Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store

Larsen, Frederik

doi:10.1080/00076791.2017.1418330

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Given different names (thrift store, charity shop, opportunity/op-shop) in different countries, thrift stores accept donations from consumers, sort, re-value, and resell them (Gregson and Crewe, 2003;Larsen, 2019). Larger ventures are often located on urban fringes or in commercial districts that provide sizeable premises at lower rents.…”

Section: Second-hand Cultures and Thrift Storesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany

Kuppinger

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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This article introduces Fairkauf, a charitable thrift store, in Stuttgart, Germany and analyzes its work and participation in alternative economies of reuse, repair, repurposing, sharing, and care, and the store’s contributions to ecological and social sustainability. Thrift stores are contemporary responses to overproduction, hyper-consumption, social inequality, and ecological degradation. This article provides a nuanced ethnographic description of a thrift store. Such stores are often overlooked, yet they play a crucial role in individual and urban sustainability efforts. They are spaces of incidental sustainability that do not loudly advertise their work, but quietly help thrifters pursue more ecological lifestyles and help cities divert huge quantities of materials from landfills and incinerators. Thrift stores’ labor connects thrifters to activities and networks of often similarly hidden sustainability efforts by ordinary people across the world. Theoretically, I engage the role of thrift stores in alternative economies that contribute to more ecologically and socially sustainable lifeworlds and futures.

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Section: Second-hand Cultures and Thrift Storesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany

Kuppinger

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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“…Reuse economies, on the other hand, are often synonymous with ideas of thrift. These markets vary widely in their forms, from informal street vendors (Ta 2017), anarchist free markets (Albinsson and Yasanthi Perera 2012), and garage sales (Herrmann 1997) to vintage boutiques (Gregson and Crewe 2003), thrift shops (Larsen 2019), national used good franchises (Minter 2019), and international exchanges (Halvorson 2012). This diversity of reuse practices suggests an overwhelming abundance of material goods to fuel the sector, and yet the quantity of used goods that move through secondhand markets is largely unknown (Schor 2010;Brooks 2013).…”

Section: Literature Review: Waste and Waste Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This immeasurable river of stuff that flows, unseen, through communities is often managed at the local scale by community reuse organizations. These small organizations are a feature of towns and cities across the United States, yet they are under-studied in the academic literature, which has tended to focus on larger organizations (see, for example, Minter 2019; Crewe et al 2003;Halvorson 2012;Larsen 2019;Ayres 2019) or direct peer-to-peer exchanges like garage sales (Herrmann 1997(Herrmann , 2015Crawford 2014) . 1988;Albinsson and Yasanthi 2012).…”

Section: Literature Review: Waste and Waste Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hochschild's ([1983] 2012) work on flight attendants demonstrates how women performed emotional labor to "smile like they mean it" to make customers feel welcomed. While some work on reuse has explored the role of emotion and affect (see, for example, Larsen 2019; Halvorson 2020; Herrmann 2015), these scholars focus on material goods (Larsen 2019) or the act of exchange (Herrmann 2015) rather than on labor. More recently, Halvorson (2020) explores the ways in which affect is displayed among volunteers in a charity reuse organization, but does not address the burdens that affect and emotion place on volunteers in reuse organizations.…”

Section: Literature Review: Waste and Waste Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Glut: Affective Labor and the Burden of Abundance in Secondhand Economies

Berry

2022

Anthropology of Work Review

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This paper explores the interlinkages between the abundance of stuff moving through community-based reuse organizations and the labor needed to manage this material. The glut of donations is due to the sheer volume of materials moving through a wasteful linear economic system, as well as the practice of donation dumping, where unusable used goods move through reuse economies, washing their previous owners free of guilt while entangling laborers in messy relationships with objects. I draw on theories of gendered, social reproductive labor to explore how the work of localized reuse, disproportionately borne by unpaid women, reproduces communities. Following calls for work that explores the social dimensions of circular economies, this research uses a qualitative approach that draws on two main methods: participant observation in reuse establishments and in-depth interviews with reuse participants. This qualitative data provides a picture of reuse activities at a local scale and helps us understand the complex relationships formed and perpetuated through reuse. I find that the labor of volunteers is often unseen and undervalued and suggest that policies designed to address material surplus do so with these laborers in mind.

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“…In this way, objects are capable of 'generat[ing] social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal' (DeSilvey, 2007: 324). Losing material is not only found in formal waste management, in this sense, but in people moving into a new house, managing belongings of relationships that have ended (with the dead or with exes), or even weight loss (Larsen, 2018).…”

Section: Relationality: Materials and Affectmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care

Isenhour¹,

Reno

2019

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Introduction: Reuse & Repair in the Age of Ecological Crises and Circular Economy In a time of acceleration, overproduction and hyper-consumption (Crocker and Chiveralls, 2018; Lipovetsky, 2011; Schor, 1998) reuse represents an obstacle, or perhaps a countervailing tendency: to slow things down, to reassess what has been cast aside, to go back rather than forward. This is something the world's scavengers and charity shops have long understood (Larsen, 2018; Medina, 2007), but the focus on and importance of reuse would seem to be growing, as products and buildings composed entirely from virgin materials are scrutinized and on the decline-in an era of environmental concern (Urry 2010). At the same time, discussions of reuse and repair have simultaneously become attractive notions for scholars across disciplines (Alexander and Reno, 2012; Cooper and Gutowski, 2015), all of whom share an interest in revaluation as a way to expose the shaky foundations of the monstrous web of life and death that Jason Moore (2017) dubs 'the Capitalocene.' According to Crocker and Chiverallis: 'reuse can be understood as a deliberative project of value transformation that challenges dominant paradigms and cultural constructions while building alternative social and physical

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Valuation in action: Ethnography of an American thrift store

Cited by 4 publications

References 19 publications

Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany

Incidental sustainability? Notes from a thrift store in Germany

Glut: Affective Labor and the Burden of Abundance in Secondhand Economies

On Materiality and Meaning: Ethnographic Engagements with Reuse, Repair & Care

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