1) Critical Reflections on Religion and Media in Contemporary Bali. Single-authored monograph with accompanying DVD. Numen Book Series: Studies in the History of Religions, 130. Leiden: Brill. 2011.
Scholars of religion have always worked closely with media of one kind or another, from sacred books and archaic languages to cassette-sermons and the Internet. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways we actually use these and other media in the pursuit of historical inquiry. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book offers a critique of the media-related assumptions underpinning fields as diverse in their subject matter and approach as the history of religions, British cultural studies and Old Javanese philology. Its central contention is that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.
2) Entertainment Media in Indonesia. Edited with Mark Hobart. New York and London: Routledge. 2008.
Entertainment media now comprise one of the world’s largest industries, yet they remain one of the least studied aspects of contemporary mass media. Every day hundreds of millions of people watch television programs that might broadly be described as ‘entertainment’, notably in the rapidly developing countries of Asia. However we still have little idea of what drives the production of Asian entertainment television, how audiences engage with television or how political and social élites understand the impact of television on the massive audiences. While India and China have attracted recent media attention, Indonesia has remained largely unnoticed. As Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, is engaged in rapid modernization and the transition to democracy in significant part through the mass media, serious attention is long overdue. The topics covered include: talent shows, crime and supernatural Reality TV, travel programmes, talent quests and popular music This book, with contributions from recognized experts on Indonesian media, is therefore of particular importance not just for explaining what is going on in Indonesian popular television, but also for establishing a theoretical framework for the study of entertainment media in other societies. The collection is essential for anyone wishing to know about entertainment media, Asian television and contemporary approaches to the study of Asian mass and popular media.
3) Special issue of the Asian Journal of Communication on Indonesian entertainment media. Edited with Mark Hobart. 2006.
This special edition about contemporary entertainment media in Indonesia consists of four articles. Each focuses on different popular genres of entertainment on television and their associated commentaries, primarily in the print media. The authors examine different aspects of television production which has burgeoned since the economic crisis of the late 1990s. The topics range from popular Indonesian music programmes, through imported genres like talent quests, real-life crime and supernatural reality TV, to travel programmes which represent Indonesia to Indonesians through foreign eyes. The articles all give a sense of the energy, vitality and openness of mass television broadcasting formats, although these are usually portrayed in the mass communications and media studies’ literature as either effectively determined by multinational corporations or else conventional to the point of sterility. As a collection, these pieces, with their stress on television as complex sets of situated practices, offer new ways of approaching one of Asia’s major media industries.
