Religious TV Series: The Making of Popular Piety Culture in Indonesia

Abstract

In the last few years, Indonesia's post-Suharto's era has been marked by a proliferation of popular piety culture in the media. This proliferation is situated within the political transition from authoritarianism to democracy, the industrialization of media and the emergence of Islam as one of the important keys to unlocking the ongoing transformation of the political, social and cultural spheres of contemporary Indonesian society. My thesis, in general, is a study of the role of Islam in this transformation and how popular culture is an integral part of it. Through my study case of the production of a religious TV series, I want to explore the complexity that makes up religious practices when the piety movement takes up secular/capitalist media to further their movement. In other words, this paper asks: when the logic of the piety movement and the logic of the media industry converge, what kinds of practices in terms of religious practices and film-making practices are maintained, negotiated, and challenged? Building my methodological framework on theories of media practices (Bourdieu, 1977 and 1993; Couldry, 2004; Hobart, forthcoming; Rajagopal, 2001), I divide my analysis into how and why practices and standards are constructed, affirmed and challenged in two foci: on-site and off-site.