reterritorialization in the micromediascape: indonesian regional

Reterritorialization in theMicromediascape: Indonesian RegionalTelevision amid the Rise of NormativeMedia-Islam

GARETH BARKIN

In Indonesia, national broadcasting in the 21st century has been characterized by increasing Muslim normativityacross the spectrum of commercial programming, along with sectarian clashes that have further marginalizedreligious minorities. This article investigates the case of a small, regional television station in one of the country’sChristian-majority provinces to explore the ways that such minorities have exploited a relaxation of broadcastregulations to form distinctive and insular micromediascapes within the larger field of Indonesian media culture. Isuggest the need for a more graduated articulation of Arjun Appadurai’s “mediascape” concept that foregrounds theimport of local, small-scale production and broadcasting, particularly to marginalized groups. Based on anethnographic study in Manado, North Sulawesi, I argue that local TV has risen to the foreground of the province’spublic culture in a manner that mobilizes its religious, ethnic, and historical identity narratives to reterritorializeaudiences and reify the region’s distinction from the state. [Christianity, Indonesia, Islam, media, television]

Introduction

I n the summer of 2011, as part of my fieldwork forthis article, I visited Bunaken, a small island with apopulation of around 1,800 that attracts a steady

trickle of tourists due to its coral reefs. I had been thereseveral times since attending Indonesian languageschool in the nearby city of Manado, North Sulawesi, in2000, and was familiar with the island’s three villages.This time, I was surprised to find that evenings between6:00 and 11:00 p.m. were dominated by an island-wideloudspeaker system that served as a sort of public radio,which everyone was essentially compelled to listen to.Even in the bungalow area populated by diving centersand tourist-catering homestays, powerful loudspeakersrebroadcast one resident disc jockey, who punctuateddomestically produced Christian pop music with reportson locals’ donations to a church rebuilding project. Sheloudly repeated the amounts that each resident hadgiven several times over, adding greater emphasis tomatch the generosity of the donor. Eventually, I foundthe broadcast booth near the island’s largest church. Ibu

Riska,1 along with neighbors and the church’s minister,told me that the practice began three years earlier toraise money for a different church construction project.She said that although the causes kept changing, theinstitution of nightly broadcasts through the loud-speaker system was unlikely to go away, and thatresidents enjoyed the entertainment and sense ofcommunity it brought. Indeed, the booth was a livelyscene, with local children playing outside, and manyvillage residents hanging out to discuss a variety oftopics, including their neighbors. Ibu Riska kept tightcontrol of the DJing duties, however, and told me thatshe played exclusively Indonesian-language, Christianmusic, of which she assured me there was a greatvariety.

What struck me about Riska’s and her friends’claims regarding the community-building nature of thebroadcasts, however, was that despite being quite small,the island was far from homogeneous. One of the threevillages on Bunaken is populated predominantly byMuslims. Walking through it the next night, I could nothelp but notice that the Christian music and church

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Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 29, Issue 1, pp. 42–56, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12003.

announcements could be heard almost as easily as theywere in the other villages. Speaking with a few residentsthere about the broadcasts, I encountered a strainedambivalence. “You can’t really hear it from my house,so it’s ok,” said one; “I don’t really enjoy the music, butI understand their goal,” said another, adding, “if wecould raise money to build a big mosque here, wewould.”

I was surprised by the unusual reversal of roles thatthe two religions’ adherents were experiencing onBunaken as compared with the national media culturein Indonesia, which has increasingly, and more overtly,catered to the country’s nearly 90 percent Muslim popu-lation since the fall of the New Order government in1998 (Hefner 2011). As I continued my research amonglocal TV producers in the urban Manado area, the expe-rience served as a curious exemplar study’s findings,encapsulating on an even smaller scale the Christianconstruction of what I term micromediascapes, withdeference to Appadurai (1990). Here, I am referring tothe active modification through production and broad-cast (or other means of distribution) of the ambient(trans/)national mediascape available in a given locale,be it a province as large as North Sulawesi, a city likeManado, or even a cluster of villages on the small islandof Bunaken.

In this essay, I seek to clarify this practice andreconcile it with Appadurai’s (1996) articulations of themediascape through an investigation of local televisionin Manado, particularly as it relates to ethnic andreligious subject-making. Drawing on Aihwa Ong’s(2006) recent work, I discuss local broadcasting and itsrelationship to the fragmentation of Indonesian sover-eignty, and the reterritorialization of the region’s domi-nant Minahasan ethnic group as geographically boundand distinct from the state. Through an ethnographiccase study of Pacific TV in Manado, I explore the waysin which that region’s historically ambivalent relation-ship to the Indonesian state (Kosel 2011) has found anew and powerful mode of expression, and importantlya forum for development. Drawing on the region’s colo-nially bound history, I argue that regional television hasrisen to the foreground of North Sulawesi’s mediascapein a manner that draws on its religious and ethnicidentity narratives and its history of marginalization toconstitute and reify its distinction from the state(Bourdieu 1984).

The Rise of Regional Television

In Indonesia, national broadcasting in the 21st centuryhas been characterized by increasing Muslim normativ-ity across the spectrum of commercial programming(Heryanto 2011). Not only has the number of explicitlyIslam-themed programs increased, but based on myown interviews with national TV producers, the industryhas also increasingly approached general programmingdevelopment with an imagined Muslim audience inmind (cf. Ishadi S. K. 2011). During the era precedingcommercial television, and as private stations came toprominence in the 1990s, religious programming wasminimal and generally limited to sermons from ulamaand other religious figures. Broadcasters embraced(willingly or not) the Suharto government’s effort tominimize the representation of potentially divisivesocial issues (Hollander et al. 2009). As a result, Islam-themed programming was thought of largely as a publicservice, rather than as a potential source of commercialsuccess or revenue (Barkin 2005).

That changed in 1998 when the collapse of the NewOrder was accompanied by the first Ramadan sinetron,a wildly successful prime-time drama that aired eachnight of the Muslim fasting month. Initially broadcaston RCTI, the country’s first private station, the Ramadanserial was immediately replicated by other stations, and

Gareth Barkin is an associate professor of anthropology and Asian studies at the University of Puget Sound. He has written onthe gaze of national TV producers in Indonesia, their creation of new citizenship models, and commercial Islam.

FIGURE 1. This photo I took of the scenery beyond Manado inad-vertently captured a number of television transmission towers

dotting the city. Pacific TV’s is not among them.

Reterritorialization in the Micromediascape BARKIN 43

soon became a staple genre on Indonesian television. Italso opened the door to more widespread, commercialleveraging of religious sentiment on national TV. Accom-panying a revitalization of popular Islam that had argu-ably been growing since the 1980s (Liddle 1996; Porter2002), programming overtly oriented toward Muslimshas moved beyond sinetron, or prime-time dramas, andinto other genres, while sometimes taking on a moreconservative tone. Although industry pioneer Ishadi S. K.(2011) has recently pointed out that on Indonesian tele-vision Islam has remained relatively compartmentalizedaround Ramadan, and while I made a similar argumentsome years ago (2005), this has begun to change in thelast few years. Recent hits include a number of “realityshows,” which, mirroring the most common sinetron plotnarratives, tend to focus on families or groups of friendstrying to negotiate challenges through the lens of Islam,such as bringing a straying child or friend back from drugaddiction or promiscuity through consultation with areligious expert. Other programs, like TransTV’s Halal?,are built around clerical judgment of pop-cultural trends,problematizing the division between Indonesia’s historicpluralism and what some media critics argue is anincreasingly Arabized model of Muslim practice(Sabarini 2010).

Since the advent of popular, commercial Islam inthe late 1990s, however, Christian-oriented productionhouses, and later regional television stations, have beengaining a gradual if lower profile within the industry.Whereas I have previously argued (Barkin 2005, inpress) that most programming that caters explicitly toMuslim audiences represents a commercial Islam aimedat mobilizing religious sentiment within a neoliberalfield, broadcasting in Christian-majority North Sulawesiillustrates what I argue to be an ideologically distinctapproach to religious identity construction rooted in thecharged subjectivity of a persecuted minority groupeager to elevate itself above the religious and politicalnorms of the ambient, national mediascape. Here, Iexamine the case of one such regional TV station in aneffort to illuminate recent changes in the productionculture of regional broadcasters among Indonesia’sChristian populations. I draw on my experiences con-ducting interviews at local stations in Yogyakarta, aswell as at Christian production houses in Central Java in2011 and 2012.

Having conducted research largely on national tele-vision production for the past decade, I was drawn tothe subject of regional TV in the Manado area becauseI noticed how disproportionately prominent the industrywas there, and wanted to understand the role it playedin daily life, especially in the context of the difficultiesthat Christians have recently faced in Indonesia. The

fieldwork for this article was conducted largely in thesummers of 2011 and 2012 in North Sulawesi, but I alsodraw on data collected over the previous decade study-ing national TV producers. This project began in 2001,with a 20-month field study of national broadcastculture production in Jakarta, and has continued withregular short-term research trips.

My previous work investigated ideologies and prac-tices behind influential models of national culture andlifestyle that TV producers create. Among these, thehandling of religious content and religiously associatedaudiences was cast into relief after the New Order’s fall(cf. Kitley 2000), as discussion and representation ofpreviously forbidden topics no longer threatened TVstations with closure or disciplinary action.2 I came tofocus on the transformation of religious programming,and in particular the burgeoning of a discursively com-mercial Islam that endeavored to represent religiousthemes in ways that comported with national citizenshipand neoliberal subjectivities (Barkin in press). As withAbu-Lughod’s (2002) work on Egyptian TV andMankekar’s (2002) discussion of the Ramayana TV seriesin India, these changes have come to fuse the country’sdominant religion with conceptions of national citizen-ship in such a way as to sideline religious minorities, andin this case challenge their “Indonesianness.” My initialgoal for this project was to explore what might becharacterized as reactions to these broad sociopoliticaland mediacentric changes from the country’s margins,where Christian minorities have exploited a relaxation ofbroadcast regulations in the past decade to form distinc-tive and insular mediascapes within the larger field ofIndonesian media cultural production (Bourdieu 1993).

To focus on this issue, I began ethnographic workamong regional TV broadcasters in predominantlyChristian North Sulawesi, focusing on the troubleddevelopment of local television, as well as explicitlyChristian production houses in Jakarta and Yogyakarta,which develop religious programming for other localand national stations. As it became clear that Yog-yakarta would provide an informative contrast to NorthSulawesi, I conducted a number of reception-focusedinterviews there on the subject of local TV acrossseveral key demographics, including industry profes-sionals, and university students and academics, as wellas rural farmers, government employees, and serviceand factory workers.

The Shifting Constraints of Private Television

Private television stations in the post-Suharto era are nolonger burdened by the threat of government sanctions

44 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 29 Number 1 Spring 2013

or closure. Yet they have encountered a new and morevolatile set of constraints in the form of conservative“Islamist” organizations and complicit law enforcement,as well as a public wary of a secular or anti-Islamicmedia (Van Bruinessen 2002). In my earlier work(Barkin 2005, 2006), I have discussed producers’ effortsto ameliorate risk while appealing to moderate Muslimaudiences. More recently (Barkin in press), I argue thatthis contrast between commercial mobilizations ofIslamic images and narratives and rising religious con-servatism that rejects these appropriations has created avolatile tension in the national discourse surroundingthe popular representation of Islam (see also Weintraub2008). But during this shift from a largely secular mediaculture to one inflected by a neoliberal Islam, and thento one characterized by struggles to negotiate the tenorof the national media’s increasing Muslim normativity,the country’s religious minorities have in many waysbeen left out of the discussion, at least on the nationallevel. This concern is particularly poignant for Chris-tians, who have struggled in other ways since the fall ofthe New Order government.

Intimidation and violence against Christians, whomake up between 5 percent and 7 percent of Indonesia’spopulation, have grown dramatically in the post-Suharto era (Sidel 2006). In 1999, sectarian violencebegan in Ambon. It would continue through 2003,eventually displacing approximately 500,000 people,most Catholic. When I conducted research in Manado in2000, there was already a large camp for refugees fromthe Maluku Islands, of which Ambon is the capital, aswell as one for those fleeing sectarian violence thatoccurred in Poso, Central Sulawesi, during the sameyears. Rather than returning, many decided to stay inmajority Christian areas like North Sulawesi and south-eastern islands, such as Flores and Timor (van Klinken2007). Also beginning in 1999, East Timor, which ispredominantly Catholic, was granted independence bythe Indonesian government after a referendum thatangered the country’s military, which had been fightinga guerrilla insurgency there since the province wasannexed in 1975. The military, which sponsored a “pro-integration militia,” reportedly killed over 2,000 people,raped hundreds of East Timorese women, and burned ordemolished approximately 75 percent of the country’sinfrastructure, forcing over 300,000 into West Timorand displacing nearly three-quarters of the province’spopulation (McDonald 2002).

These two large-scale traumas introduced new gen-erations of Indonesian Christians to an increasinglyprecarious position within a country that appearedprogressively less capable of defending its minoritypopulations. Anti-Christian violence dipped in the mid-

2000s, but has recently escalated. In 2010, a recordnumber of anti-Christian incidents were recorded, whilein 2011 this number nearly doubled (Compass DirectNews 2012). Although none matched the scale or scopeof the early 2000s, recent church bombings and a resur-gence of violence in Maluku have been compounded byprosecutions of anti-blasphemy laws and apparent gov-ernment complicity or inaction in cases of Christianvictimization (Crouch 2012).

Thus, Christians living in places like Manado havebeen regularly hearing for nearly 15 years not just thattheir religion is under attack, but also that their gov-ernment has failed to represent them and to preventtheir growing marginalization. This marginalization ofChristians (and other religious minorities), along withthe graduated deterioration of state authority and therise of popular Islam, has all been widely documentedand discussed (e.g., Aragon 2005; Bruinessen 2011;Hefner 2002; Salim 2012; van Klinken and Barker 2009;Weintraub 2011). My purpose here is not to contributeanother case study to these literatures, but rather to usethem as a platform from which to address the supposi-tion that the Minahasans are taking advantage of localbroadcasting to creatively reframe their mediated rela-tionship to the state, and how the legalization ofregional TV has fractured the national mediascape insuch a way as to make new forms of identity-buildingpossible.

Pacific TV Manado

Pacific TV in Manado is one of the more successful localstations in a country that, despite government efforts to

FIGURE 2. Pacific TV’s corporate logo hanging over their frontoffice.


discourage it (Republik Indonesia 2002), is still domi-nated by nationally oriented programming broadcastfrom Jakarta over satellites and networks of relaytowers. It represents a recent trend in the otherwisetroubled sector of regional television. In particular,minority religious communities and cultural groupswhose discursive identities have developed, to varyingdegrees and in different ways, in opposition to nationalnorms seem to be among the only audiences makingregional television economically lucrative (Nielsen2009). Bali, for example, where most identify as agamaBali or Balinese Hindu, and where the tourist-driveneconomy was greatly damaged during bombings carriedout largely by Javanese and other Muslims in 2002 and2005, also has one of the most successful regional TVstations, Bali TV, the influence of which Mark Hobarthas studied for years (2002, 2007, 2010).

While Balinese, including diasporas, have used tele-vision to help mediate and reproduce their own identitynarratives (Bhaskara 2012), Christian-dominated areaslike the Minahasa region of North Sulawesi have alsoseen a blossoming of local TV stations. Manado is nowhome to five private, local stations, while nearbyTomohon, the province’s second city, has one of its own.Considering the relatively low population of the region,this is well out of proportion with the national average,which I will discuss in greater detail below.

It should first be noted that regional television inIndonesia has largely been an unkept promise by thegovernment. To counter the center-controlled nationalbroadcasting environment that dominated the countryduring Suharto’s New Order government, Indonesia’sParliament in 2002 endorsed a new broadcast bill thatrequired a shift toward a different model. The model,

which is similar to that of the United States, would havethe national stations become networks that, instead ofbroadcasting directly to national audiences via relaytowers, would be required to profit-share with localaffiliate stations that would air their own locally pro-duced programming as well. Ten years later, this law hasyet to be implemented, and although a number ofregional stations have cropped up across the country,the national stations—which command the vast major-ity of viewers in most if not all provinces—have beenlargely unwilling to work with them to develop theaffiliate model (Hidayat 2010; Natalia 2011). Whendescribing this situation and Parliament’s intentions tome, Tito, head of production at Pacific TV, claimed that“they’re good at making rules, but not at enforcingthem.”

The lack of cooperation from national stations hasled regional television to languish in relative obscuritythrough much of the country, forced to procure orproduce all of their programming independently. As aresult, many have limited broadcast hours, or fill theday with inexpensive foreign programs of limitedappeal. Although station managers often cite local newsas a key advantage, most of these stations are not ableto bring in sufficient revenue to afford their own newscrews, and so their reports frequently depend on infor-mation from the same national news organizations towhich they are ostensibly the alternative. Although theypredominantly depend on advertising for their revenue,they are too small for the country’s primary ratingsagency, A. C. Nielsen, to take notice, and as a result, fewhave any ratings data beyond what they are able tocollect themselves.3

Pacific TV was developed by a local couple andbegan broadcasting in 2003. The station quickly metwith success in appealing to advertisers, and went frombroadcasting eight hours to 18 hours per day by the endof that year; currently, they broadcast 20 hours andclaim to have 80 percent “local production.”4 Althoughnot the first,5 they are now the longest running station inthe region. However, station manager Ertina, and othersat Pacific TV, told me that they rarely turn a significantprofit, and that it is “hard to find advertising in thisenvironment,” wherein few local business can affordtheir rates, the highest among North Sulawesi’s stations.They often described themselves with the phrase “tele-visi lokal biasa,” or “normal” local television, meaningthat they were not part of any larger media group ornetwork. They are a terrestrial broadcaster with twotowers, covering 71 percent of the North Sulawesi prov-ince’s population, but have no satellite presence.

When I first visited them in June 2011, I waswarmly greeted by Ertina, who introduced me to several

FIGURE 3. An area of the station where some rohan or Christianworship programs were shot.


producers, the head of production, and the station’sowner, Natalia.6 All proved open to interviews and dis-cussions, while allowing me the opportunity to observeproduction practices and spend time informally at thestation, talking with staff, on-air talent, and otherguests. I have organized my observations around threethemes (“Prominent Role,” “Christian Worldview,” and“Looking Westward”), which I argue to be indicative ofthe emergence of new, geographically delimited medi-ascapes among North Sulawesi populations, where thesovereignty of the center’s national imaginary has lostmuch of its preeminence.

Prominent Role

The first is that, based on all available measures, theregional television scene in this Christian-majority areagenuinely appears to be more popular and dynamicthan it is in more nationally representative, Muslim-majority and Javanese regions. Although, as notedabove, A. C. Nielsen has no precise viewing figures,corporate executives anecdotally confirmed this dispro-portionate popularity based on a proprietary surveyconducted in 2009, while internal polling data fromJogja TV versus Pacific TV in Manado (both based ontheir own research) showed that Pacific TV reachednearly the same audience numbers, despite having one-fifth the population within its coverage area.7 Pacific TValso has greater competition within its region, includingfour other local private stations,8 with one more set topremiere soon. Yogyakarta has a total of four local TVstations, despite its large population, and provincescloser to Manado also manifest a similar pattern.

Sulawesi’s most populated province, Sulawesi Selatan,boasts five stations, while Sulawesi Tengah claims two,Sulawesi Tenggara just one, and North Sulawesi’sneighboring province, Gorontalo, also boasts a singlestation.

Given the difficult economic environment thatbroadcasters confront in Indonesia, this would seem toindicate that local TV in North Sulawesi—to the extentthat Pacific TV can be taken as exemplary of the field—is more popular among advertisers, and presumablyaudiences as well, than it is in most regions. Accordingto accounts by station executives who have attendedconferences with their peers from around Indonesia, theregion is among the most dynamic and competitive inthe country, along with Bali and Medan, in Sumatra,which is also home to significant Protestant audiences.This is not to say that these data alone denote audienceengagement, or that cities and provinces with non-Muslim majority populations are the only areas wherelocal TV is successful—Banjarmasin in South Kaliman-tan is one counterexample of a thriving local broad-casting culture—but it seems clear that outer islandcities are disproportionately turning to regional televi-sion, and even among these, Manado appears to beexceptional, especially considering its low populationand relative isolation. Finally, while many regions turnto local stations because audiences are eager to watchTV in their own local languages, Minahasans tune ineven though they do not themselves have a sharedlanguage (more on this below) and their stations broad-cast in the same Indonesian used by national stations,with only occasional use of regional slang.

Because there is great diversity and variation inpopulation and demographics between cities andregions, these sorts of comparisons are far from con-clusive. However, having spent months in both Yog-yakarta and Manado over the past three years, I foundthe role and reception of regional TV among locals to bequite different. Although North Sulawesi residents cer-tainly discuss national TV on occasion, bringing up thesubject of television by itself more often leads people totalk about their regional stations. I found that mostpeople I spoke with knew of several local TV personali-ties and were familiar with local talk shows and newsanchors. Also, many large churches had relationshipswith one or more of the local stations and would hostlive religious events on weekends or even during theweek. A number of Manadonese cited having partici-pated in or observed these events as being central totheir relationship with local stations.

For example, Eddi is a musician and the son of adosen (lecturer/professor) at Manado’s public university,Universitas Sam Ratulangi. He had performed on a local

FIGURE 4. Pacific TV’s control room, with some of its agingcamera equipment in the foreground.


station with his band, singing Christian-themed popsongs, in 2006. He told me he is very focused on hisfaith and spreading the gospel through music, and thatlocal television plays a big role in promoting local andChristian culture in the region. Although he claimed notto watch much TV generally, he said that he is morelikely to turn on Pacific TV, or one of the other localstations, than to turn to national stations like RCTI andSCTV. “It isn’t that there’s anything terrible about theirprogramming, but we just don’t feel it is ours,” he toldme. “There are some shows that I like or that my wifewatches, but we feel a bit guilty.” When asked aboutlocal stations like Pacific TV, Televisi Manado, and TV5,he told me that his family and extended family watchedthem regularly. “We like to watch local news, but alsothe ‘lifestyle’ programs because we know they willreflect our culture,” adding, “it’s really a blessing thatwe are able to make television that’s authenticallyMinahasan,” referring to his and North Sulawesi’s pre-dominant ethnic group. Eddi’s comments reflected anumber of themes I encountered in my discussions ofregional TV with Manadonese people, in particular (1)the claim that it was preferable to national TV, whichwas characterized as everything from a guilty pleasureto outright sinful to “televisi mereka,” or “their televi-sion”; (2) the perceived cultural ownership of local TV,as expressed through (among other things) use of thephrase “televisi kami,” or “our (not your) television,”9

which seemed to be aimed at excluding other Indone-sian ethnic groups more than me personally, and whichalso came to the fore when interview subjects discussedfriends they knew who had been on a local program, ortheir own experiences participating in a broadcast; and(3) the presumption that local TV reflected a Minahasan,Christian worldview, and as such that supporting it wasa moral and religious imperative, rather than just a tastepreference.

A key counterexample can be found in Yogyakarta,a predominantly Muslim and ethnically Javanese citythat is often described in travel literature as the “culturalheart of Indonesia.” Over the past three years, I have hadthe opportunity to discuss local TV there with a widevariety of residents. Yogyakarta makes for a helpfulcomparison because it shares its majority religion andethnic group with the Indonesian state, unlike Manado,but it also celebrates its distinguished local history andcultural status (Woodward 2011) in a manner that mighteasily invigorate local broadcasting. The local practiceof Islam, for example, is often contrasted with that ofEast Java, and even nearby Surakarta (Sutiyono 2010).Indeed, one could argue the probability that everyregional media market, regardless of religious or ethnicaffiliation, might indulge in approbations of local dis-

tinctiveness that mirror Manado’s, but at least in Yog-yakarta, I found little support for this supposition.

When I brought up the subject of regional televi-sion, most locals were unaware of the majority of sta-tions that covered the area, and very few claimed to beregular viewers of any of them. On the other hand, thegreat majority was familiar with prime-time sinetron,and often had strong loyalties to one Ramadan serial oranother. Local stations were often spoken of as “a bitbackward” (agak terbelakang) or “rural” (kampungan),as they were compared with national TV in productionvalue, actors’ talents, and other measures of perceivedquality. There did not seem to be any discourse compa-rable to the points discussed above regarding Mina-hasan audiences. Rather than a regional loyalty, I founda range of reactions, from complete indifference orunawareness to an apologetic embarrassment at localstations’ quality.

The subjects of ethnic affiliation and religion onlycame up if I mentioned them, and in such cases I wasgenerally met with confused looks; clearly, these werenot great concerns, although a few mentioned that theyliked local stations’ frequent use of the Javanese lan-guage. Although national TV might not often celebrateJavanese-ness or syncretic Yogyakartan Islam in theway that locals often do, it was clearly still their TV andnot someone else’s. “I do not think it is really anydifferent from the [national] private stations,” Soetoyo,a restaurant owner, told me. He kept a TV turned on inhis restaurant, but always tuned to a national station.“That is what people want to watch,” he told me. “Noone knows about Jogja TV or these others.” A restaurantpatron named Adi jumped in, adding, “I’ve seen JogjaTV, they watch it in the village sometimes because theycan get a clear signal.” Most of my discussions inYogyakarta mirrored this one, with vague recollections,references to rural consumption and the use ofJavanese, as well as critical comparisons to nationalstations. In North Sulawesi, I rarely heard suchcomparisons; residents tended to speak of local TV asthough it were a separate medium, not to be evaluatedon the same bases.

Christian Worldview

Second, in my research on Pacific TV—which I focusedon in part because it produces the most local content ofthe stations covering Manado10—I found religiousthemes and references to be front and center in a greatdeal of their programming. This is not to say that mostof their programming is explicitly religious; it is not.Their local productions mostly focus on Minahasa as a


territory—local news, travel and tourism around theregion, Minahasan food and cooking, the province’snational parks and wildlife, and local events. Althoughthese programs rarely address Protestantism or Chris-tianity explicitly, a number of indicators foregroundedChristian identity, both on and off the air. Several of thesets featured Christian decoration and imagery, and thesame was true of the staff offices, which were festoonedwith crosses, framed images of Jesus Christ, andChristian-themed calendars. This is not unusual for anoffice in Manado, but Christian culture came across onthe air in other ways as well. On many of the programsthat ostensibly had no religious connection, such as alive pop music broadcast from a shopping mall, Chris-tian music could be heard as background music during“bumpers,” when transitioning to or from commercials.Newscasters and talk show hosts often wore visiblecrosses. On-air personalities frequently threw in phrasesthat establish or reference their Christian identity, suchas “Insya Jesus,” which roughly translates as “Jesuswilling” and serves as a sort of substitute for thecommon “Insha’Allah,” commonly heard on nationalTV. Music video programs, common during daytimehours, featured many Indonesian artists, most of themovertly Christian and often singing Christian-themedmaterial. Overtly Muslim artists, or those whose musicinvokes Islamic themes, are virtually never broadcast.

The same company that manages Pacific TV (PacificMedia) also owns a prominent radio station, which itsmanager claimed broadcast around 70 percent religiouscontent. Tito, Pacific TV’s programming manager, made

a point of emphasizing to me the cultural gaps left bynational broadcasters and how seeing the world from aMinahasan perspective was a central goal of the station,although he stopped short of claiming a Christianagenda. Instead, he and Natalia, the station’s owner,seemed intent on communicating a message of toler-ance and religious solidarity to me, recalling the coun-try’s foundational Pancasila philosophy and theSuharto-era prohibition on controversial invocations ofreligion. They even showed me that they had done aMuslim program to celebrate the Idul Fitri holiday at theend of Ramadan, but when pressed, this proved the loneexample they could cite. After a number of conversa-tions with different staff members about this topic, I wasleft with the impression that it was important to themthat they not appear to be overtly Christian, like theirradio station, as that would delimit their scope andconstrain the range of themes and topics in their pro-ductions. So they did what was necessary to perform arelatively symbolic inclusiveness. This performance mayseem a superficial homage to Indonesia’s founding prin-ciples and the New Order’s religious inclusiveness, butas Berg (2011) recently articulated, maintaining the cor-diality of interreligious relationships has long been apriority in North Sulawesi. In my own experience datingback to 2000, Manadonese often spoke of maintaininggood channels of communication between church andmosque as key to avoiding the troubles experienced inPoso and Ambon.

Nevertheless, and although it is ostensibly just ascommercially oriented as the national stations, inwatching their programming, I found Christian themes,language, and references to be far and away more

FIGURE 5. A banner that had been used at recent location shootsfor live music programs on Sundays. The Indonesian portion iscommonly translated as, “For the kingdom of God is not eatingand drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy

Spirit.—Romans 14:17.”

FIGURE 6. Located next door to Pacific TV, Radio Manado is anovertly Christian station owned by the same parent company,

Pacific Media.


common than were similar phenomena on Yogyakarta’sregional stations. Tito often told me that local Mina-hasan cultural perspectives were rarely in evidence onnational TV, and after a while it seemed that he wasfolding Christianity in under the aegis of this ethno-scape (Appadurai 1990). Indeed, despite its ostensiblesecularity and claims of balance, Pacific TV featured anumber of rohan, or Christian worship programs. Theyalso broadcast Christian media from outside sources,including the Christian Broadcast Network’s Solusi, aprogram based on the same company’s U.S. show, The700 Club. Whereas CBN has struggled to get nationalstations to carry their programming, even when paiddirectly for the time in the manner of an “infomercial”(Barkin 2005), Pacific TV made no such demands,broadcasting the show’s dramatizations of Christianconversions without compensation. Moreover, religionwas one of the central vehicles through which thestation interacted with the Manadonese community atlarge. As noted above, they often engaged in live broad-casts from churches throughout the city, bringing inregional ministers and choirs, as well as musical per-formers, and conducted impromptu interviews withparishioners. Holiday specials broadcast from down-town locations, particularly around Christmas andEaster, were also cited as very popular and highly visibleevents to urban Manadonese, whether they watchedthem on TV or not.

Further, Pacific TV frequently had ministers,employees of the Church, and other clergy contributingto their productions. Beyond these overtly Christianprograms, the line between religious programming andother categories appeared fluid and dynamic, with moston-air talent demonstrating that, whatever the subjectat hand, expression of religious identity was normativerather than exceptional. This exceeds, in some ways, theMuslim-normative turn in national media culture thatremains somewhat more compartmentalized in its rep-resentations of religiosity, confining them largely toentertainment programs, where they are explicitlymarked as religious in character.

Looking Westward

Finally, in spending time at Pacific TV, I found not onlyChristian, but also themes that could be described as“pro-Western” to be deeply integrated into program-ming across several genres. For example, music videoshows, discussed above with regard to their focus onChristian-Indonesian music, also featured Westernartists much more frequently than did similar nationalprograms, showing none of the shift away from Ameri-

can pop that has characterized Jakarta’s broadcasting inthe past decade (Weintraub 2010). More surprising, indialog or talk shows, American and European diplomatswere frequent guests, seeming to reproduce an outsid-er’s gaze relative to the nation-state (see Barkin 2006),in that Indonesian government policy was often dis-cussed as though by two friendly allies concerned abouta looming threat on their borders. In 2011, they hostedboth Kristin Bauer, the U.S. Consulate General, andCameron Hume, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, based inSurabaya and Jakarta, respectively. This not only illus-trates an exceptional interest in U.S. affairs and per-spectives, but also serves as evidence of the closerelationship between the region and the U.S. govern-ment. The national culture of Indonesia was often char-acterized as the absent “other” in these friendlyconversations, emphasizing the imagined sociogeo-graphic distance of “Indonesia”11 from the Minahasancommunity. This recalls Appadurai’s suggestion that thetacit scripts of globalized mediascapes “help to consti-tute the narratives of the ‘other’ and the proto-narratives of possible lives” (Appadurai 1990:299), inthis case constructing not just Minahasa’s distinctionfrom Indonesia, but also its proximity to powerful allies.

Frequent references to European and Americansports and fashion pervaded even news programs, aswell as tourism or “lifestyle” shows. Perhaps impor-tantly, Pacific TV has working relationships with boththe Voice of America and Deutsche Welle media agen-cies, whose content, Tito told me, was greatly appreci-ated by Minahasan audiences. “We are very open toWestern culture,” the station’s manager, Ertina, oftentold me (sangat terbuka kepada budaya Barat), andexplained that there was a tremendous amount of mediacontent available to them for little or no money as aresult. The satellite feeds are free to any domestic broad-caster, and sometimes even have subtitles already inplace, but according to Tito, very few Indonesian sta-tions would think to broadcast their programs, whichare funded by the U.S. and German governments.Pacific TV, however, embraced the affiliations, andowner Natalia chuckled at the notion that other stationswould avoid them. They argued that Minahasan audi-ences love the sports coverage provided by DeutscheWelle, which they often put on in prime-time hours, andthat the Voice of America provided them with a gooddeal of “soft news,” heavy on human interest stories andmovie reviews. And while most of Indonesia hasembraced the country’s cinematic reawakening of thepast decade, including its increasingly common Islamicthemes (Hoesterey and Clark 2012), by showing domes-tically produced films all but exclusively, Manado’sprimary cinema still heavily favors Hollywood.


Clergy from Australia, Europe, and the UnitedStates were also common guests on Pacific TV. Indeed,because of the region’s religious affiliations, many livein Manado and have close connections with particularchurches. Tito noted that several churches had specificaffiliations with Western partners that led to abroadprograms, exchanges of ministers, and immigrationopportunities for Indonesians. For example, theSeventh-day Adventists, who have a sizeable presencein North Sulawesi, maintain close connections with thegroup’s large “university church” in Loma Linda, Cali-fornia. As a result, many Seventh-day Adventists inthe area have visited or studied in the United States,and Loma Linda is home to one of the larger Indone-sian communities in the United States. Connectionslike these feed back into Manado’s mediascape, cel-ebrating perceived cultural proximity to the imaginedWest, while fostering greater familiarity with Western-origin media.

Producing “Minahasa”

Christian-oriented television appears to build on thatreligion’s embattled, minority status within the country,engaging in what Wright (1989) called “preaching to theconverted,” indicating the process of constituting and

reifying ethnic-religious communities through broad-casting. Harkening back to Anderson’s “imagined com-munities” concept of national identity developmentthrough print capitalism (1991), Christian communitiesin North Sulawesi have long made use of various broad-cast media to consolidate and organize; the arrival ofregional television broadcasting in the past decade hasallowed these efforts to gain breadth and character,much as radio did for U.S. evangelicals over the courseof the 20th century (Goff 1999; Hangen 2002), or as“charismatic Christianity” over the airwaves turnedaudiences into communities in Ghana (Clarke andClarke 2009). As a relatively recent ethnic and geo-graphic designation, Minahasa is a prime candidate forthis mediated identity production.

Although it has been thoroughly naturalized inpopular culture, Minahasa was actually a colonialpolitical designation for eight different (and often con-flictual) language groups living in the region, andaccording to Henley (1996) did not exist before the 19thcentury. In local discourse, however, Minahasa is oftenrepresented as an ancient and primordial grouping, andit is not uncommon to hear passionate Minahasansproffer theories of the island’s peopling that raciallydistinguish themselves from even their close neighborsin Gorontalo. Jacobsen (2002) points out that thegroup’s status as a relatively modern colonial inherit-ance means that Minahasans cannot rely on commonethnic identity markers, such as a shared culturalhistory or language,12 to constitute and differentiateMinahasan-ness. Instead, he argues that modern Mina-hasan identity depends on a number of other variables,including (and in order of importance) their land/territory, genealogies, Christianity, education, and West-ernization. He adds that “having such a variety ofidentity markers to draw upon when defining Minahasaethnicity makes it adaptable to historical as well ascontemporary social and political changes” (Jacobsen2002:40).

One, therefore, need not invoke Ong’s (2006)concept of graduated sovereignty, wherein she outlinesgrowing fissures in Jakarta’s control over a once sov-ereign state, to understand Manado’s favoring of aWestern imaginary over “Indonesia,” and Java inparticular. Before “Javacentrism” marginalized outerislanders, Minahasans fought alongside the Dutch colo-nial armies to put down insurgencies and keep theNetherlands East Indies whole (Ricklefs 2001). In itsearly years as an identified region and umbrella ethnicgrouping, Minahasa developed a reputation for loyaltyto the Netherlands, particularly after helping to deci-sively win the bloody Java War of 1825–30. The groupand territory’s early unity was, thus, built not just by

FIGURE 7. Pacific TV’s Manado transmitter tower, located at theirstudios, just outside of the city. Also visible are the satellite dishesused to receive and rebroadcast Deutsche Welle and Voice of

America programming.


colonial bureaucrats seeking political control overnorthern Sulawesi, but also as Dutch allies in the fightagainst indigenous Indies powers. Many Minahasanswere given full European legal status by the Dutch inthe 20th century, reflecting an unusually close relation-ship between the colonizer and the colonized, as well asthe region’s historic embrace of Christianity (Henley1996). This Dutch hegemony over the region lasted intoIndonesia’s revolutionary war, which bitterly dividedMinahasans, as many favored the Netherlands’ offer offederalism over outright independence. After the war,many Manadonese came to resent Jakarta for perceivedcorruption and exclusionary economic policies; the areabecame home to the Permesta separatist movement,leading Sukarno to bomb and later occupy Manado in1958. Although there have been no further rebellions inthe area, and Christian leaders go to great lengths todiscourage sectarian hostility (Berg 2011), the post-Suharto era’s violence seems to have revived many ofthe anti-Javanese, anti-Muslim narratives that helpedMinahasa develop such a close bond with its colonialrulers, while strengthening the belief that Minahasansare qualitatively distinct from the rest of the nation thatthey were compelled to join.

Therefore, and although it may be heavily inflectedwith Euro-Christian symbols and images, Pacific TV inmany ways represents a reterritorialization of Mina-hasans in Minahasa, a region that is, in essence, theproduct of its antithetical colonial and postcolonialidentities (Bhahba 1994), and a territory that is themost unequivocal marker of the group’s legitimacy. Inthis way, the station runs counter to much of the main-stream in Indonesian popular culture, inverting, forexample, the deterritorializing trend recently articu-lated by Luvaas (2009) with regard to indie pop musicand independent fashion (Luvaas 2010), which wascharacterized by the rejection of ethnic markers, andfor which there is ample evidence across a variety ofmedia (see, e.g., Barkin 2006; Heryanto 2008;Hendriyani et al. 2011; cf. Loven 2012). Minahasans, bycontrast, who lack the shared linguistic heritage andstoried cultural history of the Javanese, Balinese, andmany other Indonesian groups, are heavily invested inthe project of negotiating and articulating their ownethnic identity markers (Kosel 2011). Like the indie popband members Luvaas describes, however, the “local” ofthe nation-state also feels like an artificial trap forPacific TV producers (Luvaas 2009), but not one thatseparates them from a global dialectic so much as fromtheir (lost) ethnic subject position of supremacy acrossthe archipelago, the legacy of their ill-paying confed-eracy with the Netherlands, and elevation over its othercolonies.

Discussion

In Appadurai’s (1990) original articulation of his term“mediascapes,” he refers to them as “closely related tolandscapes of images.” In my work, the most compellingelement in his various “scape” concepts has been onethat he does not state explicitly: that, in invoking themetaphor of a landscape, he incorporates a dynamic,imperfectly shared, but essentially corporeal geography(be it of images, ideas, or ethnicities), while also implic-itly allowing for the shifting perspective of the indi-vidual agent as spectator. The landscape, after all, isitself a cultural construction that relies not just onhistorically particular ontologies of nature and beauty(see Frykman and Löfgren 1987), but also created in theact of its framing. The mediascape is, thus, producedcontinuously by an array of global image-makers andneoliberal distribution networks, but always in tandemwith the viewer, who need only to turn her head toreframe the landscape on new cultural geography.

Conceived at a time of grand globalization theory,what the term “mediascape” seems to lack is a sense ofscale, gradation, regionalism (e.g., Shim 2006), and thepotential for local (co-)production of the image reper-toires it relies on. The suggestion of micromediascapesis not meant as a significant departure from the originalterm, but rather an inductive addendum from the eth-nographic trenches: a suggestion that mediascapes canbe messy, geographically delimited (or not), overlap-ping, and their constituent elements—as I discovered onBunaken—may be quite small in scale, but neverthelessubiquitous for some. The Minahasan mediascape, as awhole, certainly includes a great variety of globalimages and narratives, as well as an Indonesian nationaldiscourse that remains in many ways paramount. In theforeground, however, is a local micromediascape ofgrowing visibility. This micromediascape represents notthe global deterritorialization of images and narrativesoften associated with neoliberal culture flows, but alocally motivated reterritorialization of “Minahasan-ness” that draws on the region’s distinctive historicalaffiliations and ambivalences to alter the landscapedramatically.

Ong’s articulation of graduated sovereignty focuseson the approaches of what she terms “postdevelopmen-tal” states like Indonesia, and how they increasinglyfavor “a dispersed strategy that does not treat thenational territory as a uniform political space” (2006:77). In letting go of Suharto-era broadcasting legislationthat mandated TV be exclusively a national endeavor,the 2002 Parliament failed to promote the democracy-building cooperation between national and regionalbroadcasters that they may have hoped for, but they


did allow for the emergence of newly graduatedmediascapes, particularly in areas marginalized bythe rise of popular Islam in the national media, byceding television—easily the country’s largest mediaindustry—to provincial competition.

That said, some provinces compete more eagerlythan others. The idea of reterritorialization clearly reso-nates more in a group that has an adversarial historywith the state and its predominant ethnic group, onethat is defined largely by the land it occupies, and whichshares its predominant religion with the nation’s formercolonial power rather than the nation itself. I would notexpect that the implications of this case could bebroadly generalizable, although I would certainly becurious to see more ethnographic research on the role ofregional broadcasting (and other contributors to themicromediascape) in areas of Indonesian Papua andAceh, which have more recent histories of separatism.Even there, however, I would not expect to see a com-parable development of the medium, as local tourismprograms, talk shows, and music videos are hardly theclarion call of the insurgent. Far from it—NorthSulawesi has been quite successful in maintainingcordial relationships between Christians and Muslims,largely avoiding the sectarian violence that has grippednearby provinces, but part of this process has involvedinverting national power imbalances within Minahasanterritory in a palpable manner—one that impacts andrefigures the ambient mediascapes of households,neighborhoods, Internet cafés, and public spaces.

Whether or not the loudspeaker broadcastingnetwork on Bunaken reflected any malicious intenttoward the island’s Muslims, its Christian pop music andchurch donation reports had nevertheless become partof their daily lives. Similarly, as representations ofpopular and political Islam became increasingly norma-tive on national TV, North Sulawesi stations began toprovide a popular alternative that daily distinguishesand reifies the qualities of Minahasa for Minahasans,and not, importantly, in any overt opposition to thenational. Such a dialectic would reinforce the subalternposition of local media, and foreground a cripplingbinary of the sort that Said famously criticized in thecontext of Western coverage of “Islam” (1997). Instead,locals are allowed to largely ignore national mediadiscourse, or indulge in it only selectively: a significant,new luxury. Now, from the loudspeaker radio onBunaken to Pacific’s TV towers, broadcasting hasbecome an increasingly powerful means of both frag-menting conceptions of citizenship and constitutingnew imaginaries, rooted in media that look past Jakarta,toward the Protestant West, and to symbols of localsovereignty and preeminence.

Notes

1 All names have been changed to protect informants’ iden-tities to the degree possible.

2 In order to promote an image of national unity, the NewOrder government severely limited media discussion of“SARA” issues, an acronym of Suku, Agama, Ras, andAntar-golongan, commonly translated as ethnic or tribalaffiliation, religion, race, and intergroup relations. As aresult, representations of religion on TV were minimal,relatively superficial, and highly compartmentalized.

3 A. C. Nielsen has done small-scale studies of regional TVviewership, but these have been largely limited to the fivecities where they focus their research (see Barkin 2005 fora detailed discussion of A. C. Nielson’s data collectionprocedures in Indonesia, as well as the ways in which theyinfluence the industry).

4 The 2003 Indonesian broadcast legislation required that 60percent of independent, regional station content be locallyproduced, although this is not effectively enforced. I wastold different percentages of locally produced content bydifferent people at the station, but it was clear that theywere generally proud of how much production they did,considering it significantly more than their competition.

5 Bunaken TV, which began broadcasting in 2002, onlylasted seven months on the air before shutting down forlack of revenue.

6 Natalia told me that she had taken possession of thestation when she and her husband divorced some yearsearlier; they had developed and launched it together.

7 Manado’s population was 408,354 in 2010, compared with2,389,200 for the Yogyakarta metro area. Pacific TVreported daily viewing averages of 20,000–30,000, com-pared with Jogja TV’s 30,000–35,000. These are estimatesprovided to advertisers based on the stations’ ownresearch, and as such are to be interpreted critically.

8 For purposes of this comparison, I am focusing on private,local stations that produce a significant portion (althoughnot necessarily the absolute majority) of their owncontent, as opposed to being rebroadcasters in a largernetwork system. As noted above, the major private sta-tions have not yet engaged in a network model with localaffiliates; however, the public, government station, TVRI,does engage, to varying degrees, in the affiliate model,and allows some local programming (particularly news) tosupplement content from Jakarta. There are also somelocal stations set up by foreign interests that onlyrebroadcast imported content, which I have also excluded.For example, Spacetoon is a Dubai-based children’snetwork that owns free-to-air stations in 12 Indonesiancities at the time of this writing, but which broadcasts nolocal content.

9 The Indonesian national language uses separate wordsfor the “inclusive we” (kita) and the “exclusive we” (kami),which excludes the person being addressed.

10 As noted above, Pacific TV claims to produce about 80percent of the content it broadcasts, although it was


unclear whether repackaged music video shows with localhosts or other repurposing of purchased content fellwithin that calculation. Based on the variation in thepercentage reported to me by different station employees,I suspect 70 percent might be more accurate, but this isstill an impressive figure considering that it broadcasts 20hours per day with a relatively limited budget.

11 Italicized to indicate the Indonesian language and there-with reference the local conception of Indonesia, asopposed to an abstract designation of the nation-state.

12 The languages of the eight different groups that werepolitically united as Minahasa by the Dutch (Bantik,Bentenan, Ponosakan, Tombulu, Tondano, Tonsawang,Tonsea, and Tontemboan) have largely been supplanted byManadonese Malay, which is very close to the Malay-derived national language, Bahasa Indonesia. Moreimportantly, these are/were mutually unintelligible lan-guages, and as such do little to help unite Minahasans asa singular ethnic group.

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