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This interview with the Indonesian filmmaker Candra Aditya reflects on several months of collaborative work with a small group of scholars specializing in film, language, religion, and culture. In addition to remarks on the short film Dewi pulang, the discussion also addresses a range of more general issues pertaining to filmmaking in post-authoritarian Indonesia.

This essay explores the relationship between language and mutual (mis)understanding in Candra Aditya’s short film Dewi pulang. The film follows Dewi, a young Javanese woman, as she travels from Jakarta to her natal home in Central Java to attend her father’s funeral. The tension between Dewi’s multiple and often conflicting obligations is marked by the use of language—from the colloquial Indonesian she speaks with her friends in Jakarta to a brief exchange with her English-speaking boss on the telephone and the various forms of Javanese employed ‘at home’. Drawing on examples in both Indonesian and Javanese, it is argued that the film’s use of language may be understood as a form of social commentary, reflecting critically on the complex and at times incongruous desires, expectations, and aversions at play in the lives of a growing number of young Indonesians.

Short films have proven an important medium for social commentary in contemporary Indonesia. As an example of the genre, this special issue of BKI presents Candra Aditya’s (2016) short film, Dewi pulang (Dewi goes home), which follows a young Javanese woman as she travels from Jakarta to her natal home in Central Java to attend her father’s funeral. A critically annotated transcript and translation of the film’s dialogue is followed by four essays on various aspects of the film and a conversation with the filmmaker. Issues addressed include the changing nature of short films and ‘indie’ cinema in post-authoritarian Indonesia; the filmmaking practices specific to Dewi pulang; the interplay of absence and presence in Dewi’s movement between Jakarta and her natal home in Central Java; and the juxtaposition of Indonesian-, English- and Javanese-language dialogue, and the forms of sociality they respectively embody. Taken as a whole, the special issue offers at once a window onto short filmmaking in Indonesia and new primary materials for further analysis.

The collapse of the New Order ushered in what many had hoped would be a new era of openness and transparency for Indonesia. The loosening of laws pertaining to broadcast and print publication gave rise to a proliferation of new media and cultural production. This had a profound effect on everything, from politics, religion, and the economy to popular conceptions of romantic intimacy and personal accomplishment. The question is whether prevailing approaches to media and popular culture are adequate to the task of accounting for these oft-cited transformations in Indonesian public life. Focusing on issues of piety, class, and romance, this article examines a sequence of films, pop songs, and YouTube parody videos to offer a presuppositional critique of the current scholarship. Its central contention is that closer attention to pop culture as a form of ‘argument’ offers an important corrective to the reifying tendencies of prevailing approaches.

The scholarship on post-authoritarian Indonesia has taken a relatively passive attitude to theorizing popular culture—either presupposing the category absolutely, or invoking prior theorists as authorities without querying the coherence or applicability of their accounts and terminology. As the contributions to this special issue mean to suggest, the question of popular culture may require more careful consideration—not least given its alleged importance for our understanding of recent developments in politics, religion and the economy. This introductory essay provides a brief synopsis of the articles and a survey of the key issues addressed.

The essay explores Bible translation in early nineteenth-century India as a comprehensive and under-appreciated site for intercultural and interreligious interactions involving Christians and Hindus in a complex context of asymmetrical colonial relations. Postcolonial theorists are interrogated for theory-driven approaches that lopsidedly rely on English-language resources without taking into account the actual Indian-language artefacts of translation projects that came into being. Using a philological approach, the essay treats the Dharmapustaka, the Sanskrit Bible translated at the Serampore Baptist Mission, as a case study in ‘transculturation’—a multidimensional process catalyzed by an English missionary, William Carey, on the edges between India and Europe.

This article attempts to answer the question as to why Balinese make offerings. Eschewing an explanation in terms of a unitary religious or cultural belief, it explores the practices surrounding the preparation and dedication of banten (the Balinese term most commonly glossed in English as ‘offerings’), and how these practices embody conflicting articulations of agency, community and the common good. Analysis is directed to highlighting this complexity, while at the same time trying to avoid some of the difficulties and misleading reifications that come with the language of ‘syncretism’, ‘hybridity’, ‘great and little traditions’, and the like.

Using the example of Nehemiah Goreh, a mid nineteenth-century Brahmin Hindu convert to Christianity, the essay explores how Anglican missionaries interacted with Indian counterparts, sometimes encouraging their ordination (as was the case in the South), or (as was the case in the North) placing obstacles in their way. After an agonistically 'cognitive' struggle with Christian faith, Goreh was recommended for ordination by the Low-Church Anglican missionaries of Benares, only to be denied 'Holy Orders' by superiors in Calcutta, who felt that ordination would entail social intercourse of a kind detrimental to British status in colonial society. Having been a 'subaltern' of mission for some twenty years, Goreh converted again, this time to High-Church Anglicanism. I demonstrate that he did this not only to secure his ordination (High-Church Anglicans being less averse to having Indian counterparts), but also because, in the process of understanding the faith he had embraced, he had become convinced by High-Church Tractarians of the “Grace of Orders.” I argue, therefore, that Goreh's little-known ordination quest demonstrates exemplary integrity, politically and theologically.

1 Since 1597, when Bali was 'discovered' by the Dutch explorer Cornelis de Houtman, the Balinese have been variously described as 'heathen', 'Hindoo', 'Hindu-Buddhist', 'animisitic' and so on (see Vickers 1989:12). Boon (1977:45) has discussed the manner in which, from the late nine teenth to early twentieth centuries, 'after caste, the second main rubric for characterizing Balinese life was religion', explaining that 'by religion is intended Hinduism as conveyed by Sanskritic and Kawi texts and activated in rites at the temples and shrines throughout the island'.

Asia in the Making of Christianity studies the experience of converts from fifteen locations throughout Asia, using a variety of approaches to examine the meaning of becoming Christian. The book addresses and assesses models under debate for understanding religious conversion.

Nehemiah acknowledged openly and publicly - of all places, and not coincidentally, in a published letter to John Henry Newman - that he had not quite known what kind of religion Christianity was at the time of his conversion, and claimed around the same time in another publication that he had deliberately held himself back from ordination to the priesthood even though Anglican missionaries of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) had urged it upon him, not only makes his intellectual travails more poignant, it also underscores the need for a socio-cognitive approach to conversions in cases like his. The author viewed in terms of a Hindu theology of religions of his own design, though based on antecedents from antiquity. Keywords:Christianity; Church Missionary Society (CMS); conversion; Hindu theology; Nehemiah Goreh; socio-cognitive approach

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book demonstrates that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book demonstrates that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book demonstrates that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.

This chapter focuses on the use of television for the propagation of a normalized model of Hindu religiosity in the later years of the New Order. This is the first step in specifying the conditions under which a present state of affairs might be interpreted as replicating an element of the past. Television in Indonesia has been linked since its inception to the ideals and institutions of national development. Programs were chosen for inclusion in the archive to provide a record of Balinese representations of theatrical performance and more broadly cultural issues and events. This collection of Hindu recordings offers a unique body of materials for historical analysis in that it comprises a systematic record of the Hindu religious programming broadcast during this period. Keywords:Hindu religiosity; Indonesia; New Order; television

This chapter argues that our theoretical understanding of media significantly affects how we interpret the empirical history of religious formations, ranging from the high vantage of the world religions down to smaller-scale new religious movements and more localized groups. It present this argument with specific reference to the uses that have been made of television, text and dramatic performance on the Indonesian island of Bali. But the primary target is a more general set of media-related assumptions that are shared by fields as diverse in their subject matter and approach as the history of religions, British cultural studies and Old Javanese philology. The chapter suggests that no single approach to, or theory of, media can do justice to its ostensible object. Keywords:Bali; history; media; ostensible object; religion

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book demonstrates that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted on the Indonesian island of Bali, this book demonstrates that more nuanced attention to problems of media will have serious implications for how we think about the study of religions, past and present.