A Western Consumer in Korea: Autoethnographical Fiction of Western Performance

Abstract

Shopping is a profoundly important survival skill. It also communicates power, status, class, and many other ritualistic aspects of culture that imbue the performance of shopping with meaning beyond the fulfillment of material needs. Shopping is at once political and pleasurable, if not at times frustrating. These autoethnographic vignettes show the effects of a foreign male body navigating and blundering through consumer culture in South Korea. Beginning with the seemingly simple task of ordering coffee at a coffee shop, what follows investigates nuances of performing Western consumerism out of the Western context, moving on to bigger ticket and even household items in more chaotic and, sometimes, predictably docile sites. Informed by the works of Alexander (2003), Denzin (2003), Ellis and Bochner (2000), and Ulmer (1989), these vignettes illustrate the moments of epiphany in which the often paradoxical and contradictory motivations and effects of everyday performances of culture are revealed and understood.