The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

Preface

PREFACE Readers cannot help but pick up on the accents and the obsessions of a work, even a short work. What follows in this preface can thus be taken as hints for the reader. The seeds of this project can be found in the field research that became Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: a South Korean Social Movement (Abelmann 1996). Writing this ethnography of a 1980s tenant farmers’ movement in the North Chôlla Province (a region noted for its relative underdevelopment, its still-large agriculturist population, and its political activism), I became increasingly interested in the movement-seen—that is, in how it was viewed, contemplated, and participated in by nonlocals. The movement I examined in that work was one that had garnered the attention of many nonlocal people , from regional farmer activists to students in Seoul with antiestablishment convictions, to a host of professional political organizers who found considerable political significance in an actually quite small and remote land struggle. When two hundred of the farmers moved themselves to Seoul to occupy the headquarters of their landlord corporation, I was able to observe the encounter of these farmers and their activities with a broad swathe of Seoul residents, among them the urban relatives of the farmers. Thus I found myself partially privy to the urban middle-class gaze at the farmers among whom I had been living, both in the countryside and during the “occupation” in Seoul. In short, I came to see them as “seen.” Among these glimpses were several awkward encounters, such as when a man at a market in Seoul recognized me for having been among the demonstrators months earlier and then proceeded to liberally slander the farmers, or the also much later conversations with the brother of a close friend of mine who happened to be a manager at the landlord corporation in question. Across all of these encounters—encounters with the gaze at farmers as both a class and regional other—I was struck by visceral class prejudice or disdain xv for farmers’ manners, looks, and ways of being. Important to note, however, is that in those late 1980s days, Seoul was still very much a city of adults with rural roots and home villages: a city of people who made at least occasional rural sojourns to visit family grave sites if not living relatives. The symbolic and historical proximity of farmers to the city made these palpable divides of class and circumstance all the more interesting to me, for they were distances traveled among siblings and cousins, and often within lifetimes. I told myself that in my next project—always a welcome respite from the sometimes messy mire of the project at hand—I would somehow focus on class distinctions and distances. These interests found their home in a summer trip to Seoul to begin a project on cross-class encounters in middle schools and high schools. In the late 1980s I had become interested in the then burgeoning teachers’ activism in South Korea, activism that amazed me because some of it seemed to go for the jugular of schools, as organs of class reproduction in Seoul. Most shocking to me was the moment in that struggle (a fleeting moment, as it turned out) when the teachers’ union (Chông’yojo) proclaimed their members to be “laborers,” thus eschewing the considerable cultural and symbolic capital accorded teachers. Also interesting was the intermittent insistence that teachers refuse parents’ o¬erings, a longstanding practice in which parents make payments (referred to as ch’onji or pongt’u, meaning “envelopes”) to teachers to enhance their children ’s favor; these envelopes revealed the on-the-ground workings of class privilege. It was in this context that I set out to locate a school in a residential area with class diversity. Quite frankly, this project did not take root, because my confidence in its ability to speak to my interests faltered; I wondered whether school ethnography would really o¬er a window on class relations. Furthermore, schools revealed themselves to me, in even a short research stint, as bureaucratic institutions that would call for considerable politicking on the part of the ethnographer. The politics of social-movement field research were just then still close enough in my own research history that I found myself wanting a project less governed by such management. I cannot quite recall the moment I began to think about women’s stories of social mobility (their own and that...