How are class-cultural distinctions formed and maintained in a region of rapid economic expansion and contraction?  How do burgeoning media industries respond to public demand for models of cultural integration and modernity?  Who are the people behind the development of culturally influential media products, and what social forces govern their various interests, influences and interactivity with media consumers?

Tamara Bleszynski, one of the most popular television actresses in Indonesia, is featured in 2001's Doa Membawa Berkah 2, a limited-time series produced to run only during Ramadan.  This sort of series, which features Muslim-themed story lines and an emphasis on prayer and piousness, have become increasingly popular since they began in 1998.

As an assistant professor of anthropology at Centre College, I teach and conduct research on issues relating to the nexus of media and cultural life in Southeast Asia. While working on my dissertation for Washington University, I completed eighteen months of fieldwork in Indonesia to answer questions surrounding mass-mediated production in Indonesia, thanks to the generous support of the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren foundation and the Fulbright-Hays foundation.  This project, the results of which I am now publishing, concerns issues of taste and class-based social distinction in Indonesia.  Specifically, I studied how Indonesian mass-media producers are influenced by various social forces, public discourses, and market pressures, in their creation of new, popular models of national culture.  My fieldwork examined the field of television production as situated within its economic, political and historical contexts, as well as the internal dynamics and exigencies of the industry.  This research was conducted in Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, from October 2000 to May 2002; my doctoral dissertation, "Producing Indonesia: The Derivation and Domestication of Commercial Television," was defended in August of 2004.

Nico Siahaan and Sophia Latjuba as co-hosts of the popular variety program Impresario 0-0-8, which was dedicated to the promotion of its primary sponsor, an international long distance company.  The program has recently been re-worked to suit a new sponsor, Japan's Sharp corporation.

Television is arguably the most powerful mass medium in Indonesia, reaching over ninety percent of the archipelago's 210 million inhabitants, among whom print media remain relatively unpopular.  As anthropologists have moved to acknowledge and understand the nature of this ubiquitous mass medium, they have largely followed the traditions of cultural studies in looking to audience interpretations and their own textual analyses.  Television studies have further tended to focus on the exceptional, the reception of Western content, and the empowerment of local or 'indigenous' populations through video production. 

My research, instead, focuses on the normative, the national, the sorts of programs that are most popular and influential with the people of Indonesia themselves--to the extent this can be determined--while taking the producer's point of view heavily into account.  The study incorporates an ethnography of Indonesia's culture of media production, as it extends between television networks, local stations, production houses, advertisers and their agencies, as well as the government and religious interests. 

Multivision Plus--this cameraman's employer--is the largest production house in Indonesia, and controls much of prime time on each of the major national stations. It has been heavily criticized for depicting only wealthy and hedonistic lifestyles, but its founder Raam Punjabi claims he is only "selling dreams."

My other research interests include transnational culture markets, interactive media, economic anthropology, human ecology and comparative media studies.

This site includes my C.V., which is downloadable in .pdf format, a list of various links, and a video project presented in RealPlayer media formats, intended to test the multimedia forms that I am using to supplement the presentation of my doctoral research.  The current video, on the Indonesian television program and theatrical show Ketoprak Humor, was made over a weekend using footage taken for use in the dissertation project.  It is an experiment intended to test the equipment and software obtained for that project.  Comments and criticism are invited: barkin@centre.edu.