Indonesia in the Satellite Age: The Story of a Lighthouse Project and Its Role in the Formation of a National Ideology

Joshua Barker,

Dept. of Anthropology,

Univ. of Toronto

Suharto’s New Order government was famous for its lighthouse projects aimed at demonstrating that Indonesia was a modern nation. The most spectacular and expensive of these was the Palapa satellite project, which provided the archipelago with universal television coverage for the first time. This paper examines the history of the Palapa project from the standpoint of its role in promoting ideologies of national development and modernzation. It focuses on the symbolic values attached to the satellite by the group of Indonesian engineers and officials who brought the project to fruition. These values centered around the idea that the satellite would provide the material basis for a collective, national imaginary: a wawasan Nusantara (archipelago world-view). The paper shows how this ideology came to shape the technical configuration of the satellite system as well as the television programming it carried. The result was a relatively effective ideological apparatus aimed at ‘nation-building’ through ‘development’. The paper then goes on to describe how the ambitions of entrepreneurial capitalists ultimately brought the configuration of the satellite system into contradiction with its nationalist ideology and helped to set the stage for the emergence of a new ideology of globalisasi (globalization).