Console-ing Passions: Television and Cultural Power. NC: Duke University Press, 2016. viii, 314 pp. (Illustrations.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6204-3.
This book explores the captivating subject of lifestyle television and its presence and effect in “modernizing” Asian cultures. Chapters illuminate and describe striking similarities and startling differences in the consumption of lifestyle programming within and between geographic localities in China, India, and Taiwan. Using “lifestyle-oriented popular factual television…to examine shifting and emergent social and cultural formations” (2), the authors cover various forms of lifestyle programming, and pay attention to their representation across spatial divides, to illustrate lifestyle television’s effect through a range of topics including romance, religion and spiritualism, travel, health, femininity and patriarchy, family, and self-help.
Noting television “in many Asian countries … [as] the most powerful and ubiquitous media form” (3), the authors hone in on the medium’s impact through its programming—both conventional lifestyle programming and other instructive formats including “any nonfictional, non-news programming that incorporated direct advice to the viewer” (19)—“aimed at instructing the middle classes in matters of consumption, taste, and ‘the good life’” (3). As such, the demographic scope of this book is focused, yet, in the context of India and China, vast. Early on, the authors appreciate the difficulties in defining a monolithic middle class, especially in India, and the adoption of suzhi (human quality) in the establishment of new norms to manage modernization in China.
Together with the rise of the “middle class” in the countries analyzed, modernity and modernization is at the core of this book. However, instead of understanding modernity in Asia as the co-option of models, albeit dominant, from the West, the authors employ the multiple modernities discourse adding layers of complexities and depth to the book. The utilization of the multiple modernities paradigm, however, does not distract from the observance of transnational trends associated with rising consumerism and individualism symptomatic of conventional Euro-American modernities. Every chapter gives space to discussions on the aspirational and imaginative qualities of lifestyle programming depicting transnational norms of being juxtaposed against multiple modernities situated in on-the ground realities.
Chapter 1 charts the course of television, and lifestyle programming within China, India, and Taiwan. Comprehensively, the authors delineate the structure and ownership of television within each of these localities, mechanisms for access, audience demographics for lifestyle-oriented programs, and content. For example, “there is an explicit and disproportionate amount of advice … on topics of health and well-being targeting senior viewers” (32) in China in comparison to India and Taiwan, which reflects China’s large ageing population, and is an example of a competing modernity identified by the authors.
Key trends identified in chapter 1, such as the localization of transnational trends, political shaping of content, and the “division of audiences along linguistic, cultural, and geographic lines” (50) set the foundation for chapters 2 through 4. Interspersed with insightful comments from interviewees,
chapter 2 tackles the politics of scale, and placemaking through comparative case studies of lifestyle programming developed on metropolitan versus municipal/regional television channels in China. Similarly, chapter 3 explores Indian television and its role vis-à-vis multiple divides based on class, space and place, cultural-linguistic, and disconnects “between lifestyles and ‘imagined worlds’ of television … in our interviews with poorer households” (91), and the growing prominence of regional television. The authors also wade into nationalism and television in the Indian context but surprisingly stay clear of sport.
Nowhere is the authors’ contention of competing multiple modernities more apparent than when it comes to the mediation of matters of the heart. This type of programming, while emulating transnational norms in format, sets, hosts, and expert guests, reverts to culturally appropriate content when the program topics include dating, romance, relationships, and marriage. For example, the exploration of love and dating in India and China in chapter 7 draws up examples of performative selfhood while tapping into “shifting attitudes toward love, sex, and marriage, and in particular the kind of calculative, individualist, and material turn … of Indian dating shows” (206). But the reinforcing of culturally acceptable and accepted gendered roles “underpinned by a patriarchal logic” (136) in India, and the articulation of “extremely direct pedagogical instruction in the rules of ‘proper’ feminine gender” (219) in China by “experts” display the nexus between the market, the state, the media, and the audience.
Both chapters 5 and 6 delve into the emergence of the experts on television for both entertainment and educational purposes by different audiences across the three countries for utilitarian, experiential, pragmatic, and aspirational purposes. The authors provide pleasing juxtapositions of the uses of experts to mediate information over metropolitan/national and municipal/regional channels to divides previously identified.
In a captivating exploration of religion and spiritualism in chapter 6, Da Ai, the television station of a Taiwanese Buddhist society, is situated within the intricacies of rational-ethical religiosity characterized by a “demythologization of traditional beliefs, a devaluation of ritual, a dilution of hierarchy” (184), and its critiquing of modernity’s excess vis-à-vis Buddhist precepts.
Holistic as the book is, it would have benefitted from some additional insights. The authors’ scant incursion into nationalism, especially in India, provides an overview, yet masks the growing imaginations of identities of the self and the other which are creating more divides in these rapidly modernizing spaces. In terms of sport, China’s hosting of the 2008 Summer Olympics and India’s preoccupation with cricket could have further strengthened the multiple modernities discourse, and illuminated models of nationhood, and the convergence of geographic space and identities, if any. In exploring media forms and types in Taiwan, the authors curiously and continuously mention the use of Japanese media as a blueprint for Taiwanese programming. As such, it is confusing why the influential Japanese media is not investigated in depth.
Ultimately, the authors have provided an enthralling mechanism of “viewing” competing modernities in India, China, and Taiwan. The book is a resource for those interested in the development of television, lifestyle programming, and the multiple modernities in the world’s two largest populations.
Gloria Spittel
Independent Researcher, Dubai, UAE