Review of Antti Leppänen. Neighborhood Shopkeepers in Contemporary South Korea: Household, Work, and Locality.

This review is on Neighborhood Shopkeepers in Contemporary South Korea: Household, Work, and Locality written by Antti Leppänen. The book is about the cultural concepts, categories, and classifications related to the capitalism of small shopkeepers in Seoul in the late 1990s. It is based on field-work that was conducted while Korea was facing a major economic crisis, due to the imposition by the International Monetary Fund of stringent conditions on the nations of Southeast and East Asia that sought its help. This book indicates how the economic and social consequences of the crisis were not limited to the salaried middle class, but also harshly affected small businesses and the self-employed, and shows how the “recovery” measures did not trickle down to the “ordinary people,” the sŏmin, at the neighborhood level. Based on intensive ethnographic research concerning the ways the crisis was perceived and faced by small shopkeepers in their daily lives, this book investigates how they adjusted to social and economic oscillations. The book describes the cultural conceptualization, categorization, and classifications of capitalism, extracting them from the shopkeepers’ daily conversations and their daily practices.