book1

Jimoondang Publishing Company, 2001.

Hardcover, 202 pages.

ISBN 89-88095-44-8

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Youngsook Lim, Director
Jimoondang International
227 Suttons Lane
Edison, NJ 08817 USA
Tel: 732-777-9650
Fax: 413-480-9575
Jimoondang@yahoo.com
Home page: www.jimoon.co.kr

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.From Tradition to Consumption:
Construction of a Capitalist Culture in South Korea.

By Dennis Hart, Associate Professor
Political Science Department, Kent State University
Kent Ohio 44240, E-mail dhart@kent.edu

This book was recognized by Korea's National Academy of Sciences as a "Distinguished Academic Book" in 2002. The National Academy of Sciences is South Korea's leading and most prestigious scholarly organization and provides advice and recommendations to the government on matters pertaining to science and education policies. A selection committee of Korea's top scholars reviewed books in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that were published in Korea in 1999, 2000 and 2001. The National Academy of Sciences will support the selected books by providing publishers with grants of between $10,000 and $16,000 per book. These grants will be used to help distribute the books to libraries.

From Tradition to Consumption is a ground breaking work that provides a wonderfully innovative and insightful explanation of the eclipse of traditional society and the rise of a new consumer culture during South Korea's recent march to economic development. The book convincingly portrays this shift to cultural modernity as the reasoned response of people to rapidly shifting forms of labor, everyday life, and state narratives. Key to this transformation from agriculture to a modern life has been the drastic alteration of the family from a unit of production to a unit of consumption.

This state-led industrialization also has redefined gender roles in Korea. The pressing needs for production and consumption to bolster economic development have resulted in the creation of a middle-class family marked by the white collar male and urban housewife. These new social roles serve to make the process of consumption central to the family, and to promote the act of consumption as the basis for modern identity for many Koreans.

Table of Contents

Chapter One Materialist Culture and Korea
Introduction
Materialist Culture
Variations and Agency within Materialist Culture
Consumerism and Hegemonic Culture
Korea, Cultural Change and Agency
Situating Materialist Culture Within Korean Studies

Chapter Two Korea's Historical Traditions and Legacies
Introduction
Traditional Family Relations and Structure
The Family and Group production
Confucianism and the Traditional Family
Yangban and Commoner Families
The Yangban Wife and the Commoner Wife

Chapter Three Industrialization and the Family
Introduction
Urbanization and the Family
From Production to Consumption
From Home Production to Wage Labor

Chapter Four Inventing the Modern Patriarch: Consumption and the Family
Introduction
The Patriarch, Past and Present
Consumption and the Middle Class Male
The Patriarch's Changing Economic Basis
Concluding Thoughts

Chapter Five Creating the Korean Housewife
Introduction
The Shift to a Modern Working Woman
Creating the Korean Housewife
Consumption and The Modern Home
A New Role, A New setting, and A New Dilemma
The Social Role of Modern Homes
Educating the Modern Housewife
The Housewife as a Homebound Social Role

Chapter Six Advertising in Korea: Articulating the Materialist Culture
Introduction
Ideological Hegemony, Modern Society, and Mass Media
Koreans and Their Mass Media
Advertising in Korea
Korea's World of Advertising
Conforming to Live in the New World
Preying on Popular Malaise
Advertising's Foreign Allure
Concluding Thoughts

Chapter Seven Conclusion: Forgetting the Past and Repositioning Politics
Introduction
Forgetting the Past
The Consequences of Materialist Culture For Politics
Korea's Political Milieu
The June 1987 Demonstrations
Concluding Thoughts on Korea and the Study of Change