Representing culture and politics (or is it just entertainment?): watching Indonesian TV in Bali

Changes in Indonesian television broadcasting are best gauged in terms of how they are viewed by their audiences. Here I examine Balinese households' viewing practices in the context of broadcasting after the 1998 fall of Suharto, finding enhanced levels of engagement by viewers compared to my observations of pre-1998. Balinese viewers are interested in the new broadcasting trends, and in new kinds of programs, particularly current affairs. They also remain devoted to traditional performance genres such as ludruk- short dramatic scenes which use stock Indonesian historical characters and situations to make satirical political commentary. My observations of changes in Indonesian television broadcasting after Suharto have been supported by newspaper articles on the subject published in the latter part of 1999. During this period I observed Balinese households routinely watching television, and discussed my observations with the members of these households. This paper is neither a study of media texts, nor a study of television reception. Instead, I try to link the micro-practice of watching television at home to the context of television broadcasting changes taking place at a time of great social, political and economic change in Indonesia. In this regard I attempt the project suggested by Raymond Williams, of looking 'not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice' (Williams 1980, 48). Both 'news' programs and 'entertainment' programs are considered in this light. Bali is an excellent choice for a critical 'take' on Indonesian television broadcasting given the strong local political claims of Balinese people within the civil and religious structures of Indonesian nationalism. I observed television watching in a small number of Balinese households at frequent intervals over a four-month period, and much of my data are in the form of notes written late at night from memory. In view of this limited ethnographic data, there is no attempt to generalise from the specifics of close engagement with certain programs observed in these households, to the wider Balinese population, and certainly not to the Indonesian television-viewing population. Nevertheless, in my observations over years of related visits to Bail, this figure of the highly engaged viewer appears as something new. My analysis here attempts to demonstrate the extent to which the materials of television broadcasting may be taken up by communities of viewers in their discursive reconstruction, I have worked through a body of theory in relation to my limited observational data on the practice of Balinese television viewing, and so discussion of that theory frames my analysis. It is hoped that this paper will generate ideas for further research and interpretation that others may find useful in extended research on television and media in Indonesia.