Abstract
In an effort to ‘locate’ Asian lifestyle television in ethnographic concreteness and provincialize Western centric television studies – mundane, personalized, localized modes of address – the book ambitiously encompasses China, India, and Taiwan lifestyle television channels and programmes, without compromising ethnographic subtleties and theoretical coherency. The book is encapsulated in its vision for plural and specific modernities rather than variations of the homogeneous modernity and its understanding of tele-modernities as ‘an ideal one aspires’ (p. 8) – such aspirationalism is a recurring theme throughout the book. A major challenge is to define lifestyle television in these three contexts as lifestyle television is not even a recognized genre in China and Taiwan but found in various established local genres such as the Japanese influenced variety shows. Lifestyle television is thus a device for ‘comparison and critical reflection’ (p. 18) and the book delves into the particularities of television industry, cultural economy, and systems of genres, with its concomitant regional and transnational flows, in each context. The book is built upon solid foundation of recording and viewing hundreds of hours of television programmes, the archival substratum, and interviewing both audiences and industry insiders, the ethnographic homestead; the selection of field sites, with one major urban city and one small regional town/city in China and India, also serves the comparative anchors of relational scales greatly.
The book can be divided into two parts: the first three chapters focus on three locations with three different ways of presentation, and the last four chapters are comparative studies of one specific genre or themes of television programmes in two locations out of the three. In the case of China, the chapter is an ethnographically observant juxtaposition between the different approach to televisual pedagogy, construction of taste in the spatial imagination of the metropolitan Shanghai, the supposedly cosmopolitan, and the rural Bengbu, the resolutely local. In the case of India, the chapter surveys a great range of Indian television channels from Doordarshan to Northern/Hindi-oriented programmes to ‘vernacular’ such as Tamil programmes, that perpetuate a ‘Tamil modernity’ (p. 97). In the case of Taiwan, it narrows down to one channel TLC Taiwan to understand its viewers’ aspirationalism of transnational mobility and cosmopolitan values. The following four chapters each investigates one theme or genre of lifestyle television: the construction of ‘everyday experts’ on Indian and Chinese television, ancient spirituality or moral ideal’s blend with modern/capitalist techniques or social problems on Indian and Taiwanese television, the careful performances of the privatized self in the marketplace of dating Reality television and its tension with family and gender norms in India and China, and the negotiation of femininity in Chinese and Taiwanese women lifestyle programmes.
The formats of engaging with various topics vary greatly in different chapters: some are in-depth studies of a single programme, with lengthy quotes from interviews with both viewers and producers; some are literature reviews plus industry analysis; and some are content analysis of episodes selected from an array of programmes. The book aims at providing a comparative angle in the context of Asia but the comparison is, remarkably, not done through a systemic bullet-point format. In cues such as ‘comparable to the situation in China’, ‘like Taiwan’, and ‘unlike India’ found throughout the book, often preceded by detailed discussion in another context, comparisons are organically interweaved into the text as the reader can be naturally connected to the comparability of the cases while still engaging with the detailed discussion in proximity, rather than a zoomed out holistic view.