The Cinematic Santri: Youth Culture, Tradition and Technology in Muslim Indonesia

My dissertation explores the rise and course over the last ten years of cinematic practices among young pious Muslims (santri) of NU associates (Nahdlatul Ulama), the largest traditionalist Muslim group in Indonesia and elsewhere. It especially focuses on questions about (1.) the backgrounds, processes, and meanings of the santri’s current uptakes of cinema, and about (2.) the ways their cinematic practices have shaped and commented upon (a.) the dynamic interactions and relationship between religious tradition, socio-cultural changes, and image-making technologies and practices, and (b.) the many ways in which Islam is daily lived among pious Muslims in Indonesia against the heterogeneity of human’s modern desires and the complexity of experience and anxieties of the everyday lives.
To answer these questions, the dissertation draws on anthropological theories of discursive tradition and of ethics as everyday life, combined with an analysis of visual and material culture. Fieldwork for this research, lasting twelve months in total, was carried out in between 2011 and 2015, at the Jakarta NU headquarters and in an NU-affiliated pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in West Java. Here, I followed the pesantren students as they watched popular films in a cinema theater, created their own short films set in the context of their own pesantren environment, and as they screened films of their own styles across the main pockets of NU’s local communities. I show throughout the dissertation that the rise of cinematic practices is both a symptom of NU life, i.e, a result of changes in multiple sectors of the socio-political life of the NU community, especially among these young santri, and an approved method for them in dealing with problems of contemporary life. Their uptake of cinema in turn becomes an ethical practice that may help them preserve pesantren traditions in a secular age of digital technologies.