Preface

32
nationally and from the provincial station of state television (TVRI). 35
culture has any coherence, surely we should find it here.
If
Culture has been turned into a key articulatory notion in Indonesia under
the New Order régime of President Soeharto. Potential differences of
religion, language, ethnicity, local law and ‘customs’, and class have been
rigorously moulded into ‘culture’. Each region has its own distinctive
dress, arts, crafts, ceremonies, food, which together form its culture,
kebudayaan, from the root budaya, a neologism from budi, mind, reason,
character and daya, energy, capacity. 36 Culture is instantiated in endless
forms, from the dress of television announcers to arts’ festivals and
spatialized in ‘Beautiful Indonesia’ in Miniature (Taman Mini ‘Indonesia
Indah’) built as Mme Soeharto’s vision of an Indonesian Disneyland, which
was that
the park’s centrepiece was to be an 8.4 hectare pond with little islands
representing the archipelago. Mini would also include ‘ancient
monuments’, representative ‘religious buildings’, a 1000-room hotel and
shopping centre (of ‘international standards’), recreation facilities, an
artificial waterfall, a revolving theatre, and an immense outdoor
performance arena. Particular importance and one hectare of land each
would be given to twenty six display houses representing the ‘genuine
customary architectural styles’ of each of Indonesia’s provinces. A
central audience hall of Central Javanese aristocratic design would be
used for large ‘traditional’ (tradisional) ceremonies. And all of this
could be appreciated in its Mini completeness from an aerial cable car
(Pemberton 1994a: 242-43, see the opening quotation).
As Pemberton notes, culture became central to the politics of the period,
which was
35
The project is collaborative between STSI (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia) The
Academy of Performing Arts, Denpasar and SOAS, and I am grateful to its two directors
from 1990 onwards, Professor Madé Bandem and Professor Wayan Dibia, for their help
and active support. With permission from TVRI Denpasar, the project has recently
digitized one hundred and fifty hours of materials from the project, covering all the genres
of broadcast programmes from different kinds of theatre, to documentaries, programmes
on development, chat shows and even daily English language broadcasts for tourists. I
draw on some of these materials in the analysis below.
36
I am grateful to the late Professor Khaidir Anwar for pointing out to me the probably
derivation of the term. As etymologizing is a social practice, we need to look to the uses
of budaya, not to some originary meaning.
For a good account of how religion (agama), custom (adat) and culture (kebudayaan)
have been linked in official discourse in Bali, see Picard 1990, 1996.