Comment by superconduct123
4 days ago
I'm always surprised how big the population of Indonesia is yet it seems culturally underrepresented in the world compared to a lot of smaller countries
Almost 300 million people but it rarely comes up in the news or pop media
They don’t have a huge culture industry yet (or at least, not one that appeals to English-speaking audiences), but they’ve become a lot more prominent on the internet in the last 5 years due to better infrastructure and integration into various English speaking social networks (via both social media and people travelling in and out of Indonesia).
It’s a Muslim majority country and very conservative, so a lot of the themes you’d find in American film, music, and literature wouldn’t make much sense there, and the media that has commercial potential outside of Indonesia is generally coming from wealthy households that don’t have much to do with how the average Indonesian really lives (Nicole Zefanya being the example that comes to mind).
Indonesians (at least the ones who speak English) are quite similar to Latinos in that they have a desire to be accepted into the English-speaking world not only personally but culturally. This can manifest in attempts to whitewash oneself to fit in, adopting whatever seems to be popular on English-speaking social media, leading to comparatively old trends propagating in these countries.
You saw the same thing with the Chinese and the Koreans back in the 2000s and both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries, but those were both secular countries already well-integrated into the international system. I wouldn’t expect to see anything quite like that in Indonesia until at least 2030, when more of the digital natives come of age.
> both developed their own internationally-competitive culture industries
Korea definitely, but China? Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped. Conventional wisdom is that the Three Body Problem couldn't be published today.
I'm curious what (homegrown) Chinese cultural products are internationally competitive today. China seems to be punching far below their weight, considering their population and their economic position.
Mainland China is coming the other side through anime.
Productions like "The Legend of Hei" are of truly high quality and it's getting a decent reception in Japan for instance (not breaking the box office, but the fact it's there and talked about so no positively is already something)
> Seems like most of China's modern cultural export came from Hong Kong, and even that has stopped.
You’re probably right. I’m just saying that 20 years ago the label of being “Made in China” meant something was cheap and bad. The business culture still isn’t great from what I hear but people are more comfortable than ever buying Chinese products and I’ve been hearing that more exchange students have been going to China to study.
The impression I had of China’s cultural exports was mostly from having seen more Chinese expatriates and immigrants openly engaging with e.g. Chinese music and fashion influencers. This wasn’t particularly common 20 years ago; I started noticing it around 2019.
The other thing I should note is that when I said internationally competitive I primarily meant outside of the Anglosphere. K-dramas are an interesting one because you can find women (it’s almost always women) of all ages from all over the world who watch them. Korean media is not unheard of in the Anglosphere but it is not nearly as popular as it is outside of the Anglosphere.
It’s possible China doesn’t have anything like this yet, and maybe it never will due to being comparatively censorious, but my perception is that sentiment towards China has improved quite a bit outside of the Anglosphere. I haven’t done reading on that; it’s just a hunch.
Xanxia and Wuxia
2 replies →
Feels like in the West the only Indonesian movie that got popular is The Raid, which had a Welsh director anyway. And, uh, The Act of Killing which was also made by a Brit.
For anyone else who enjoyed The Raid, the sub-genre of graphic and brutally violent Indonesian action movies is a gem.
The Raid 2; The Night Comes For Us; The Shadow Strays....those should get anyone started going down the rabbit hole.
They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.
They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.
The only time I see Indonesia in the news is when some unfortunate soul gets swallowed by a giant snake:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/python-kills-woman-swallowed-in...
Many such cases.
The island of Bali has outsized impact from all the tourism.
I always thought it was interesting that, I guess due to Arab racism, it's also not very represented in the community of Islam.
Like, Indonesia (and together with Malaysia) makes up a really significant portion of all muslims. As an outsider it still seems like there isn't much cultural overlap- which seems like, even if Indonesian culture wouldn't reach Europe or the USA, at least it would reach to the middle east / north africa because of the the religious link.
I could have drawn some parallels between Catholics and South America, but there's already two Popes that have Latin American roots.
At least in the two holy cities itself, Indonesia has quite significant pull. Because our pilgrims heavily outnumber lots of other nations. To the point where sellers around the city usually knows a least a word or two of Indonesian.
I also did a double take when I learned that they were Muslim-majority too. It flies in the face of a lot of assumptions.
Which assumptions are those?
Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.
I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.
17 replies →
Ask someone in the West what the largest muslim country is.
You must not have known about Malaysia then either?
Correct, it was around the time I learned how big Islam was in certain parts of Southeast Asia in general. It's just massively under-represented in news and popular culture and my historical/geographic education never really went into much detail on Asia.
Check out the predominant races there, you’ve probably never heard of them!
Why? It's a big religion in the world and I heard it grows at 30% per year
How much of that is just because people aren't allowed to leave the religion though? My whole family would be considered Catholic if we still had those sorts of old thinking rules that Islam still has. Instead we have lots of people becoming Catholic and lots leaving balancing out.
typo? Rounding it up to 2 billion, 30% means 600 million per year
1 reply →
Yeah and... articles like these are reminders that cultural representation as a concept in general is kind of broken. There's no website which topic distribution follows actual distribution of population of the world[1].
1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_per...
I think it's just because there aren't large immigrant communities in Western countries besides Australia and the Netherlands.
I feel the same way about China tbh
Like how many of you can name a Chinese movie or pop star or TV show?
I dunno, I would think AT LEAST Jackie Chan is a household name due to the Rush Hour movies, and for anyone who grew up watching Hong Kong action flicks, they'd probably also know Jet Li at least, and Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and maybe Bolo Yeung and Sammo Hung too.
Don't forget Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen, Wu Jing, Michelle Yeoh, Simu Liu, Donnie Yen, Jason Tobin, Olivia Cheng, Dianne Doan,
Lucy Liu isn't famous in China but she is in the US.
Not Chinese but recognizable because of HBO's The Warrior: Andrew Koji, Hoon Lee, Joe Taslim
(I cheated, my parents are from Hong Kong.)
4 replies →
Big Fish & Begonia was a good film that got a wide release in the west. Flavors of Youth is on netflix. Ne Zha was too I think. In animation at least they do better than a lot of countries. Mojin: The Lost Legend is the only live action movie I can remember seeing off the top of my head though.
The only ones I can name are from Hong Kong before the handover, off the top of my head: Wong Kar-wei, Jackie Chan, John Woo, Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung.
Authoritarian cultures aren’t known for freedom of expression so it makes sense there’s little cultural export. The same thing applies to Islamic countries, the iconoclastic bent kinda puts a damper on visual art.
The west deliberately blocks Chinese media.
In asia, China's culture is far more prevalent and gaining quickly.
What Chinese media is blocked in the west? First time I’m hearing of this
Japan and Korea, yes. China, not really.
Unless you want to include Hong Kong, but even then
1 reply →
Opression makes it much harder to export culture. See also China.