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While Indonesia's burgeoning private television industry has prospered through the country's democratic transition and the rise of popular Islam, it has remained ideologically constrained by many of the content restrictions established during Suharto's New Order era. One area in which producers have broken these norms is in the field of religious imagery, and the adaptation of religiously-themed narratives and tropes. This article – based on a long-term ethnographic study of television producers in Indonesia and the social institutions that influence them – explores the strategies and goals behind the industry's handling of the imagined religious audience. It asserts that the tension of appeasing cultural conservatives has been redirected by the industry into content that appeals to the much larger demographic of moderate Muslims, through the adaptation of narrative conventions and stylistic forms that draw on an array of global media traditions. It examines new genres and conventions invoked by producers in their efforts to both placate and mobilize religious sentiment among Indonesia's culturally heterogeneous population, arguing that these practices promote a successful, commercial Islam that largely comports with neoliberal subjectivity.

Indonesia's private television industry blossomed into a powerful source of national, mass culture production in the 1990's and early 2000's. This essay examines the ways in which producers' subject position, in relation to global media form and narrative, is transformed, through production processes and conventions, into a distinctive 'way of looking'. By focusing on the example of a travel program, issues related to the representation of elements classified as 'traditional' or 'ethnic' is explored. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the country's TV producers, programmers and station executives, the essay puts forward the notion that the use of global forms and narratives leads to the encoding of a particular 'gaze' in popular programming, which positions viewers as foreign to symbols of traditional culture. (Asian J Commun/NIAS)

Shortly after the fall of Indonesia's New Order government, the country's public radio network began limited broadcasts of a program intended to augment the midwifery skills of the biomedically trained "skilled birthing attendants," called bidan. This radio series was focused on educating rural health care providers in an efficient, modern way, reflecting the country's history of Jakarta-centered nation-building through didactic mass media. After what appeared to be relatively promising trials, the national Ministry of Health let the program languish and never brought it to full implementation. This article investigates the bidan radio series as a case study not only in public health education, but as a representation of the country's shifting narratives of nationalist modernity, and the role of mass media in reproducing them. We argue that the program depended on the medium itself as the locus of its message, and therewith national radio's historic discourse of unifying progress. Based on an ethnographic collaboration between medical and media anthropologists, this ethnohistoric research interrogates childbirth as a disputed field of cultural knowledge production, and an exemplar of broadcast media and biomedical nationalism's entangled trajectories.