilde University)
 
This paper addresses the role of Indonesian media within the country’s election politics. Today, election victories in 
Indonesia are increasingly determined by the way issues and image, for which a candidate stands, are portrayed in the 
media. This new populist and media-centered campaign environment has tremendous effects on the role and power 

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of actors from the media industry within the political economy of Indonesia. Besides the more obvious interference of 
politically wired media-owners in newsrooms, Indonesian politicians do utilize a large number of additional strategies 
to influence public opinion with the help of media personnel. Equipped with the necessary professional knowledge, 
actors at all levels of the media industry have become sought-after providers of a broad range of campaign services, 
including strategic agenda setting, controlling and managing journalists in the field, organization of smear campaigns, 
social media wars and more. These services are often part and parcel of an intricate system of money politics and 
patronage provision, but can also take on extortive character with journalists turning against politicians. Despite the 
fact that they permeate all levels of the media industry and have impact on the quality of information available on a 
wide range of mass and social media outlets, many of these methods are largely unknown to the Indonesian public 
and have been little or not at all discussed in Indonesia- related scholarship. Interestingly, the practices described here 
show similarities to other scholars’ analysis of media-political relations (both during and beyond election times) in 
cases as diverse as Thailand, Russia, or Venezuela. Therefore, the material raises questions about common structures 
or other factors underlying and shaping the agency of media personnel in otherwise highly diverse (media) systems. A 
discussion of these questions aims to contribute to further conceptualization of media-political relations. The research 
for this paper was conducted in two case studies of recent major elections campaigns in Indonesia’s young democracy: 
the campaign for Governor of Jakarta in 2012 and the Indonesian presidential election in 2014. The data is based on a 
mixed-methods approach including eleven months of ethnographic research with participant observation and quali-
tative interviews, media content analysis as well as quantitative sources.
— Exploring Press Bias in Indonesia with Computational Techniques
Jacqueline Hicks (KITLV) 
At the heart of comparative research on media systems is the question of “political parallelism” – the nature of the 
links between political actors and the media. 
Traditionally, researchers have explored such links by explaining their own or others’ impressions of media bias, or by 
manually coding a small proportion of media stories and extrapolating their conclusions. By contrast, this research 
uses automatic text-mining techniques on tens of thousands of digitized newspaper articles to explore media bias in 
Indonesia. 
Indonesia is an interesting case study for two reasons. First, there have been increasing concerns over the past ten 
years about the concentration of ownership in the media industry by politically connected elites. Second, the recent 
2014 presidential elections polarized the nation around two very different and clearly delineated candidates. This all 
raised the potential for a highly partisan media coverage of the elections, but can this be proven?
This research compares the narratives around the candidates’ personalities and governing styles in six different news-
papers – two ostensibly neutral, two whose owners publicly declared support for one candidate and two whose owners 
endorsed the other candidate. Was there much difference in the way these different newspapers described the candi-
dates? Was there any change before and after the newspaper owners officially endorsed one candidate or the other?
— Media Organizations and Public Discourses in Southeast Asia
Rüdiger Korff (University of Passau)
The discussion of mediatization draws attention to media as an own system. As much as media start to dominate 
communication, the logic of media turns into the logic of communication and thus, public discourse gets defined by 
media. It is assumed that media are the independent variable. However, the ownership of media organisations, their 
control by state comissions and the need to get financing from f.e. advertising implies that media have to provide 
information to an audience, and that the audience understands these. In this perspective, media are the dependent 
variable.
In the presentation data on media owenership, regulation and self-description on their homepages are used to show 
that media are from being independent. Media use existing discourses and try to frame these in specific ways.

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Panel: On, Behind and Around the Screen in Contemporary Indonesia:  
Identities and Representation
convener: Meg Downes (Australian National University)
panel abstract
This panel focuses on imaginative world-building in contemporary Indonesian popular culture, particularly film and 
television, and the complex global and inter-Asia cultural flows that shape these processes. Mediascapes and popular 
cultures are key sites of representation (as well as misrepresentation and non-representation), where everyday social 
identities, in relation to ethnicity, religion, gender and nation are constructed, negotiated and contested. While these 
topics have often been studied in isolation, we bring them into conversation with each other, examining their complex 
and multiple interactions and intersections. Together, we trace the origin and transmission of on-screen representa-
tions, as well as public reactions to these cultural products, with Maria Myutel focussing on producers, Evi Eliyanah 
examining content, and Meg Downes concentrating on audience responses. Myutel’s paper, ‘Indians and soap opera 
in Indonesia: behind ‘the seen’’, takes us behind the scenes of the popular ‘sinetron’ format to address questions of how 
ethnicity features in cultural production in Indonesia. Eliyanah offers complex insights into the ambivalent on-screen 
construction of masculinity and its intersection with religiosity, modernity, and globalisation in her paper, ‘Re-pre-
senting but not quite radically changing: Visions of contemporary Muslim masculinities in recent Indonesian films’. 
Finally, in the closing paper, ‘‘Movies are not just for entertainment’: Representations of self and nation among young 
Indonesian audiences in the post-reform era’, Downes examines the life of popular narratives beyond the screen, and 
the symbolic significance of consumption practices for young Indonesians. Throughout, our concern is with different 
representational ‘moments’ of production, construction and interpretation.
Approaching processes of screen representation from these three distinct but overlapping angles, this panel seeks to 
examine changes and continuities in the way ethnic, religious, gender and national identities have been reproduced 
and re-articulated in post-reform era Indonesia, while also highlighting broader methodological and theoretical im-
plications for studying mediascapes in Southeast Asia more generally.
— ‘Movies Are Not Just for Entertainment’: Representations of Self and Nation among Young Indonesian Audi-
ences in the Post-Reform Era 
Meg Downes (Australian National University)
The question of what makes ‘quality’ national cinema in Indonesia has long preoccupied commentators, filmmakers 
and consumers, as well as politicians and policymakers. This paper takes an ethnographic approach, concentrating 
on the consumption practices of young Indonesians, and examining how certain types of films are highly valued by 
society, while others are dismissed or ignored. Guided by the common preoccupations of these young respondents, I 
examine a number of important, interrelated processes; firstly, the way respondents self-represent their viewing tastes 
reveals the importance of popular film consumption practices in achieving symbolic capital amongst young educated 
Indonesians; secondly, for many consumers there are distinct roles and responsibilities for Indonesian cinema as 
opposed to films from East Asia or from Hollywood; and finally, consistent patterns in the way young respondents 
discuss the social responsibility of Indonesian cinema point to the continued influence of long-powerful ‘film nasi-
onal’ discourses. Focus on change, liberalisation and diversification has been the norm in studies of the Indonesian 
mediascape since 1998. Less studied are the continuities in public discourse regarding the media’s role in society. This 
paper seeks to highlight the persistence and resilience of such discourses and their complex interactions with both 
global and inter-Asian cultural flows, as well as tracing the symbolic importance of popular narratives amongst young 
consumers in contemporary Indonesia.
— Re-Presenting But Not Quite Radically Changing: Representations of Contemporary Indonesian Muslim 
Masculinities in Recent Indonesian Films 
Evi Eliyanah (Australian National University)
Film has been an important cultural arena in which ideas about Islam and becoming good Muslims are constantly 
constituted and contested in contemporary Indonesia. Concerned with the social construction of masculinity and its 

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intersection with religiosity, modernity, and globalisation, my paper explores representations of Muslim masculinity 
in four Indonesian films: Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love, 2008), Perempuan Berkalung Sorban (2009), Ketika Cinta 
Bertasbih (When Love Chants, 2010), Ketika Cinta Bertasbih 2 (When Love Chants 2, 2010). These films constitute 
and contest contemporary Muslim masculinity around uncertainties of modernity and globalisation through their 
wrestles with contemporary gender issues to produce archetypes of new ideal Muslim men: young, urban, middle-
class, (foreign) educated, gentle towards women, and responsible heads of the family. However, although many schol-
ars see this representation of masculinity as “redefining” the status-quo representations of Muslim masculinity pro-
duced during the New Order, I argue that the power relations between Muslim men and women remains ambivalent 
in these representations, as evident in the men’s reluctance to accept women being more resourceful in religious 
knowledge, financial independence and leadership skills. This ambivalence arguably reflects the contemporary Mus-
lim middle class’ desire of departure from the image of “traditional Muslim” yet not wanting to give up the privileges 
being provided by the status quo.
— Indians and Soap Opera in Indonesia: Behind ‘The Seen’ 
Maria Myutel (Australian National University)
Since the mid-1990s, soap opera known in Indonesian language as sinetron (an abbreviation of sinema elektronik) re-
mains the most watched entertainment program on the Indonesian free-to-air TV. Despite its huge popularity and the 
constant criticism coming from media activists, state institutions, content providers and audiences alike, the sinetron 
as a complex phenomenon of Indonesian pop culture is understudied by scholars. Putting “the object of soap opera” in 
the centre of the analysis, this paper seeks to examine what distinguishes sinetron from other global TV formats of a 
similar kind. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with prominent producers in Jakarta and close reading of the sinetron 
narratives, I would argue that the defining feature of the Indonesian soap opera lies in its production process and not 
so much in its narratives (which are mostly copied), audio-visual codes (mixture of American daytime soap opera, 
telenovela, Bollywood and K-pop codes), structure (that remains very flexible during the show), air time, or the tar-
geted audience. More specifically, the producers of sinetron, who are predominantly of Indian descent, play a decisive 
role in shaping sinetron as an original genre of the Indonesian television. On a more general basis, by contextualising 
the sinetron production historically, this paper addresses the question of how ethnicity features in cultural production 
in Indonesia during the last two decades.
Panel: Performative Publics and Global Modernities in Southeast Asia
conveners: Chris Hudson (RMIT University), Fridus Steijlen (KITLV)
discussants: Craig Latrell (Hamilton College), Yuanxin Li (University College Dublin)
panel abstract
Global flows of culture are so deeply embedded that local or national environments may now be imagined as having 
a global span. The imagination has become an organized field of social practices, and a form of negotiation between 
sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility, as Appadurai famously pointed out. An expanded field of the 
imaginary is a key component of the global order (Appadurai, 1996). Questions still arise, however, about how the 
imagination of life with a global span is made possible at the level of everyday social practices. Performance and per-
formativity offer a fertile field in which to think about the ways in which individual or collective identity and agency 
are constructed, recognised and reproduced in expanded fields of possibility. Urban spaces and media can become the
locations of new publics – stages on which subjects can create and perform transformed identities. Performative in-
terventions in Asia can generate a re-imagining of local publics, both spatially grounded and mediatised, and help to 
renegotiate the connection between the local and the global.
This panel will investigate the role of the imaginative and aesthetic dimension in the diffusion of global modernity 
through performative practices in several Southeast Asian societies. It is a continuation of a project begun at a sym-
posium in Barcelona in November, 2014.

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— An Islamist Flashmob in the Street of Shah Alam 
Bart Barendregt (Leiden University)
On October 6th, 2012 and anticipating the upcoming Malaysian national elections, some of my long-time acquain-
tances came up with the idea of taking down to the streets of Shah Alam, - a suburb of KL mostly populated by the 
young Malay middle class, - to organise what according to them was the first Islamist flash mob ever. While some of 
them mourned the invisibility and neglect of Islamic performing arts in mainstream media, others were driven by a 
more politically-motivated agenda, protesting the many civil atrocities in the Syrian war that had recently broke out 
or, less outspoken, Malaysian politics itself. The flash mob, soon branded as Cinta Rasul (‘Expression of our Love for 
the Prophet’), thus provided the means to collectively voice various forms of discontent that seemingly collided in a 
shared Islamist agenda. As diverse as its causes, were the expressions heard that day at Shah Alam’s Freedom Square: 
from motivational speech, and Muslim stand–up comedy to Muslim metal and other new found expressions of ‘halal 
chic’ a wide audience was seemingly addressed. 
In seeking to participate in a wider Malaysian public discourse, Xpresi cinta Rasul seems yet another clear rupture 
with previous Islamist performance, in which Muslim activists hitherto performed for own audiences and at their 
own venues. This paper uses the example of the Islamist flash mob to explain how a new sort of Islamist visual and 
auditory repertory is currently being shaped through its interaction in and with a wider public sphere and how public 
performances such as this may provide Malay islamist with the means to articulate local religious and political con-
cerns with global pop aesthetics. In doing so it moves away from the ways street spectacle and remediation of such 
performance has mostly been studied for progressive and, artivist causes, showing but little concern for conservative, 
poor, reactionary or in this case Islamist appropriation of the very same imagery, technology or formats.
While the format of the flash mob, road show or massively staged carnival in itself may (yet) be somewhat of an un-
conventional mode within the emergent public visibility of Islamism in Southeast Asia, much can be learnt from the 
intersection of practices, places and actors that converge in the event of October2012 and since that moment have 
increasingly become an ccepted format within Islamist circles. Building on recent work in the field of visual studies 
and digital anthropology, this paper uses the Islamist flash mob as to illustrate the affectionate power of travelling 
images, as well as the affordances of social media that not only provide one-time events with a much longer lease but 
increasingly so have replaced the single event as main attraction calling forth publics of its own.
 
— Mediatised Resistance in Indonesia 
Birgit Bräuchler (Goethe University Frankfurt)
Drawing on current debates about global protest aesthetics and nonviolence this paper looks at contemporary forms 
of mediatised resistance in Indonesia. Media performances nowadays play a crucial role in how individuals and social 
collectivities imagine themselves and in how the local is interlinked with the global. Social movements, grassroots 
and marginalized people all over the world make increasing use of media to promote their cause – locally, nationally 
and internationally. Media have become a crucial means for nonviolent resistance and protest. In Indonesia, media 
were once the cornerstone of national unity and are now increasingly being used by different groups to push through 
their political and economic interests. At the same time, media have become important means for subversive politics, 
empowering the marginalized, and resistance against the government, among others on Bali, the main tourist des-
tination in Indonesia. After a dramatic but short recession due to the Bali bombing in 2002, the tourism industry is 
now booming more than ever before. Although the government is building on Bali’s cultural capital, its development 
policies are oriented towards increasing tourist numbers and infrastructure. The aggressive development policies of 
the Indonesian government start to trigger resistance among the Balinese, who have long been depicted as peaceful, 
harmonious, cultural and apolitical people. This contribution looks at a recent nonviolent protest movement on Bali 
that is publicly articulating and mediatising its dissatisfaction with the reclamation of land in Bali’s south, meant to 
open up new space for tourism development. In line with Balinese tradition, culture and art are being employed as 
weapons against outside intruders and as a means to criticise politics. Through its extensive media use the movement 
manages to organise protest and performative interventions that can generate a re-imagining of protest publics on a 
local and a global scale. 

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— Global Modernities and Shadow Puppet Theatres of Southeast Asia
Matthew Cohen (University of London)
Scholars of Southeast Asia have long focused on the region’s varied traditions of shadow puppet theatre as vehicles 
for articulating local identity: performances are a dialogue between performers and sponsors that index community 
affairs, power dynamics, conceptions of the person, and the relation between humans and the spirit world. Global 
flows of culture mean that these arts and associated artefacts have an international span, and are being re-worked in 
imaginative permutations in search of new publics in art galleries, the internet, community arts contexts, interme-
dial collaborations, and festivals. Even while cultural conservatives mourn vanishing traditions, a new generation of 
Southeast Asian shadow artists, many of them both university-educated and the descendants or pupils of traditional 
practitioners, are seizing the codes of performance culture, inhabiting received forms, and re-making them to speak 
to both local particularities and global issues---a mode of repurposing consonant with what French art theorist and 
curator Nicolas Bourriaud has identified as “postproduction” artistic strategies. Javanese artists Heri Dono, Nasirun, 
Eko Nugroho, and Jumaadi mine traditions of wayang kulit in their installations and community projects for politi-
cal parody and carnivalesque revelry, critiquing heritage discourse and development policies. Javanese and Balinese 
puppeteers such as the late Slamet Gundono, Catur “Benyek” Kuncoro, and I Made Sidia fashion a plethora of wayang 
kontemporer genres, ephemeral creations that expand fields of possibility for shadow play and renegotiate the connec-
tion between the local and the global. Thai artists Kamol Tassanchalee and Chusak Srikwan work against the formal 
constraints of nang yai and nang talung, violating the figure’s sacred aura and asserting their own authorship. Cambo-
dia’s Sovanna Phum Art Association boldly crosses circus with sbaek thom, while the “Projek Wayang” of Malaysia’s 
Five Art Centre departs from wayang Siam, and reimagines Malaysia’s shadow theatre as a dialogue between books in 
a library, a dancing light bulb, or animated objects in a marketplace stall. Southeast Asian shadow puppeteers partici-
pate in international collaborations such as The Theft of Sita (2000), Macbeth in the Shadows (2005), and Story of the 
Dog (2006). Animators and game designers throughout the region endeavour to reimagine the figures, performance 
dynamics, and stories of shadow play traditions in digital milieus. Such abductions and radical re-interpretations 
stoke debates about cultural identity and patrimony, aesthetic norms and moral values, individual agency and collec-
tive creativity, postcolonial exoticism, and the politics of recognition.
— Performing the Global and the Local at Changing Airport Singapore
Chris Hudson (RMIT University)
As is well known, the processes of globalization have brought about transformations in social and political life inside 
nation states. The binary of global/local, amongst other oppositional pairs, has been dissolved and we are more likely 
now to think in terms of Beck’s ‘inclusive oppositions’. These are experienced at the level of everyday life as a cosmo-
politanism that, as Beck argues, has ‘roots’ and ‘wings’ at the same time (2002: 19). It would be difficult to think of a 
more apt metaphor than Beck’s roots and wings to describe the role of the international airport in the dissolving of the 
dualism between global and local that gives rise to the cosmopolitanization of the nation state. 
Airport terminals are spaces of mobility and transience and are often thought of as no-man’s lands of temporal and 
spatial dislocation. Airports are also, however, public spaces rooted in the particularities of the local. An interesting 
case in point is Changi Airport, Singapore. Changi’s Terminal 3 was opened in 2008 to much fanfare and has since 
been promoted in Singapore as ‘a lifestyle hub for families’. It was reported that Terminal 3 is so much fun and so wel-
coming, that people are reluctant to leave. It offers a number of child-oriented attractions, such as a 12 metre tall slide, 
a playground, and a dedicated corner where children can watch the Cartoon Network on television, in addition to a 
cinema, a multi-media entertainment centre, a nature trail, a vertical tropical rainforest five storeys high and a shop-
ping area resembling a traditional Asian bazaar, all accessible to the non-travelling public. Terminal 3 has become a 
sort of ersatz village or kampong, a safe, familiar locale where people socialize and share meals with friends, shop and 
take their children to play. This paper will consider Changi’s Terminal 3 as a space in which global and local citizenship 
can be performed and where people can act out their global identities without ever having to leave home.