Enregisterment, Communities, and Authenticity: Watching Indonesian Teledramas1

This paper explores how ideas relating to enregisterment and authenticity might contribute to discussions of community. I point out how participation in processes of enregisterment enables people to position themselves as belonging to at least three types of communities: those who can recognize and evaluate enregistered signs, those who are situationally given the authority to perform them, and those who cross. My empirical focus is audio‐video recorded interaction from organized teledrama viewing sessions and post‐viewing interviews that involved Indonesians studying in Japan. I show how these Indonesians situationally index their membership in one or more of these communities through their authentication and denaturalization of representations of ethnic social types. [community, enregisterment, authenticity, Indonesia]