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

3 Key Words

3 3 3 KEY WORDS An openly acquisitive society, which is concerned also with the transmission of wealth, is trying to judge itself at once by an inherited code and by the morality of improvement. —Raymond Williams, The Country and the City During my conversations with the eight South Korean women I introduced in chapter 1, a particular world of words emerged, demanding that I take note of them. Over time I began to underline these words in my field notes, to anticipate them in my conversations, and to use them myself as prompts in conversations. In the earlier days of this project, I imagined that I would write a book with some sort of a glossary to serve as a guide to the women’s stories. Over the course of the research, however, it became clear to me that the hardest words to gloss were these very words. This chapter introduces the reader to a dozen or so words that mark the talk of a generation of women. They are all words that do not do well solo because they so often comprise the refrains of stories and reflections, and because they make best sense in concert with one another. Let me recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s comment on words: “Each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases” (1981, 263). Bakhtin also described the “language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, school, and so forth” (1981, 273), asserting that a word has “tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (1981, 293). The words the reader finds here are indeed charged mementos of a day and a generation, fleeting and in flux. Bakhtin used the word “heteroglossia ” to capture the “contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of . . . embattled tendencies in the life of a language” (1981, 272). Bakhtin tells us that the day or the moment asserts itself in words that are then shadowed 59 by new words, or new twists on old words. Thus, “languages of various epochs . . . at any given moment . . . cohabit with one another” (Bakhtin 1981, 291). Language, then, is a stratified, sedimented a¬air in the sense that “at any moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between di¬ering epochs of the past, between di¬erent socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth” (Bakhtin 1981, 291). I call the words discussed in this chapter “key words” after Raymond Williams’ Key Words. Williams reserved key words for just the sorts of words for which “‘I see from my Webster’s’” simply will not do “for words of a di¬erent kind . . . for those which involve ideas and values” or “deep con- flicts of value and belief” (1976, 17, 23). He was furthermore interested in the ways in which clusters of words work together (22). Williams recommends that the reader make his own way among the key words “to change as we find it necessary to change . . . [to] go on making our own language and history” (25). To remind the reader of the open character of inquiry, Williams’ book ends with six numbered blank pages (344–349). It is through Williams’ spirit of conflict and change that sense is made of the cluster of words presented in this chapter. I suggest that these words are indices of change, and of the necessary conflict that change engenders. The words are dated in two senses: for belonging to a particular historical moment , and for being already out-of-date in South Korea for which the word “change” seems somehow understated. Change in South Korea is not of the step-by-step variety; rather, it races, leaving behind perhaps only the likes of plodding ethnographers to dare to author some pages, just as so many blank ones unfurl ahead. During a recent brief sojourn to South Korea, I asked an anthropologist acquaintance of mine about the field-research project she had described to me in enraptured detail several years earlier. She responded hastily, “Oh that.” South Korea is simply not a place for very long-lived interests or projects. Of the ethnographer of South Korea who resides outside of the country, South Korea makes an anachronism. Of my reader—and of her encounters with South Korea—I ask that she read on in the spirit...