Paper short abstract:

I suggest that social change and transformation become visible in narratives about the ordinary. Based on research on the life trajectories of young people in Seoul, South Korea, I want to discuss two ways to use the ordinary as analytical tool to track this change.

Paper long abstract:

Waking up in the morning, drinking coffee and dress, taking the subway to university or the office, participate in courses and clubs, business meetings or casual conversations with colleagues, meeting friends for dinner or do some shopping after work - these are some of the daily routines and activities of my research participants as they are the daily routines of a vast majority of young people living in South Korea. But in this "ordinary generality" (Highmore 2002) I found the particular, even exceptional, of my research participants' lives. The common is at once a general and highly individual experience that illustrates the complexity of practices in a social matrix and requires anthropologists to work between structure and agency (Highmore 2002).

I suggest that in narratives about the ordinary, everyday, and common change and transformation of the social become visible and an attention to it offers anthropologists the possibility to move beyond habit and reproduction to goals, projects and desire (Appadurai 2004). In my analytical approach, I merge two different qualities of the ordinary to illustrate the complexity of my research participants' everyday lives: ordinary ethics and, to borrow the term from Emily Gilbert (2005), money as 'common cent'. Ordinary ethics describes the reflections, explicit judgements, and highly personal reasoning of my research participants in relation to the demands, values, and pressures of their respective social matrix while practical considerations and pragmatic ways of using money illustrate their own values. In engaging with the ordinary, I can show how values change.