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DIREKTORI PENELITIAN ASING DI INDONESIA
2013
26.1 Dr. Jörgen Gunnar Bertil Hellman
Warga Negara : Swedia
Jabatan : Associated Professor
Institusi : Dept. of Global Studies, Gothenburg University
No. Sip : 010SIPFRPSMI2013
27. The Synoptic City: Local Journalism and the Public Sphere in Bandung, Indonesia
Tujuan Penelitian : Mengkaji hubungan sosial dan pola budaya yang
membentuk lingkungan perkotaan di Bandung, khususnya melalui praktik jurnalisme lokal di media cetak
dan elektronik
Bidang Penelitian : Antropologi Sosial
Daerah Penelitian : Jabar Bandung
Lama Penelitian : 12 dua belas bulan mulai 15 Agustus 2013
Mitra Kerja : Sekolah Arsitektur, Perencanaan, dan Pengembangan
Kebijakan SAPPK ITB Ir. Teti A. Argo, MES., Ph.D.
Abstrak
In its studies of urban life, anthropology has often tended either to neglect or to critique synoptic views of cities. The history of neglect is well known. Most
of the classic urban studies focused on communities and spaces that occupied small pockets within the broader urban experience. The Chicago School of urban
sociology and anthropology famously focused on hobos Anderson 1923, gangs Thrasher 1927, the Jewish quarter Wirth 1928, the slum Zorbaugh 1929,
and taxi-dance halls Cresey 1932. As Hannerz 1980: 54 has pointed out, these studies exaggerated the isolation of the social worlds they described and left it
up to readers to develop a “wider-scope understanding” of the city as a whole. More recent scholarship that has focused on synoptic views of cities has tended
to be suspicious of such a gaze. Michel de Certeau 1984, who applied Foucault’s
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Sekretariat Perizinan Penelitian Asing Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi
DIREKTORI PENELITIAN ASING DI INDONESIA
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notion 1977 of panopticism to the city, contrasted the view of the city as seen from the skyscraper to the city experienced by the pedestrian. For de Certeau, the
spatial practices of the pedestrian were creative and poetic, while the panoptic gaze was one that sought mastery and control. Similar contrasts are evident in
a number of urban ethnographies, particularly those that focus on the practices and technologies of centralized urban planning Barker 1999a, Caldeira 2002,
Davis 1992, Holston 1989, Low 1999, Mitchell 2002.
The proposed research program seeks to provide a more nuanced analysis of how synoptic knowledge about cities is produced and what role it plays in urban
life. It builds on empirical insights from recent research on activism in the urban peripheries of the global south Ali and Riker 2008, Appadurai 2002; Holston
2009. These studies have highlighted the fact that it is not just planners and state actors that produce synoptic knowledge; it is also marginalized groups. In the
favelas of São Paulo, neighbourhood activists have established databases that contain detailed historical information about landholdings and land disputes. In
the slums of Mumbai, activists have conducted their own censuses that count the number of residents, toilets, the size of dwellings, and so on. This kind of
knowledge has been deployed efectively to make citizenship claims for land tenure, sewage services, etc. in the local and global arenas. This research builds
on this work by looking more closely at the group of people that are most involved in creating a synoptic view of the city on a daily basis and who arguably have the
greatest impact on urban dwellers’ understandings of the public life of cities: local journalists. It examines the changing social and cultural world of local journalists
and their role in the construction of urban public life Bourdieu 1998. In examining these questions, the research draws from, and contributes to, theories about the
emergence of what have variously been called “imagined communities” Anderson 1991, “publics” Habermas 1962, Warner 2002 and “social imaginaries” Taylor
2007. These theories seek to trace the conditions under which people come to see themselves as being part of an objectiied social whole that includes people
beyond their immediate families and local communities. Media of various kinds— print and electronic—are central to this process, since it is through mediation that
people are able to step outside of themselves and recognize themselves anew Mazzarella 2004. The study of the formation of social imaginaries and publics
has thus come to be closely linked with the study of media worlds Appadurai 1996, Gaonkar 2002.
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Although Anderson, Taylor, and Warner developed their theories to better understand print culture and its consequences for modern political life cf. Adam
1995, Moriyama 2005, they and others have also sought to apply their theories to newer media forms, such as the Internet Anderson 1998, Appadurai 1996,
Axel 2006. Some of my own past research is a case in point. I have examined, for example, how electric and electronic media have provided the occasion for
new social imaginaries about neighbourhood publics and imagined national communities in Indonesia Barker and Simon 2003, Barker 2003 2008. But this
research taught me something surprising: the most important media for the construction of publics in Indonesia are still books and newspapers. Even Onno
Purbo, whom many people call the Father of the Indonesian Internet, is very clear on this point. At virtually every workshop he gives he implores his young followers
to write books and newspaper articles. He has come to believe this is the only way to build a public that will stand up for the interests of a “free” merdeka Internet.
Thus, although this research program includes a focus on electronic media, the primary emphasis is on print journalism. It is in print where the most important
struggles over publics are still being played out.
This research builds on a tradition of ethnographic studies of journalism dating back to the 1970s Gans 1980, Golding and Elliot 1979, Schlesinger 1977, Tuchman
1978. Such studies examined the practices and ideologies of journalists as cultural producers, mainly in newsrooms in the United States and Britain. In more recent
years, anthropologists have conducted ethnographic work on journalism in a variety of national contexts, including Nigeria Bastian 1993, 2003, Ghana Hasty
2001, 2005, 2005b, 2006, 2009, South Africa Fordred-Green 2000, Germany Boyer 2005, India Landsman 1987, Ståhlberg 2006, Rao 2009 Forthcoming, Vietnam
Schwenkel 2009 and elsewhere. Some have also conducted ethnographies of global news production through studies of foreign correspondents Boyer 2001
2005, Boyer and Hannerz 2006, Hannerz 2005, Pedelty 1995 and their relations with local journalists Bishara 2006. This more recent wave of research, like much
other work in the anthropology of media, has often focused not just on the culture and practices of journalists, but also on the meanings of news stories, how they
circulate, and how they are interpreted in diferent contexts Askew and Wilke 2002; Ginsburg et al 2002. All these aspects of the production and dissemination
of city news will be addressed by this research.
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Sekretariat Perizinan Penelitian Asing Kementerian Riset dan Teknologi
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27.1 Ms. Emily Zoe Hertzman
