This book explores activities in the global landscape of second-hand cultures and economies of reuse, repair, sharing and care. Individual chapters provide ethnographic studies of how ordinary people live, revive, create, and refine practices of reuse, repair, sharing and care as they seek to prolong the lifespan of goods, contribute to planetary health, make a living, and create communities. The authors introduce practices like childrens clothes swapping, repair of appliances, or reuse of domestic fabrics, and analyze how people exchange and share goods (farmers market), buy used items in different venues, reuse or recycle materials (tires), repair items for resale (TVs), or avoid purchasing new goods (free stores). The volume examines activities in different settings across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and Asia, and analyzes specific economic, gendered, social and cultural contexts, material conditions, and motivations. The authors theorize global second-hand circuits and economies and the potential of ordinary people and small projects in the making of a more sustainable and equitable world. This book will be of interest to readers in environmental anthropology or sociology, environmental studies, sustainability studies, consumer studies, and material and popular culture studies.
Chapter
1. Introduction : Second-hand Cultures and Economies of Reuse,
Repair, Sharing and Care.
Chapter
2. Reuse and ReUse: Informal and
Institutional Transfer of Used Goods.
Chapter
3. Social Capital in
Secondhand Markets.
Chapter
4. Greening Farmers Markets: How Communities
Come Together to Keep Items and Waste Out of the Landfill.
Chapter 5. These
System Will Provide their Own Lessons: University Reuse Programs as Sites of
Material Care and Educational Praxis.
Chapter
6. Fixing Coffeemakers and
Giving Away Couches: Urban Economies of Reuse, Repair, Sharing, and Care in
Germany.
Chapter
7. Ready to Repair: Teleologies of Secondhand Electronics
Market and Repairing in Tanzania.
Chapter 8. This is really genbrug!
International Mothers Consumption of Second-hand Childrens Good in
Copenhagen, Denmark.
Chapter
9. Frictional Infrastructures: Navigating the
Socio-Spatial Landscape of Second-Hand and Waste Tires in Mega-City Lagos.-
Chapter
10. The Immense Possibilities of Six Yards of Cloth: Saris,
Recycling, and Power in Indian Households.
Chapter
11. Reclaimed wood in a
reclaimed city? Or, the story of Joes new table.
Chapter
12. Second-hand
for the Third World: Charitable Gift Giving during Religious
Volunteer-Tourism in the Dominican Republic.
Chapter
13. Secondhand Sacred:
Christian Material Culture and Reseller Ethics.
Petra Kuppinger is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Monmouth College, USA. She has conducted research on topics of space, globalization, and consumerism in Cairo, Egypt, and issues of space, culture, and Islam in Stuttgart, Germany. More recently she has been working on topics of urban transformations and sustainability.
