Tired of being alone, Rhea takes the plunge into the marriage market. Each time she meets a new guy she thinks she’s hit pay dirt, only each guy has a weirder problem than the last. Awash with caricature and banter, Half Love Half Arranged debuts a voice that could well be the next Anuja Chauhan.

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.

Amelia Brown is willing to do anything to make it stop, this feeling that hurts like an entire battlefield inside her. The plan is in action when a magnetizing stranger, Ethan Garcia, holds her hand as they rush her to the hospital. The unjustified tears in his hazel eyes are poetry to Amelia. This is the first time she thinks there might just be another way to end her suffering. For a minute, Amelia’s drooling heart forgets that it’s already been given to Austin, her almost perfect husband. She swings in and out of love with the husband, who still manages to sway her with those sea-blue eyes, and the stranger whose overpowering touch and dominating gaze warn Amelia that he’s trouble. She wonders if it’s possible to love two people at the same time. Will she try to revive a failing marriage with a husband that once kept her like a queen? Will she incurably fall for the stranger whose extremism scares and excites her at the same time? Or will she discover spine-chilling information about them, only to realize that she’s been a victim to a long-thought evil plan?

This study complements the burgeoning literature on South Korean economic development by considering it from the perspective of young female factory workers. In approaching development from this position, Kim explores the opportunity and exploitation that development has presented to female workers and humanizes the notion of the 'Korean economic miracle' by examining its impact on their lives. Kim looks at the conflicts and ambivalences of young women as they participate in the industrial work force and simultaneously grapple with defining their roles in respect to marriage and motherhood within conventional family structures. The book explores the women's individual and collective struggles to improve their positions and examines their links with other political forces within the labor movement. She analyses how female workers envision their place in society, how they cope with economic and social marginalisation in their daily lives, and how they develop strategies for a better future.

A collection of ethnographic essays on the city of Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay), the volume questions the city's claim of a 'self-projected' cosmopolitanism by exploring its relationship with religion.

Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has continued to grapple with transgressions that shook the nation to its core. Following the serial killings of Korea’s raincoat killer, the events that led to the dissolution of the United Progressive Party, the criminal negligence of the owner and also the crew members of the sunken Sewol Ferry, as well as the political scandals of 2016, there has been much public debate about morality, transparency, and the law in South Korea. Yet, despite its prevalence in public discourse, transgression in Korea has not received proper scholarly attention. Transgression in Korea challenges the popular conceptions of transgression as resistance to authority, the collapse of morality, and an attempt at self- empowerment. Examples of transgression from premodern, modern, and contemporary Korea are examined side by side to underscore the possibility of reading transgression in more ways than one. These examples are taken from a devotional screen from medieval Korea, trickster tales from the late Chosŏn period, reports about flesheating humans, newspaper articles about same- sex relationships from colonial Korea, and films about extramarital affairs, wayward youths, and a vengeful vigilante. Bringing together specialists from various disciplines such as history, art history, anthropology, premodern literature, religion, and fi lm studies, the context- sensitive readings of transgression provided in this book suggest that transgression and authority can be seen as forming something other than an antagonistic relationship.