#measured excess

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Initially, the IMF drew much of the blame: 'to be IMFed' became a verb meaning to suffer the dislocations of unemployment, underemployment, or reduced income.

Nelson, Measured Excess, 181.

This is my new favourite word.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Mannequins, dressed in miniskirts, bell-bottomed jeans, and go-go boots, adorned in beehive hairdos, thrust one hip forward behind the legend, in English, 'Nostalgia 1960s.' What kind of nostalgia is this, I wonder. . . . South Korea entered the decade of the 1960s as one of the world's poorest countries, with a per capita income estimated at less than $150. Half the population still lived in the countryside, and most of the city residents worked long hours for poor pay in factory jobs or worse. I have spent more than a year hearing stories from women about the privations of their youth, their 1960s, and about how it is not possible to understand today's consumer choices without understanding South Korea's past. Perhaps even more to the point, the consumers targeted by these boutiques were as yet unborn in that hardscrabble decade --- they have no memories of the sixties, they cannot. experience this nostalgia. 'Nostalgia 1960s' is a slogan that evokes in them a nonmemory of a fabricated era.

Nelson, Measured Excess, 138.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

And the South Korean people had grounds for protest. For one thing, South Korea's international competitive advantage was achieved, in large part by keeping labor costs low. The state played a strong role in suppressing wages, outlawing autonomous labor unions and not merely turning a blind eye to industry's use of private thugs as a violent response to labor action but indeed supporting private force against worker protests with assistance from the police and the (South) Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

Nelson, Measured Excess, 15.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

I personally believe that we are all made a little foolish by the objects through which we attempt to express ourselves, but no more so in Seoul than in San Francisco.

Nelson, Measured Excess, xiv.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

When I report a certain housewife's enthusiasm for Japanese plastic laundry pins, I worry that this woman, as well as her neighbors, will not only believe they recognize the individual but will take personal offense on her behalf at my wry tone. The work of anthropology is often accomplished through attending to local gossip, but we rarely acknowledge that the act of writing is, in large part, the evaluating and passing on of stories told behind turned backs -- however much the point of the composition is synthetic or analytical.

Laura C. Nelson, Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), xiv.