![Sample our Economics, Finance,Business & Industry journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5931/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Economics-Finance-Business-Industry.jpg"})
Abstract
Research interest in secondhand economies has expanded in recent years among scholars of diverse disciplines, especially anthropology, history, geography, and sociology. The introduction to this Special Issue discusses a number of interdisciplinary and regional perspectives on the topic. After an overview of scholarship relating to secondhand economies, historical and contemporary, we introduce a number of themes that have attracted particular attention, including the growth and expansion of secondhand exchange, the emergence and specialization of diverse secondhand venues, the material objects involved, influences on these modes of exchanges, and the cultural significance of secondhand things and the professions connected with them. Finally, we turn to the articles included in this Special Issue, identifying some of the major issues to which they speak.
Notes
1. Alexander, Catherine and Joshua Reno, “Introduction,” in Alexander and Reno, eds. Economies of Recycling: The Global Transformation of Materials, Values and Social Relations (London: Zed Books, 2012), p. 3.
2. A couple of notable exceptions to this include Staffan Appelgren and Anna Bohlin, “Circulating Stuff Through Second-hand, Vintage and Retro Markets,” Journal of Current Cultural Research (Thematic Section, Vol 7, 2015); Jon Stobart and Ilja Van Damme eds., Modernity and the second-hand trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010) offers an exception to this by including various venues and types of second-hand exchange in a broad-spanning examination of 200 years of European used goods trade.
3. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990, orig. published 1922); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); and Arjun Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
4. Douglas, Purity and Danger.
5. Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 15.
6. Mike Crang, Alex Hughes, Nicky Gregson, Lucy Norris, and Farid Ahamad, “Rethinking Governance and Value in Commodity Chains through Global Recycling Networks,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 39 (2013): 12–24.
7. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 5.
8. Laurence Fontaine, ed., Alternative Exchanges: Secondhand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England”; Adam Mendelsohn, The Rag Race: How Jews Sewed Their Way to Success in American and the British Empire (New York: New York University Press, 2015).
9. Hansen, Salaula, 99–126.
10. in years past, recycling tended to apply to consumer waste disposed of through centers recycling products by material for industrial re-use. However, textile industries, as well as recent scholarship, also apply the term to the re-use, re-distriction, and re-production of cloth products.
11. See for premodern context, Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England”; Lemire, Dress, Culture, and Commerce; For more contemporary analyses, see Angela McRobbie, “Second-Hand Dresses and the Ragmarket,” in Zoot Suits and Second-Hand Dresses: An Anthology of Fashion and Music, ed. Angela McRobbie (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988); Gregson and Crewe, Second-Hand Cultures.
12. Heike Jenss, Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
13. Le Zotte, Goodwill to Grunge; Mendelsohn The Rag Race; Woloson In Hock.
14. Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England”; Woloson, In Hock.
15. Terence Turner, “The Social Skin,” in C. B. Burroughs and J. Ehrenreich, eds. , Reading the Social Body (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press), pp. 15–39.
16. Hansen, Salaula.
17. Le Zotte, From Goodwill to Grunge.
18. Hansen, Salaula.
19. Andrew Brooks and David Simon, “Unravelling the Relationship Between Used-Clothing Imports and the Decline of African Clothing Industries,” Development and Change, vol. 43, no. 6 (2012): 1265-1290; Hansen, Salaula.
20. Norris, Recycling Indian Clothing.
21. See for example, Melissa Gauthier, “Mexican “ant traders” in the El Paso/Cuidad Juarez border region” in Globalization from Below: The World’s Other Economy, eds. Gordon Matthews, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, and Carlos Alba Vega (New York: Routledge, (2012), 138–153; Lynne B. Millgram, “Activating frontier livelihoods: Women and the transnational secondhand clothing trade between Hong Kong and the Philippines,” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, Vol. 37, Issue 1(2008): 5-47; and Niko Besnier, “Consumption and Cosmopolitanism: Practicing modernity at the second-hand marketplace in Nuku’alofa, Tonga. Anthropological Quarterly,” Vol 77 (2004): 7–45.
22. See Eriksen and Schober, “Waste and the Superfluous”; Minh T. N. Nguyen, “Trading Broken Things: Gendered Performance and Spatial Practices in a Northern Vietnam Rural-Urban Waste Economy,” Joshua Reno, “Waste and Waste Management,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol 44 (2015), 557–572; Melanie Samson, “accumulation By Dispossession and the Informal Economy—Struggles Over Knowledge, Being and Work at a Soweto Garbage Dump,” Environment and Planning D; Society and Space, Vol 22, no. 5 (2015), 813–830; Raymond Stokes, Roman Köster and Stephen C. Sambrook, eds., The Business of Waste: Great Britain and Germany, 1945 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Carl Zimring, Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000 and “Dirty Work: How Hygiene and Xenophobia Marginalized the American Waste Trades, 1870–1930,” Environmental History, Vol. 9, no.1 (2004), 80–101;
23. See for examples of literature on secondhand automotive trade, J. Joost Beuving, “Cotonou’s Klondike: African Traders and Second-hand Car Markets in Bénin,” The Jounral of Modern African Studies (Vol. 42, Issue 4, Dec. 2004), 511–537; Yali Yand, Hao Chen, and ruoping Zhang, “Development of Used Car Market in China,” Modern Economy (Vol. 4, Issue 6, 2013), 453–460. Carl Zimring broadens his interest in scrap recycling with his pertinent article “The Complex Environmental Legacy of the Automobile Shredder,” Technology and Culture (July, 2011, Vol. 52), pp. 523–547.
24. Leon Rosenstein, Antiques: The History of an Idea, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2009).
25. Briann Greenfield’ s history of antiquing in the United States is a good example. Greenfield, Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in the Twentieth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Alison Isenberg’s forthcoming book uses antiques in tandem with less valuable secondhand trade as a lens to understanding the relationship between racial reconfiguring of nineteenth and twentieth-century United States cities, and the politics and economy of preserving and redistributing objects of American heritage. Alison Isenberg, “Second-Hand Cities: Unsettling Racialized Hierarchies,” (paper presented at the 2013 American Historical Association Conference, New Orleans).
26. Joanna Cohen, “‘The Right to Purchase Is as Free as the Right to Sell’: Defining Consumers as Citizens in the Auction-House Conflicts of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, (20, no. 1, 2010), 25-62; T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27. Wendy Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence Through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
28. Jennifer Le Zotte, From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
29. Gretchen Herrmann has written extensively on garage sales, beginning with Stephen M. Soiffer and Gretchen Herrman, “For Fun and Profit: An Analysis of the American Garage Sale,” Urban Life, Vol. 12 (1984): 397–421; Herrmann’s later garage sale work focused on gender and the role of gift-giving and haggling in the exchanges. For example, Herrmann, “Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the U.S. Garage Sale”, American Ethologist, Vol 24, No 4 (1997): 910–930; and Herrmann, Hannling Spoken Here: Gender, Class, and Style in U.S. Garage-Sale Bargaining,” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol 38, no 2 (2004): 55-81. See also Ruth L. Landman, “Washington’s Yard Sales: Women’s Work, But Not for the Money,” City and Society, Vol. 1, no 2 (1996): 703–728. For more on flea markets, see John F. Sherry, “A Sociocultural Analysis of a Midwestern American Flea Market,” Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 17, no. 1 (1990): 13–30; Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, “The Bargain, the Knowledge and the Spectacle: Making Sense of Consumption in the Space of the Car Boot Sale: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (Vol. 15 (1997): 87–112; Kathryn Watt and Bernhard Dubbeld, “Enchanting the Worn-Out: The Craft of Selling Second-Hand Things at Milnerton Market, Cape Town,” Social Dynamics, vol. 42 (2016): 143–160.
30. Staffan Appelgren and Anna Bohlin, eds., “Circulating Stuff Through Secondhand, Vintage and Retro Markets,” theme issue. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, Vol. 56, no. 1 (2015).
31. Andrew Brooks, Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes (London: Zed Books, 2015); Elizabeth Cline, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (New York: Penguin, 2013).
32. Kate Fletcher, Sustainable Fashion and Textiles: Design Journeys (London: Routledge, 2014).
33. Nicky Gregson and Mike Crang, “From Waste to Resource: The Trade in Wastes and Global Recycling Economies,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Vol 40 (2015), 151–176.
34. Crang, Hughes, et al, “Rethinking Governance and Value in Commodity Chains Through Global Recycling Networks.”
35. Alexander and Reno, “Introduction,” 3–4.
36. See for example, Beverly Lemire, “Consumerism in preindustrial and early industrial England: The trade in secondhand clothes,” Journal of British Studies, vol. 27, no 1 (1988), p. 1–24; Lemire, Dress, Culture, and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade Before the Factory, 1600-1800, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). Lemire, “Shifting currency: The culture and economy of the second hand trade in England, c. 1600–1850,” in A. Palmer and H. Clark (Eds.), Old Clothes, New looks: Second Hand Fashion, (New York: Berg, 2005), pp. 49–82; Wendy Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jennifer Le Zotte, From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative economies, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
37. Important anthropological contributions include Karen Tranberg Hansen’s Salaula: The world of secondhand clothing and Zambia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Lucy Norris’s Recycling Indian Clothing: Global Contexts of Reuse and Value (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Alexander and Reno, 2012; Thomas H. Eriksen and Elisabeth Schober, “Waste and the Superfluous: An Introduction,” Social Anthropology, Vol. 25, No. 3 (2017), pp 282–288. Social geographers Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe offer an excellent space-based study of secondhand exchange with focus on car boot sales and charity shops in Britain in Second-hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003), and Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark edited a collection of studies of the interactions between secondhand clothing and fashion industries in Old Clothes, New Looks, 2005.
38. For more on circular economy (CE) models, see for example, Fenna Blomsma and Geraldine Brennan, (2017) “The Emergence of Circular Economy: A New Framing Around Prolonging Resource Productivity,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 21(3): 603-614; Desrochers, Pierre (2000)., “Market Processes and the Closing of ‘Industrial Loops,’—A Historical Reappraisal,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 4(1): 29–43.
39. Nicky Gregson, Mike Crang, Jennifer Laws, Tamlynn Fleetwood, and Helen Holmes, “Moving up the waste hierarchy: Car boot sales, reuse exchange and the challenges to consumer culture and waste prevention, “Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Vol. 77 (2013): 97–107.