In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class (Harvard East Asian Monographs)

In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues not only that South Korea's contemporary urban middle class exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition on the part of Koreans to seek high status, combined with a favorable political and economic climate that has made it possible for many to achieve this status. Lett shows that in addition to inheriting a cultural need for status from the yangban tradition, Koreans have adapted traditional ways of asserting high status to modern life. As Korea evolved from a "traditional" Confucian, agrarian, and largely closed and isolated society to one that is predominantly middle class, urban, industrialized, and increasingly global in outlook, new ways of asserting status have developed. Lett analyzes strategies for claiming high status in depth in terms of occupation, family, lifestyle, education, and marriage in order to show that these means of status assertion are the defining characteristics of South Korea's middle class. In this ethnography of the everyday life of contemporary Korea, Denise Lett argues that South Korea's contemporary urban middle class not only exhibits upper-class characteristics but also that this reflects a culturally inherited disposition of Koreans to seek high status. Lett shows that Koreans have adapted traditional ways of asserting high status to modern life, and analyzes strategies for claiming high status in terms of occupation, family, lifestyle, education, and marriage. The Harvard-Hallym Series on Korean Studies , published by the Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, is supported by the Korean Institute of Harvard and Hallym University in Korea. The series is committed to the publication of outstanding new scholarly work on Korea, regardless of discipline, in both the humanities and the social sciences.