Midwife Radio: The Entangled Trajectories of Global Health Programming, Broadcast Media, and the Indonesian State

Shortly after the fall of Indonesia’s New Order government, the country’s public radio network began limited broadcasts of a program intended to augment the midwifery skills of the biomedically trained “skilled birthing attendants,” called bidan. This radio series was focused on educating rural health care providers in an efficient, modern way, reflecting the country’s history of Jakarta-centered nation-building through didactic mass media. After what appeared to be relatively promising trials, the national Ministry of Health let the program languish and never brought it to full implementation. This article investigates the bidan radio series as a case study not only in public health education, but as a representation of the country’s shifting narratives of nationalist modernity, and the role of mass media in reproducing them. We argue that the program depended on the medium itself as the locus of its message, and therewith national radio’s historic discourse of unifying progress. Based on an ethnographic collaboration between medical and media anthropologists, this ethnohistoric research interrogates childbirth as a disputed field of cultural knowledge production, and an exemplar of broadcast media and biomedical nationalism’s entangled trajectories.