Nancy Abelmann, The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003, 376 pp. U.S. discourses on South Korea emphasize its rapid, economic development-the miracle of Han-to exclusion of almost everything else. South Korea is thus presented as either a neo-liberal, success story (during periods of economic growth) or as a country still held back by its legacy of Confucianism (in times of economic crisis). All of these tropes, of course, figure South Korea along a unilinear chain of modernization, wherein urbanization and consumption constitute modern and everything else is plugged into savage slot-an atavistic stumbling block to neo-liberal modernization. Anthropologists have been steadfast in contesting these monolithic representations with considerably more critical narratives, whether by exposing exploitative relations inherent in Korea's capitalist development (Kim 1997), articulating variable experiences of modernization (Kendall 2002), or by emphasizing resistance to neoliberal modernization below, e.g. 1980s minjung movement (Abelmann 1996). But one need only turn on a television to grasp ambivalence that lies at core of Korean experiences of modernity. kind of repetitive, symptomatic act characteristic of television programming around world, South Korean dramas invariably involve travails of related households, some of which toil in unjust poverty, while others revel in ill-gotten gains. Echoing political separation of families occasioned by partitioning of Korean peninsula (pundan), capitalism is shown to have turned families against one another in race for prosperity. this book, Nancy Abelmann looks to this melodrama of South Korea's mobility in narratives of eight, middle-aged women, whose polysemic accounts of success and failure, justice and injustice, form a rejoinder to neoliberal accounts of Korea, Inc. Like E.P. Thompson, Abelmann construes class as social, institutional, and dialogical practice: In sum-class-and social mobility-is not a thing to be catalogued and charted but is, rather, a project that happens partly through narrative, in families, and transgenerationally (20). The book's cover is particular telling: at least two women walk down a street at night, their silhouettes nearly occluded by bright lights of restaurants and bars, neatly raising questions of gender, social life, and practice that are obscured in economic and geopolitical discourses on South Korea. The stories that form core of this ethnography are drawn from interviews undertaken over course of almost ten years, from 1992 to 2001, although Abelmann's relationship with some (like Mi-yon's Mother) extend back into her own first encounters with South Korea in 1980s. Here, Abelmann adopts an initially jarring convention: for some of her interlocutors, she adopts pseudonyms consistent with Korean conventions-older women are (familiarly) known as Mother of their oldest child. For others, however, Abelmann invents quixotic nicknames-e.g., Education Mother, Moviegoer-that highlight some puissant trait in a way one might refer to someone unfamiliar (oh, her? The one who's always going to movies?). The effect of this is to suggest varying degrees of familiarity and formality and to self-reflexively underline life stories as partial truths; can we really know someone only as the Moviegoer? This also anticipates Abelmann's eclectic appropriation of cultural and ethnographic theory (James Clifford, Raymond Williams, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sherry Ortner, Vincent Crapanzano) that, in two, dense, initial chapters, is likely to send readers scurrying to notes from early 1990s graduate seminars. The third chapter looks to women's language as inherently heterglot, locating ambivalences of class, mobility, and modernity at very core of language. …