In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class

From the publisher’s website:

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.

Denise Potrzeba Lett is Lecturer in Korean Anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle.