Conducting ethnographic research in Korea in the 1990s, Nancy Abel Mann

observed that:

There is hardly a page of my field notes without mention of a television

soap opera or melodramatic film. It is not an exaggeration to say that the

women in these pages considered their lives to be dramatic, not unlike

those lives represented in dramas for television and film.

Abel Mann 2003, 22.

When first conducting field work in Koreain 2006 the first author found him-

self undergoing a very similar experience (Baldacchino 2008, 2014). Almost

twenty years have passed since the publication of Abel Mann's study and more

than ten years since the first author's own work. The primary aim of this study

is to explore the relationship that informants have with the Korean drama text.

How do young Koreans (mostly women) nowadays identify with such texts?

We note, however, that since Abel Mann's study the nature of the Korean dramatic text has also undergone a change. This paper is a collaboration between

a Maltese anthropologist of South Korea and a Korean film studies scholar

specialising in French cinema. It is primarily driven by an anthropological

mode of enquiry that seeks to look at dramatic texts in terms of the role that

they play in the informants' lives within the context of the broader literature on Korean drama. We cannot say that this study claims to be representative of the Korean population, or any special subset of it for that matter. This

study, however, does seek to illustrate the possibility and the range of meanings and interpretations that stem from the text when viewed through the

eyes of our participants mediated by our own encounters with Korean society. We develop our understanding of the text through the interpretations that

emerged through our encounters with informants. Seen in this light our informants are 'collaborators' in the production of knowledge more than sources of

'data', and we have tried to do justice to their own construction of the world

in line with best practices in critical anthropology that seeks to understand a

phenomenon from the 'ground up'. We have chosen to sacrifice quantitative

representativeness in favour of an intimate understanding of the drama as a

lived text.

To this end the first author conducted a series of twenty-one in-depth inter-

views over 2018–2019 supplemented by hundreds of hours throughout the

years spent discussing Korean dramas with Koreans from all walks of life.

The production of this article involved many hours of discussion between the

authors which constituted another layer of cross-cultural collaborative knowledge production in its own right, mediated by our own different disciplinary

backgrounds. The participants to this study were recruited by means of public announcements on campus in a private university in Busan. Though not

all the participants were from a particular school, by and large the people

interviewed came from a middle-class background. Some of the informants

in turn introduced the interviewer to their friends who also wanted to participate in the study. No manner of inducements were offered to the participants. Interviews were conducted in cafes and restaurants, and on occasion

on campus itself. Interviews varied in length, ranging from one and a half

to three hours. In some cases the first author also met with informants on more than one occasion as a rapport developed with the informants. Ques-ions in the interviews were mostly directed at informants' viewing patterns

and their perceptions of Korean dramas, though these dramas were often

brought into discussion with the informants' views and perceptions of the

world as really constituted. As noted further on, the relationship between

drama and reality was a topic which frequently appeared in the course of our

research and it was something that our informants themselves were acutely

conscious of. The ages of informants ranged from 20 to 27 years old. While

the call for participants did not specify gender, most of our informants were

women (eighteen). Much of the commentary below is therefore derived from

a female gendered perspective. The three interviews with men, however, were

also particularly insightful in their own right in so far as they highlighted possible differences in the relation to dramas on the basis of gendered identities and ideals, as will be discussed further on. In this paper we will discuss

audience reactions to a number of dramas. The discussion of the dramas is

selective. While there were other second-wave dramas that were particularly

popular and significant over the last decade, this paper focuses its discussion

on a selection of dramas which were popular at the time that the research

was conducted and reflects the importance given to the dramas by our informants.