This dissertation is about the broadcasting of dakwah on Indonesian TV stations. It deals with the production and circulation of dakwah programmes on TV and elucidates the social and educational... Show moreThis dissertation is about the broadcasting of dakwah on Indonesian TV stations. It deals with the production and circulation of dakwah programmes on TV and elucidates the social and educational backgrounds of popular TV preachers in order to understand the rise of the programmes in post-Suharto Indonesia. Furthermore, this dissertation discusses the competition among various Muslim organisations to influence the production of dakwah programmes and the formation of religious authority through the broadcasting of dakwah programmes on TV channels. This dissertation is based on one-year ethnographic fieldwork in Jakarta, Medan, and Bali, which includes observations and interviews with the producers, preachers, and audiences of dakwah programmes, Muslim leaders, and members of Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (KPI). This dissertation shows the important role of TV in the construction of religious authority, which becomes more fragmented in Muslim societies like in Indonesia partly because of televised dakwah. Most of the current researches on dakwah activities focus mainly on social media like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram but neglect the role of other media like TV. In fact, TV still plays an important role in daily activities of Indonesian society with its programmes. Muslims watch TV programmes such as dakwah, news, soap operas, talk and reality shows during their leisure and busy time. Muslim leaders make use of TV to disseminate their teachings and enhance their charisma among Muslim audiences. Presidential candidates and political leaders use TV stations to promote their political agendas to gain supports from the society. Show less
Producing the local: Javanese performance on Indonesian television explores how television represents Javaneseness, as a factor designed to catch and keep the attention of its putative... Show moreProducing the local: Javanese performance on Indonesian television explores how television represents Javaneseness, as a factor designed to catch and keep the attention of its putative audiences. Central is the question of how people make use of national, regional, local, public and private television in Indonesia – each in their own way and with their own goals – to represent the local and, in particular, how they construct images of Javaneseness through the production and dissemination of performance. Performance in Javanese has been used by the Indonesian television industry to achieve various purposes: to entertain and inform its audiences, to represent the local/the regional, to preserve and nurture the traditional and to build national culture, for persuasive (commercial or propaganda) aims, as a counter-voice of diversification towards global or Jakartan influences, and to express multiculturalism. These issues have been put into the framework of discursive practices about local, national and global cultures in the electronic audiovisual media in Indonesia. Three main themes structure the study: representing tradition, localizing persuasion and mediating the local. Above all, this dissertation is a plea for a more thorough study of the role of proximity in the production, dissemination and reception of local television programmes. Show less
Three Christian films have become popular in the Commune of Cobly of today's Republic of Benin, notably the American "Jesus Film" (1979), the American-Ivorian film "La Solution" (1994) and the... Show moreThree Christian films have become popular in the Commune of Cobly of today's Republic of Benin, notably the American "Jesus Film" (1979), the American-Ivorian film "La Solution" (1994) and the Beninese video film "Yatin: Lieu de souffrance" (2002). The discussion centres on how people receive and understand these films together with the digital video technology that facilitate their recent success. Christian films are so important in this part of Benin that the question needs to be raised whether Christianity is shifting from a religion of the book towards a religion of film. The theoretical starting point is semiotics, a theory that has been foundational not only for film, media and media reception studies, but more recently also for the study of materiality. This thesis' main theoretical contribution is a critique of semiotics, arguing that this theory, which has been foundational to Western science, is in fact too limiting. Semiotics, even in its Peircean orientation, cannot sufficiently explain how people in the Commune of Cobly understand shrines, film and media more generally, both through their material manifestations and interactively in terms of communication. Instead, a process called "presencing", which goes beyond semiotics, can explain better people's understanding of shrines and media. Show less
