Rianne Subijanto
Department of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

Producing ramadan melodrama series: the making of popular piety culture in Indonesia

In the last few years, Indonesia’s post-Suharto’s era has been marked by a proliferation of popular piety culture in the media. My research will map the different kinds of popular piety circulated and (re)produced through Islamist melodrama series, an understudied area especially on the production side. Islamist melodrama series started to emerge in 2005 and have been an arena of contestation where different, contradictory piety expressions are challenged, negotiated, and affirmed. Based on my preliminary study, the series have not only interpellated the public to recontest the definition of religion but also has involved in transforming, reshaping and allowing different piety expressions to be visible. Research on melodrama series and their roles in constituting the notions of gender, nation, community and class in Egypt, India, Brazil and Kazahstan has shown the importance of melodrama series and their presence as a part of people’s everyday lives. The notion of “cultural producers” does not conventionally refer only to the people who work in the industry but also the viewers that play out their agency (Das, 2003). Building on this literature, my research will be devoted to explore the ways the individual producer works in constituting and reshaping popular piety culture within constraints, such as technological constraints.