Introduction

Online drama, or webisode, refers to series that take the Internet as the main communication channel and netizens as the main audiences. Compared with traditional TV drama, webisode is a novelty with its uniqueness and diversity, which is worth our study. As an emerging industry, China's online drama industry has developed considerably in recent years in terms of genre, quantity and quality, but at the same time, the industry is faced with the issues of simplification of theme selection, lagging of innovation ability and vulgarization of content production (Leng and Zhang 2015). Webisode creators’ misreading of the characteristics of network drama creation and misunderstanding of the word “network sense” have led to the neglect of quality control and excessive adoptions of network IPs, and consequently have hindered the development of online drama creation and online drama industry (Zhao 2017). In addition, the rise of short video platforms has shifted the viewing habits of abundant netizens, and the traditional online dramas associated with long video platforms as the broadcasting channels have been challenged significantly, resulting in the emergence and prevalence of online vertical screen dramas (Cheng 2019). Meanwhile, due to the continuous requirements of the Party to cultivate a healthy and positive cyberculture (Xi 2016), the relevant authorities of the Chinese state have issued and updated regulatory policies many times for this novel form of entertainment. And the policies are often seen by critics as a restriction on the freedom of online drama creation (Hu et al. 2020). Although researches have been conducted frequently on content and forms of online dramas and challenges faced by the online drama industry, a direct and deep communication with the practitioners from the industry is missing. As pointed out by Potter, formal interviews and dialogues with industry people can indeed bring a series of benefits to researchers (2018). Those benefits include access to unpublished expertise and a wider understanding of the operational thinking and belief systems that emerge from industry practices (Freeman 2016). This study filled the gap between the industry and academia, thus deepening our understanding of the online drama industry.

In any case, the Chinese government's policy on the online drama industry is bound to have an impact on the development of the industry.

Introduction

Since the mid-twentieth century, there have been several attempts to propel the philosophy of religion beyond its historically Eurocentric, Christian-centred tradition. For too long, the philosophy of religion has been not only provincial in its outlook, but also political, insofar as it has conserved (and has been conserved by) a power dynamic of colonial modernity that produces racialized and gendered hierarchies in ways of knowing and being. However, as philosopher and historian of religion Ninian Smart asserts in his 1958 work, Reasons and Faith, ‘The philosophy of religion is intimately linked to the comparative study of religions’. With the turn of the twenty-first century, the renewed and growing effort to expand this discipline’s interests beyond abstract, ahistorical monotheism is therefore crucial.

However, the attempt to diversify philosophy of religion needs to proceed carefully, because it might be tempting simply to extend the range of religions to be investigated philosophically. The problem is that the questions and concerns that have historically absorbed philosophical explorations of Christianity are presumed to be appropriate for philosophical explorations of all other religions. By leaving unchallenged the decline from ‘religion’ in general to Christianity as the paradigm religion, philosophy of religion finds itself tacitly wedded to an imperialist Christian legacy. Furthermore, the very concept of philosophy of religion thereby remains unexamined. The very focus on the rationality of beliefs belies a notion of religion shaped in the image of the Abrahamic traditions where orthodoxy – literally ‘right beliefs’ – is paramount. Moreover, as contemporary critical theorists rightly tell us, reason is no neutral, dispassionate cognitive faculty but rather a complex, multifaceted phenomenon that is indissociable from various norms and relations of power. When we (namely, Western and Westernized scholars) problematize the categories of ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ in conjunction, the following kind of question arises: How might philosophy of religion renegotiate its terms and parameters in ways that enable it to move beyond the legacy of Christian imperialism and the racist, exclusionary logics of colonial modernity that undergirds the field? It is this question that I aim to address in this chapter.

To this end, the first two sections of this chapter highlight some key themes in the work of Wittgensteinians Mikel Burley and D. Z. Phillips respectively.

Since the end of the Cold War, few foreign-policy concepts have drawn as much attention as soft power – the ability to influence the behaviour of others through the power of culture, political ideals and sound foreign policies. The normative underpinning was that a soft power–minded foreign policy could strengthen a country’s reputation and hence its ability to shape and influence its international environment. When Joseph Nye Jr. published Bound to Lead in 1990, coining the soft-power term as a conceptual rebuttal to Paul Kennedy’s American-decline thesis in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, he could hardly have predicted the worldwide scholarly and policy debates that it has generated in the decades since. Nye himself has been an active and generous participant in those debates, engaging his critics – from leading scholars and practitioners to students at the School of Marxism at Peking University – with several books and many articles. Geoff Heriot joins these debates at an auspicious time.

In its simplest and most intuitive form, soft power is the opposite of hard power, the latter usually associated with the use or threatened use of military force and coercive economic measures. A key question of the many that were raised in both policy and scholarly debates was how to find a balance between hard and soft power. A conceptual compromise was developed as smart power, devised and promoted in a 2007 independent commission report co-authored by Nye under the auspices of the influential Washington DC-based Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS). Smart power was seen as ‘the successful combination of hard and soft power resources into effective strategy’. For Nye, smart power, more so than soft power, ‘was deliberately prescriptive rather than just analytical’.

The smart power term was subsequently used by US secretary of state Hillary Clinton in the Obama administration and in many other countries as well, tellingly in China. If a weakness of soft power was its perception as a blunt instrument largely out of reach from governmental facilitation in democracies, then smart power honed it. This refinement allowed for a more judicious balance between ‘measured national self-interest’ (to paraphrase Princeton University’s John Ikenberry) and ‘good international citizenship’ (in the words of former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans).

In their broadcasts of professional ice hockey games, The Sports Network (TSN for short), a Canadian cable television network, would identify and feature highlights of what the announcers would refer to as the “TSN Turning Point.” That is, in any given hockey game, the turning point in question was some event—often a goal or a great save, but perhaps also an untimely penalty, a key injury, or even a fight—that could in retrospect be marked as the discrete point at which the “game” turned in favor of the eventual victor. Notably, the turning point is not necessarily, or even ever, the gamewinning goal, which is to say the particular event that is proven to have assured victory by definition. No, that would be a rather uninspired choice. Instead, it might be the event that swung the momentum, that deflated the eventual losing side or energized the winning side, often well before the actual gamewinner is scored. As such, it has a certain ineffable quality in the moment. Players, coaches, commentators, and fans may be able to sense when such a momentous occurrence is taking place, and they can certainly speculate as to whether this or that play might be the point at which things will prove to have turned the winner’s way, but it is clear that the true TSN Turning Point cannot be ascertained until the game is over, until all the play has ended, and we are able to look back on the game in its totality to find the moment or moments when everything changed. In the midst of things, those experiencing or witnessing what may later be recognized as the turning point cannot be certain of the meaning of the situation. Only from a perspective made available sometime later can we may look back upon the game to discover the turning point, which is to say the most significant moment in the narrative we must retrospectively produce about the events that were occurring in real time. Although he was not thinking about it with respect to hockey, this is in part what Hegel meant by his evocative line about the Owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk. The turning point, like the narrative in which it functions, cannot be known in the moment of its happening, but only afterwards.

Introduction

In the medieval period, specifically from the fifth to eighth centuries in the Chinese historical context, the Buddhist community produced a voluminous literature, which became an invaluable resource for understanding the roles of animals in medieval religious life. This Buddhist literature not only included numerous translations rendered from Indic and Central Asian languages such as Gāndhārī and Tocharian, or which many original texts were lost, but also commentaries and collections of magical stories. In these texts, there were encounters and adaptations between Buddhist ideas and Chinese indigenous thoughts. Unlike many other world and local religions, Buddhism developed a sophisticated cosmology in which animals occupied one of the six realms for the birth, death, and rebirth of all lives or sentient beings in Buddhist terms. The Buddhist idea of reincarnation created a blurry boundary between humans and animals. In other words, in Buddhist literature, humans may be reborn as animals and vice versa, which also applies to gods and spirits. Drawing upon sources from medieval Chinese Buddhist literature centered on the Mahāvaipulya-mahāsaṃnipāta-Sūtra (hereafter abbreviated to MMS), this chapter examines how twelve animals first appeared as compassionate deities and then as demonic spirits in these sources and how Buddhist and Chinese intellectual traditions shaped this transformation.

The MMS is a sizeable collective scripture of early Mahāyāna Buddhist texts which did not survive in its entirety in any language. Some fragments in Sanskrit have been identified as parts of this significant scripture. Among numerous Sanskrit manuscripts found in Gilgit, Khotan, and other places in Central Asia, some fragments of the Sanskrit texts have been identified as those of the Ratnaketudhāraṇī, which is equivalent to the ninth chapter (Baochuang fen 寶幢分) of the Chinese MMS. There is also a separate Chinese translation Baoxing Tuoluoni Jing 寶星陀羅尼經 translated by Prabhāmitra in the Tang Dynasty and the lengths is about twice of the ninth chapter of the Chinese MMS. Although there is no complete equivalent text in Sanskrit, the Chinese and Tibetan translations that perhaps represent substantial portions, have survived in numerous scrolls and manuscripts. In the Tibetan canon, there is no complete equivalent of the MMS either.

Introduction

In this chapter, I argue that Wittgenstein’s morphological-comparative method could be an important epistemological tool for understanding different cultures and systems, thereby improving intercultural understanding. In particular, I argue that the acknowledgement of the contingent and ungrounded nature of our conceptual system prevents us from evaluating alternative systems as strange, or unnatural, and this observation encompasses both an epistemic concern and an ethical one.

As it is, my position stands on the following two points:

• i) There is, indeed, something similar to a morphological-comparative method which Wittgenstein explicitly expounds and employs.

• ii) There is an ethical tone to Wittgenstein’s philosophy and it should be understood in connection to aesthetics.

These points are not commonly accepted by scholars. Certainly, there is a tendency to emphasize the ethical tone of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work, especially by the followers of the therapeutic reading of his philosophy and, more recently, by the New Wittgensteinians. For example, in his On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy, Conant states that for Wittgenstein ‘all philosophical thinking and writing has […] its ethical aspect’ and that learning to think better is an important means to becoming a better human being (Conant 2002, 85). Indeed, it might be tempting to give an ethical reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for both ideological and biographical reasons. On the one hand, it seems as though Wittgenstein always lived in a state of moral tension, a sort of stoic attitude towards life that influenced his conception of philosophical work (Monk 1990). On the other, Wittgenstein himself wrote to Ludwig von Ficker that his first work, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, had an ethical point, for it refrained from talking about what is usually called ‘ethics’, as ethics ‘can only be delimitated from within, by being silent about it’ (Andronico 2013, 25). But these are not the ways in which the ethical tone is understood by advocates of the therapeutic reading, as they examine Cavell’s reflection on the rediscovery of the ordinary.

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall introduce the concept of translation according to W.V. Quine and Wittgenstein, then discuss the concept of interculturality implicit in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and subsequently, following Wittgenstein, Cavell and Veena Das, defend an ordinary anthropology as a renewed understanding of the intercultural.

In developing my argument, I shall draw not only on my work on these and other authors, and on my research on popular culture, but also on my own life experience as a French philosopher working in the analytic tradi-tion. My earliest research, in the 1980s, investigated the philosophy of Quine, an emblematic American scholar of the twentieth century, who contributed to the hybridization of classical American philosophy and pragmatism with the analytic philosophy of the Vienna Circle; and who proposed a groundbreaking thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, which does not affirm the untranslatability but the indeterminacy between languages, and the multiplicity of the choices that are available to a translator. Despite my analytic training, I have always been resistant to analytic philosophy’s ambition of becoming a global idiom or the universal language of philosophical communication: first, because of the obvious intellectual, conceptual and ethnocentric domination it presupposed; and second, because of the linguistic and cultural richness I had experienced in the differences in languages. From the start, American language and culture – which I had learnt to love during my childhood trips to the United States to see my grandparents – intrigued me, not for their power of universalization, but as a particular language, which we could refer to as ‘ordinary’ language. With Cavell, I discovered a philosophy of this ordinary language, of the ordinary itself, as well as a language that, in translating it, I found to be untranslatable in the strictest sense, with terms that have no equivalent in French: claim; mean; fun; care; matter. It was only natural, then, that, on the French side, I joined Barbara Cassin’s project Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, which aimed to describe the terms of both ordinary and philosophical English language. One particular aim of this chapter is to illustrate that popular culture – cinema and television series – which is an integral element of global culture, as well as local culture through their connection to an ordinary form of life, have the capacity to create genuine intercultural idioms.

Nine years after the advent of commercial radio broadcasting in Australia, and seven years prior to the onset of World War II, Prime Minister Joseph Lyons launched the newly constituted Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) from a radio studio in Sydney. From 8 pm on that day, 1 July 1932, listeners in the prime minister’s home state on the island of Tasmania could hear him only through atmospheric static because no telephone link existed with the mainland (Inglis 2006, p. 5). The broadcast had to be picked up long-distance from Sydney and relayed via the local transmitters of station 7ZL in Hobart.

On 20 December 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies launched international radio broadcasts in the English, German, Dutch and Spanish languages; noting that, although Australia lay 12,000 miles from Europe, ‘we are nevertheless involved in a European war and in full partnership with Great Britain in its conduct’ (Hodge 1995, p. 8). By 1942, ‘Australia Calling’ also broadcast in Japanese. It operated under the wartime government Department of Information except for the two years between July 1942 and April 1944 when the public service broadcaster (ABC) administered it. But the government information department controlled its news and commentaries even during that two-year period (Hodge 1995, p. 11).

Provenance is germane when considering the character and conduct of the Australian form of international broadcasting. Even if an embellishment, it is worth recalling Peter Drucker’s often-cited comment that organisational ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ (Edgar, Campbell & Stonehouse 2011). Institutional history, the evolution of organising principles and the consolidation of production norms prove to be compelling forces of indoctrination. This chapter provides a brief account of the ABC’s development as a national–domestic and an international broadcaster in the decades prior to 1983 when Parliament enacted legislation to re-constitute and modernise the organisation. That legislative change, detailed in Chapter 7, represents a useful baseline for the pre- and post-1983 era and its reconstitution as a corporation. Prior to 1983, the ABC’s national–domestic and its international services operated in closer proximity to government and under more direct administrative authority than in the decades since.

Henry Abbott was born in 1764 in Pera, a suburb of Constantinople, to a well-to-do family of expatriated merchants and consuls, among whom he was brought up in Ankara and Aleppo before moving to India. Abbott lived and worked in India between 1785 and 1802. He died in Blackheath, Kent, on 12 February 1820, age 55. In Calcutta, he married Margaret Welsh, the daughter of William Welsh of Edinburgh, with whom he had several children, all of whom were influential in the British military and diplomatic service in the East. His son James Abbott (1807–1896) served as the deputy governor of the district of Hazara in North-West India. Fredrik Abbott (1805–1892) joined a British military regiment, the Bengal Engineers, in 1823 and fought in the first Burmese War (1824–1826). Saunders (1811–1894) and Augustus (1804–1867) served in the British army in Bengal. Keith Edward Abbott (1814–1873) served as the consul-general of Great Britain in Tehran and Tabriz (1842–1856). Henry’s family in the Levant were mostly based in Ankara, Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Aleppo and Beirut. His father Joseph Abbott, as Henry wrote in his diary, established ‘a mercantile house of business’ in Ankara (Abbott n.d: 3). His uncle George was ‘a very affluent man’ in Istanbul (Ibid). Another uncle Bartholomew Edward Abbott, a Levant Company proconsul and merchant, was one of the richest men in Ottoman Salonica. His uncles John, who held the position of a consul to the Levant Company factory in Aleppo from 1770 until his death in 1783, and Robert, a merchant, were responsible for Henry’s education after he moved to Aleppo in 1774.

In Aleppo, Henry was brought up in an enterprising family of merchants who lived and worked in the Levant for many years. The Levant Company chaplain at the time, the Reverend Robert Foster, ‘a man of education & talents & an excellent scholar’, as Abbott wrote in his memoire, had tutored the young Henry (Abbott n.d, 9).

Journalist and one-time diplomat Bruce Grant wrote that relations with Indonesia have provided ‘the crucible of modern Australian foreign policy’ (Grant 1972, p. 81). For senior international relations bureaucrat, intelligence chief and analyst Allan Gyngell, it remained the most difficult relationship for Australia to manage of all its Southeast Asian neighbours (Gyngell 2017b, p. 161). Political sensitivities extended beyond the Australia–Indonesia relationship to involve the formerly Australia-administered Papua New Guinea. In the 1970s and 1980s, these co-existed as three countries in close strategic proximity: the archipelagic giant of Indonesia, the recently independent Papua New Guinea with a population of three million and the Western democracy of Australia, a product of colonialism with its own neo-colonialist elements. The three nations were unlike in almost every respect1 – in ethnicity and language, religion and culture, political ideology and governance norms, socio-economic status, topography, and their relative diplomatic and military power. Disparity of circumstance and the strategic proximity of near neighbours provided the crucible for conflicted relationships.

Australia’s relative remoteness from the principal European–Atlantic theatres of Cold War confrontation enabled it to express more easily the persona of a sincere and practical figure ‘helping others out rather than (engaging) in the contest of ideas or geopolitical strategy’ (Walker 2019, p. 63). In 2006, Simon Anholt (p. 46) puzzled over the world’s apparent love for ‘relatively remote’ and ‘exotic’ Australia, noting it was easier for countries not in the mainstream of global politics to achieve good rankings for their ‘nation brand’. But now, with Asia at the fulcrum of geopolitical contestation, Australia is immediately affected and its fundamental organising principle is to ‘stay on the winning side’ (Fernandes 2018, p. 2). The challenge of fitting values into foreign policy becomes greater as national interests become more intense (Gyngell 2017a). For that reason, the crucible of twentieth-century foreign policy might allude to complexities of international political communication in the contested present century. Accordingly, this chapter deals with the potential and the constraints of the international broadcaster’s discursive power projection, in relation to Australia’s transactional and ideological imperatives.

The study of Radio Australia’s broadcasting to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea demonstrates its conduct in relation to the three key success factors discussed in Chapter 6.

In his Preface to Impure Worlds: The Institution of Literature in the Age of the Novel (2011), Jonathan Arac reflects upon his more than forty-year career as a literary scholar, critic, and historian, tying his own multifaceted project to the inspiring figures of Walter Benjamin and Edward Said, “two exiles, the Jew and the Arab,” whose critical thinking had fueled Arac’s own work. Arac refers especially to his personal experience, first as a university student, then as a professor, but in naming these two thinkers—two radically different, yet somehow mutually resonating cultural critics—Arac also registers the degree to which mixed, hybrid, or indeed “impure” strains of critical inquiry contribute to his own distinctive work. As Arac puts it, the phrase impure worlds “names a zone of inquiry and resource that has shaped my thought for a long time.” Indeed, one might go so far as to say that “purity,” in literature, culture, and society, is inimical to criticism, in as much as literature, a social institution, necessarily reflects and gives form to the heterogeneous elements that make up social experience in a distinct time and place. Benjamin’s kaleidoscopic analysis of the Paris arcades and Said’s contrapuntal, secular criticism offer examples of this critical vocation in practice. So does Arac’s new literary history of the age of the novel, an era in which that form’s heteroglossia and multi-formalism, as Mikhail Bakhtin explored so evocatively, approximates the transformative diversity of the societies and cultures in which it is produced.

With Arac, this commitment to “impurity” underwrites a methodological imperative as well, as he has consistently sought to trouble disciplinary distinctions, making connections between previously separate phenomena and finding hidden affiliations among apparently unrelated writers and texts. It would be difficult to characterize Arac’s body of work, given the sort of professional, disciplinary, or subdisciplinary labels available to us. To be sure, Arac is an Americanist, particularly with respect to nineteenth-century American literature, and he has written influential articles and books on Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and others. His book-length study of narrative forms in the nineteenth-century United States, which appeared in the monumental Cambridge History of American Literature project edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and was later made available in bookform in 2005 as The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860, confirms his status as one of the most prominent scholars of this period, place, and genre.

One of the main objectives of this chapter is to make explicit Cora Diamond’s approach to ethics, as it is developed in Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (Diamond 2019). I suggest that this approach could work as a guide to questions of intercultural understanding. One central idea is that the Wittgensteinian philosopher, here embodied by Diamond, is not, contrary to what is often assumed, an ethical and cultural relativist. In Diamond’s view, the pluralism of language games presented in the Philosophical Investigations does not imply a view of incommensurable language games, moral language games in particular, in human cultures.

Neither Williams’ Nietzschean Pluralism nor Wiggins’ Cognitivism: A Framework and an Example

In Chapter 7 of her book Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins, Diamond closely examines a debate on truth and objectivity in ethics between Bernard Williams and David Wiggins. The debate occurred in the mid-1990s in the journal Ratio. Diamond’s own view on ethics, influenced by Wittgenstein and Anscombe, leads her to be critical of both Wiggins’ moral cognitivism and Williams’ Nietzschean pluralism. She has no doubts, though, that she is closer to Wiggins’ position than to Williams’. She devotes significant attention to one particular example used in the Williams–Wiggins dispute: slavery, or the thought that ‘slavery is unjust and insupportable’ as it was suggested in the nineteenth-century debate on slavery in the United States. The example illustrates an idea of Wiggins which Diamond herself wants to adopt: the idea that in some cases, given the reasons available to think that p, there is nothing else to think but that p: