The Foreignizing Gaze: Producers, Audiences, and Symbols of the ‘Traditional’

Abstract

Indonesia’s private television industry blossomed into a powerful source of national, mass culture production in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. This essay examines the ways in which producers’ subject position, in relation to global media form and narrative, is transformed, through production processes and conventions, into a distinctive ‘way of looking’. By focusing on the example of a travel program, issues related to the representation of elements classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘ethnic’ is explored. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the country’s TV producers, programmers and station executives, the essay puts forward the notion that the use of global forms and narratives leads to the encoding of a particular ‘gaze’ in popular programming, which positions viewers as foreign to symbols of traditional culture.