Producing Culinary Locality: Indonesian Diaspora Mommy Vloggers on Social Media

Maria Febiana

doi:10.33822/jep.v9i2.13821

Authors

Maria Febiana Universitas Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Jakarta https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8163-1466

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33822/jep.v9i2.13821

Keywords:

digital etnography, culinary locality, indonesian diaspora, mommy vloggers, sensorial locality

Abstract

This article examines how Indonesian diasporic mommy vloggers produce culinary locality on social media. Indonesian women entering transnational marriages and living in their husbands' countries are increasingly using YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to document their daily cooking, ingredient foraging, and family mealtimes. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai's (1996) conceptualization of locality as a phenomenological quality produced through everyday practices, and sensory anthropology (Seremetakis, 1994; Sutton, 2001, 2010; Stoller, 1989, 1997; Manalansan, 2006; Marks, 2000), this study argues that the culinary practices of Indonesian diasporic mommy vloggers constitute a specific form of sensory locality, a locality whose primary ingredients are taste, smell, touch, and bodily memory, and whose primary infrastructure is the digitally mediated kitchen. Using digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016) with seven Indonesian diasporic mommy vloggers, combining non-participant observation of social media content with in-depth interviews, this study finds that culinary locality is produced through a series of everyday practices: growing Indonesian ingredients in a foreign land, cooking regional dishes inherited from mothers and grandmothers, and serving them in multicultural households. These practices reproduce the sensory presence of Indonesia in an environment that is structurally unsupportive of it, positioning diasporic mothers not as passive recipients of cultural transmission but as active producers of locality. This research contributes to media and culture studies by extending Appadurai's theory of locality to the realm of digital media, by demonstrating how social media operates as a sensory infrastructure to produce a sense of transnational belonging, and by highlighting the gendered labor through which culinary locality is maintained in the diaspora.

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