Customer Reviews

Measured Excess

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This very entertaining illuminated a developing country's discovery of consumerism. I enjoyed not ony the insight into Korean life, but the way the book put this bahavior in a broader context.

Ms. Nelson's keen eye and sensitive writing create a vivid picture of how tensions among tradition, nationalism, rapid economic development and the globalization of markets play out in the everyday life of Koreans. Her book got me thinking in new ways about shopping and the collective unconscious, both in Korea and in my own culture. I came away with a better understanding not only of Korea, but also of how anthropology is done (at least by one talented anthropologist) in a postmodern world.

This is one of a spate of new books looking at Gender and Consumption in the new middle classes developing around the world. In general, I much prefer Mills' "Thai Women in the Global Labor Force" or Wolf's "Factory Daughters" to this one. Those two books have an explicit focus on gender and aknowledge the contentious nature of household decisions on spending money. The case of the Korean middle classes during the "miracle economy" of the 1970s and 1980s has a lot of intrinsic interest, and there is a lot of information here to think about. But too much of the information is summary statistics on whole segments of the population, or relatively fragmented stories and anecdotes drawn from personal encounters and interviews. It gets very hard to connect these two levels.

Rudi Colloredo-Mansfield's book "The Native Leisure Class" about highland south America does a better job of linking intimate details of daily life with 'big picture' ideas about consumer culture and development in general. It is a very tough assignment.

Nelson has a great topic. She writes well, and clearly knows Seoul extremely well. But this is not the great book on the consumer culture of a developing country that we have been waiting for.