1st Edition

Global Perspectives on Changing Secondhand Economies

Edited By Karen Tranberg Hansen, Jennifer Le Zotte Copyright 2022
238 Pages
by Routledge

238 Pages
by Routledge

238 Pages
by Routledge

Providing interdisciplinary and global perspectives, this book examines historical and contemporary changes in secondhand economies, including the emergence and specialization of secondhand venues, the materials involved, as well as the cultural significance of secondhand things and the professions associated with them. The objects in focus range from used clothing, scrap and waste materials,... Read more

Introduction: Changing Secondhand Economies 

Karen Tranberg Hansen and Jennifer Le Zotte 

1. Domestic textiles and country house sales in Georgian England 

Jon Stobart 

2. ‘Fence-ing lessons’: child junkers and the commodification of scrap in the long nineteenth century 

Wendy A. Woloson 

3. Jews, second-hand trade and upward economic mobility: Introducing the ready-to-wear business in industrializing Helsinki, 1880–1930 

Laura Katarina Ekholm 

4. Shylocks to superheroes: Jewish scrap dealers in Anglo-American popular culture 

Jonathan Z. S. Pollack 

5. The mass consumption of refashioned clothes: Re-dyed kimono in post war Japan 

Miki Sugiura 

6. The work of shopping: Resellers and the informal economy at the goodwill bins 

Jennifer Ayres 

7. Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store 

Frederik Larsen 

8. History as business: Changing dynamics of retailing in Gothenburg’s second-hand market 

Staffan Appelgren 

9. Second-hand vehicle markets in West Africa: A source of regional disintegration, trade informality and welfare losses 

Abel Ezeoha, Chinwe Okoyeuzu, Emmanuel Onah and Chibuike Uche 

10. Urban prototypes: Growing local circular cloth economies 

Lucy Norris 

Biography

Karen Tranberg Hansen is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Her publications include Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 (1989), African Encounters with Domesticity (1992), Keeping House in Lusaka (1997), and Salaula: The World of Secondhand Clothing and Zambia (2000).

Jennifer Le Zotte is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, specializing in gender, race, capitalism, and material culture, especially dress. Her publications include From Goodwill to Grunge: A History of Secondhand Styles and Alternative Economies (2017).