Melodrama of Mobility (Paper) [Paperback]

Nancy Abelmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2003

How do people make sense of their world in the face of the breakneck speed of contemporary social change? Through the lives and narratives of eight women, The Melodrama of Mobility chronicles South Korea's experience of just such dizzyingly rapid development. Abelmann captures the mood, feeling, and language of a generation and an era while providing a rare window on the personal and social struggles of South Korean modernity. Drawing also from television soap operas and films, she argues that a melodramatic sensibility speaks to South Korea's transformation because it preserves the tension and ambivalence of daily life in unsettled times. The melodramatic mode helps people to wonder: Can individuals be blamed for their social fates? How should we live? Who can say who is good or bad? By combining the ethnographic tools of anthropology, an engagement with prevailing sociological questions, and a literary approach to personal narratives, The Melodrama of Mobility offers a rich portrait of the experience of compressed modernity in the non-West.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Nancy Abelmann is associate professor of anthropology, East Asian languages and cultures, and women's studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she is also a teaching faculty member of Asian American studies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press (October 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082482749X
• ISBN-13: 978-0824827496
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #512,561 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Developing Ajummas, June 8, 2004

By 

J. Scott Burgeson (Seoul, ROK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Melodrama of Mobility (Paper) (Paperback)

"Dynamic Korea" is the local government's official slogan used to promote the country as an international tourist destination and would-be "Hub of Asia," and might also serve as the rallying cry of those cheerleaders of South Korea's breakneck development ethos. For those more skeptical of the country's ideology of development as it has manifested itself over the past four decades or so, "melodrama of mobility" perhaps more accurately and succinctly describes the mood and condition of South Korean society in the modern era. After reading Nancy Abelmann's "The Melodrama of Mobility," the utopian thinking expressed in such phrases as "Dynamic Korea" and the "Hub of Asia" ring all the more hollow.

Any foreigner who has lived in South Korea for a while has no doubt noticed the confusion and anxiety that seem to permeate just about every level and aspect of Korea society. Change, after all, is the only constant in South Korea. "The Melodrama of Mobility" is a satisfying exploration and analysis of some of the root causes of such confusion and anxiety, specifically from the gendered viewpoints of eight middle-aged South Korean women. The next time the visiting foreigner is elbowed brutally in the side by an ajumma ("auntie") rushing onto a subway car to occupy the last free seat, while they may not quite forgive her, at least they can better understand her.

"The Melodrama of Mobilty" uses the concept of social mobilty to trace the lives of these women as they travel back and forth from countryside to city, across class lines and generational divides, across ever-shifting landscapes of memory and desire. A kind of poststructuralist approach to ethnography and anthropology, the author's main aim is to show that these women's social and personal lives are in constant flux, and cannot be neatly "fixed" or "reified" into static categories of class, status, gender and identity. In this, she largely suceeds.

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but had a few problems with the form or structure of it, as well as deployment of the notion of "melodrama" as displayed prominently in the title.

First of all, it's hard to tell who this book's target audience is, beyond some nebulous "Korean Studies" or "Women's Studies" community. At times the book is overloaded with all the usual academic apendages such as constant citations of other academics including page number and year within the text, as well as constant definitions of critical terms and an overly self-concious attention paid to the writer's working methodology. And at the same time, the book is often theoretically dense, befitting a poststructuralist approach, all of which suggests this is a book geared for academics and perhaps undergraduates. However, the book is overly simple in parts and seems to treat the reader like a high school student who needs his or her hand held to get the author's points. Every chapter begins and concludes with summaries of the points made in the chapter, and often includes summaries and restatements already made in previous chapters, as well as teasers advertising points to be made in later chapters, etc., etc. This gets to be tedious after a while, and one wonders why readers capable enough to read poststructuralist enthnography need such "help" in getting the point. Again I ask, who are the intended readers? Personally, I could have done without all the constant summarizing and explications of methodolgy (which take up at least a third of the text) and done with more ethnographic observations of the women represented. One of the main women in the book deals privately in the real estate market in Seoul, for example, but there is little discussion of the networks she navigates while undertaking such work, focusing instead largely on her familial relations. For a book arguing that the division between the personal and the social is artificial, such an ommision is unsatisfying to say the least.

I also found the theme of "melodrama" insufficiently explored. Clearly melodrama is one of the most popular film and TV genres in Korea, and Korean society is indeed often melodramatic (witness weeping politicians hurling shoes in the National Assembly just a few months ago, televised around the world). This is an intriguing framework through which to view Korean society, yet the theoretics of melodrama as well as its application to Korean society and the women in the book are cursory and remain largely unexplored. Again, I would have preferred less self-conscious explication of methodology, and more solid theoretical insights.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the emphasis on retelling the stories and narratives of mobility of these women, as originally told to the author. Strip away the academic elements, the theory and emphasis on detailing methodology, and the book comes to resemble a novel of sorts, or at least a collection of interrelated short stories. I had no luck finding this book in Korea and had to order it online. Adopting more overtly the techniques of narrative, or at least restraining somewhat the distracting "academic" elements, would no doubt guarrantee a much wider readership in the future--which such individuals as appear in this book truly deserve. But then again, I am not an academic, so what do I know? If you're going to play that game, I guess you have to play by those rules.