Second-Hand Cultures and Economies of Reuse, Repair, Sharing, and Care

Petra Kuppinger

Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Monmouth College

Monmouth, IL, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-99874-4

ISBN 978-3-031-99875-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-99875-1

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Susan Andreatta is a Professor of Applied Cultural Anthropology at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA. Her research and teaching interests coincide with an emphasis on social and environmental justice, food production, health, nutrition, and food security. She leads the sustainable campus garden initiative where she supervises 50 raised beds for faculty, students, and staff use. Since 2001, she has been the director for Project Green Leaf, a project that was established to assist farmers and the public in sustaining a local agriculture and food system.

Brieanne Berry is an Assistant Professor of Environment and Sustainability at Ursinus College. Trained as an environmental and economic anthropologist, Dr Berry has conducted research on Maine's vibrant reuse economies, and the value of localized thrift, resale, and redistributive economies in rural communities. She also has research interests in food waste and circular food systems, and serves on the leadership team of the Montgomery County Food Policy Council. Her work broadly explores the potential to find value in our discards. She authored more than a dozen peer-reviewed publications. Her interdisciplinary, collaborative research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Research and Education Foundation.

James S. Bielo is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place (2021); Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (2018); Anthropology of Religion: The Basics (2015); Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (2011); and Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study (2009).

Sujan Chakraborty earned his BBA and MBA, majoring in Marketing, from the University of Chittagong in Bangladesh. He worked for the central bank of Bangladesh for 4 years. His primary job responsibility there was to conduct bank inspections. After moving to the United States, he earned an MS in Economics from the University of Maine. During his stay in Maine, he did research on evolutionary economics, circular economy, and published a few papers revolving around these topics. Now he is pursuing a PhD in Economics at Indiana University Indianapolis focusing on the economics of philanthropy, and health economics.

Subhadra Mitra Channa is a retired professor of anthropology from Delhi University. Her research focuses on gender, cosmology, inequality and marginalization, identity, and urban studies. She is the author of Gender in South Asia (2013); The Inner and Outer Selves (2013); and The Dhobis of Delhi: An Ethnography from the Margins (2024). She co-edited Life as a Dalit (ed. 2016); Religious Pluralism in India (2023); and Colonial Anthropology: Technologies and Discourses of Dominance (2024). She was the Senior Vice President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnographic Studies (IUAES) and is at present the Co-Editor of Reviews in Anthropology. Her awards include two Fulbright teaching fellowships, Charles Wallace and several visiting professorships, as well as the Distinguished Teacher Award from Delhi University.

Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a current co-editor of Religion and Society. Simon has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom. Recent books include Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement (2022) and Ideologies and Infrastructures of Religious Urbanization in Africa: Remaking the City (2023, co-edited with David Garbin and Gareth Millington).

Andrew Crawley is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Maine. His research is focused on regional economic modeling, and the labor market, including matching efficiency analysis as well as input-output assessments. He has published in the leading regional science journals, Regional Studies, Urban Studies, and Regional Science Policy and Practice. His work has received funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institute for Food and Agriculture, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Economic Development Association. He also leads the EDA University Center at UMaine; this federally funded group supports regional economic research throughout the state of Maine working with public and private stakeholders.

Andrew Esiebo is a photographer based in Lagos who started his career by chronicling the rapid development of urban Nigeria. He is a winner of the Visa

Pour La Création Prize of the Institut Français and of the Musée du Quai Branly Artistic Creation Prize. See his work at andrewesiebo.com.

David Garbin is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. His research focuses on migration, diaspora, transnationalism, urban change, and urban religion. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Bangladesh, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Europe, and North America. He was the Principal Investigator of the “Pneuma-City” project, exploring the impact of end-of-life tires in West African megacities and the informal work of roadside tire repairers in Lagos (Nigeria). His books include Ideologies and Infrastructures of Religious Urbanisation in Africa: Remaking the City (2022, with Simon Coleman and Gareth Millington), Religion and the Global City (2017, with Anna Strhan), and Migration and the Global Landscape of Religion (2023).

Gretchen Herrmann is a retired librarian and anthropologist at SUNY Cortland where she taught Anthropology and Women’s Studies. She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Binghamton University, and she has published numerous articles on garage sales, community, affect, reuse, local currencies, and Christmas games.

Cindy Isenhour is Professor of Anthropology and Climate Change at the University of Maine. Her research is focused at the intersection of environmental governance and economic policy, with particular attention to the concept of the circular economy and efforts to design more sustainable systems of production-consumption-disposal. She is the author of more than 60 peer-reviewed publications and three co-edited books including Sustainability in the Global City (2015, with Melissa Checker and Gary McDonogh); Power and Politics in Sustainable Consumption Research (2019, with Lucie Middlemiss and Mari Martiskainen); and Consumption, Status and Sustainability (2021, with Paul Roscoe).

Simon Johansson is an anthropologist affiliated with Stockholm University specializing in urban transformation and social inequality. He currently works with building evaluation capacity of the Swedish Agency of Defense Analysis. His dissertation, Comeback Detroit, examined the socio-economic shifts in Detroit as affluent residents “return” to revitalize the city, often displacing long-time marginalized communities. Johansson’s academic work critically engages with the circular economy, gentrification, and the socio-political dynamics of post-industrial urban spaces, offering insights into how economic and cultural narratives shape cities and communities.

Erika Kuever is an associate professor of Consumption, Culture, and Commerce in the Department of Business and Management at the University of Southern Denmark, and has a background in Anthropology and East Asian Studies. Her research centers primarily around the politics of consumption in contemporary

China, including consumer rights, food safety, and provisioning under the COVID-19 lockdown. Some of her additional research interests include economic anthropology, tourism, religion and marketing, and consumption for children.

Petra Kupinger teaches anthropology at Monmouth College. She has conducted research on space and power in Cairo, Egypt, and space, culture, and Islam in Stuttgart, Germany. Currently, she is researching sustainable projects, lifestyles, and urban cultures in Stuttgart. Her publications include Faithfully Urban: Pious Muslims in a German City (2015); Cities and Places (2023). She edited Emergent Spaces: Change and Innovation in Small Urban Spaces (2021). Her work has been published in City and Society, Culture and Religion, City and Community, Anthropological Quarterly, Social and Cultural Geography, Journal of Urban Affairs, Space and Culture, Built Environment, Geographical Review, GeoJournal.

Nicole Nathan is Faculty Director of Bachelor of General Studies at Temple University where she strives to make education more accessible, inclusive, and equitable for adult learners through adaptive pedagogy and expansive curricular development. Her research in cultural anthropology focuses on postcolonialism, religion, and tourism. Through a multi-sited approach to the study of transnationalism, her work seeks to delineate processes of globalization at local levels and centers marginalized voices. Her work on evangelical mission encounters highlights some of the problematic aspects of secondhand donations, including the ways in which charitable giving and consumerism form a mutually reinforcing system.

Samwel Moses Ntapanta is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark. He is an ethnographer of contemporary urbanism along the western Indian Ocean coast, focusing in particular on coloniality, consumption, and discarding, debris of late capitalism, repairing and recycling economies, and money. He is the author of Gathering Electronic Waste in Tanzania: Labor, Value, and Toxicity.

Henrietta K. Ransdell is a research fellow at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. She previously completed a Fulbright grant in Chachoengsao Thailand and is completing her master's in interdisciplinary studies—Sustainability in May 2024. Her research interests include environmental anthropology, community engagement, and education.

Angela D. Storey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville (KY, United States). With an emphasis on collaborative and engaged scholarship, her research explores the politics of urban environments and experiences of community-based activism. She currently coordinates long-term ethnographic projects in Cape Town, South Africa, and Louisville.

Petra Kuppinger

Fueled by overconsumption, inequalities in the neoliberal global economy, poverty, and concerns for the environment, recent decades have witnessed a robust continuation, revival, and growth of second-hand practices, markets, and cultures, and larger economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care. Across the world, there are expanding landscapes of thrift stores, used goods street markets, swapping events, yard sales, flea markets, and Internet platforms like eBay or Facebook marketplace. There are global circuits of used clothes and appliances. Used or discarded appliances are repaired and resold across the world. There are global cyber networks that connect experts who repair cell phones and other electronics. Repair Cafés extend the lifespan of electronics, appliances, and textiles. Share boxes or shelves dot urban sidewalks. There are for-free stores and cafés and food-saving and sharing projects and apps. Recycling, upcycling, repurposing,

P. Kuppinger (✉)

Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Monmouth College,
Monmouth, IL, USA

e-mail: petra@monm.edu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2025

P. Kuppinger (ed.), Second-Hand Cultures and Economies of Reuse,
Repair, Sharing, and Care,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-99875-1_1

and related practices that prolong the lifespan of objects are parts of everyday lives across the planet. Many of these practices have been robust elements of ordinary lifeworlds and cultures all along. Time-honored practices like fixing, mending, and creative reuse continue to play prominent roles in the lives of individuals and communities who engage in frugal, mindful, and resourceful practices that have been passed down to them. They stretch their resources and material possessions as much as possible because they have few other choices. Numerous individuals and communities make a living working with waste, and repairing, recycling, and upcycling things. People retrieve items and materials from waste streams. Simultaneously, practices of reuse, repair, sharing, and care are (re)discovered by younger generations or people who had previously considered them irrelevant or even a waste of time, because they were privileged enough to do so. These readopted practices are increasingly reaching the middle of wealthy (consumer) societies. Some have turned into profitable business ideas. Whether as the continuation of long-established practices, prompted by frugality, necessity, economic exclusion, long-held values and beliefs, or as practices fostered by environmental concerns, activities like second-hand markets, repair, repurposing, mending, or informal tool-sharing have proliferated in recent years. Guided by different motivations and necessities, people the world over buy and sell used goods, fix and resell appliances, or upcycle clothes and other materials for reuse. Some make art from cast-off objects or in creative ways recirculate the discards of others. The economic, social, and cultural circumstances and motivations for reuse, repair, sharing, and care differ vastly. Activities take endless shapes and are global in scope and impact. All help in their own small ways to reduce consumption, counter hyper-consumerism, challenge economic exclusion, and most importantly limit humanity's ecological footprint.

This book introduces people, spaces, and practices in this global landscape of second-hand cultures and economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care. Chapters explore how practitioners join, participate, and expand global economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care. People engage in daily work and routines that have always been sustainable like repairing household items, the sale of used items, or the creative reuse and repurposing of goods. They are mindful, creative, and careful in their use of material goods. Frugality and the abhorrence of waste are core values that guide long-established practices of recycling and reuse. Many individuals and communities are forced into second-hand economies, because they are excluded from dominant consumer economies and must buy used

goods. Recycling and repair work are ways to make a precarious living in a global capitalist economy that litters the planet with the discards of the privileged. The necessity to divert goods from landfills and incinerators often guides individuals, institutions, and municipalities. Their quests are rooted in the understanding that there is much life left in many tossed goods, and in ecological or political ideas. Some individuals seek the cultural “cool” of thrifted items. Others avoid consumerism and see minimalism as a chance to shed environmental burdens and individual costs of hyper-consumerism. They insist that used goods serve their needs just as well or even better than new ones. Others see resistance to consumerism as political protest and seek to vote with their money. Buying used items, they avoid the dominant capitalist market and join more sustainable and circular economies. Participation in second-hand economies becomes a political indicator, and thrifted items can signify environmental politics and consciousness. In the Global North, greed might have been “cool” in the 1980s, but green and sustainable practices are a new cool for those who are eager to learn practices from their elders or elsewhere to limit consumption of new goods, extend limited resources, decrease their carbon footprint, and live simpler and more mindful lives. Across the globe, economies of reuse are vital elements for those who remain committed to values of frugality or simply must make ends meet. Economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care are global in scope, but their expressions vary in different locations. Motivations to participate in these complex economies differ from involuntary to habitual, experimental, political, or activist. Diverse local and global second-hand circuits are interwoven.

This volume offers case studies of global second-hand cultures and economies and theorizes their complex interconnections. Much has been said about activities and projects in their specific context, but less work has been done to bring these examples into conversation with each other across the globe and across dividing lines between wealthy and less wealthy countries and lines of economic privilege, marginalization, and exclusion. Second-hand economies produce connections via the exchange of used goods, even if these lines remain invisible and are rarely acknowledged, and only occasionally problematized. This book juxtaposes case studies, activities, and projects and addresses questions about second-hand cultures from the diversion of consumer goods from landfills via municipal sharing websites, to the teaching of practices like avoiding single-use plastic on a farmers’ market, to discussions of the landscape of used tires in a megalopolis like Lagos. Authors address the problem of donated clothes

being forced onto recipients who do not need or want them and are often offended by these items, their quality, and this overall mode of “giving.” Authors address the material and spiritual quality of religious material items and how they are resold in physical markets or via the Internet. Authors ask crucial theoretical questions about the role and potential of small projects to initiate change and contribute to urban, national, and global political transformations.

Chapters explore activities in North America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean. Authors pay attention to the complexities of concrete social, cultural, and economic circumstances where activities unfold and the historical dynamics that shaped them. They describe processes of reuse, repair, sharing, and care and explore practitioners’ motivations. Based on ethnographic research, contributors describe details of practices and interactions in spaces and markets of reuse, repair, sharing, and care. They talk about the knowledge and skills involved in these practices. What values guide people’s actions? What do social spaces look like where economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care unfold? How do socialities in these spaces differ from those of the dominant capitalist economy? Authors inquire about differences between garage sales and brick and mortar thrift stores and their respective socialities. They discuss practices of reuse and recycling at a farmers’ market and how these practices affect interactions and (learning) experiences at the market. Can farmers’ markets encourage green practices beyond the sale of vegetables, and attempt to create more engaged, aware, and sustainable communities? What motivates women of different classes in India in their practices of reuse, repair, or recycling of saris? How do they rework or repurpose these fabrics? Contributors examine the intersection of the sacred and profane in the sale of second-hand religious items and explore the role of municipal sharing websites in diverting things from incinerators in Germany. They discuss why mothers in Denmark prefer the exchange and circulation of used children’s clothes to buying new items and analyze activities undertaken to expand the lifespan of car tires in Lagos. They explore how American university campuses that are overflowing with used microwaves, fridges, or desk lamps tackle issues of waste.

When authors examine practices of reuse, repair, sharing, and care, they do not lose sight of larger social, political, cultural, and economic contexts where these activities unfold. They analyze global economic and power dynamics that structure the trade in used appliances, like TV sets, between the UK and Tanzania. They show the environmental hazards of working

with used tires in urban Nigeria. They challenge the fashionable use of products made of “reclaimed wood” sourced from deserted homes in Detroit. Is this indeed an “admirable” sustainable practice or an act of greenwashing that unfolds on the backs of those evicted from the homes from which the wood was taken? Contributors question the ethics of donated clothes in the context of religious volunteer-tourism in the Dominican Republic. What is the point of forcing second-hand clothes on those who do not want them? Is reuse socially destructive in this context?

Theoretically, this volume contributes to debates about second-hand cultures and economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care that engage themes of environmental sustainability, inequality, poverty, degrowth, just transition, and social justice across the globe. Second-hand cultures and economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care are situated at complex intersections of necessary social and environmental transformations, applause, and recognition for worthwhile sustainable projects and activities, job opportunities, fields of dangerous labor, toxic exposure, and exploitative work relations. Few would debate the necessity of comprehensive economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care, but how can this be achieved without harm to and exploitation of those who do the work? Can individuals in Germany or Denmark celebrate their “sustainable” use of second-hand goods when these goods are the products of exploitative capitalist production in Bangladesh or Vietnam? Can sustainable activities be applauded when reused or recycled goods, even after their prolonged lifespan, still end up in landfills or workshops in the Global South to be dismantled under harmful conditions?

Analyzing “positive” examples of second-hand cultures and economies of reuse, repair, sharing, and care, it is crucial to recognize how they are situated in global economic and political regimes. Is a “sustainable” product the result of exploitative processes somewhere across the globe that are invisible to consumers? What is the end-of-life reality of a thrifted shirt or a thrice-repaired toaster? How are we to understand the export and repair of TVs from the UK to Tanzania from a material and an ethical perspective? Without doubt, repairing goods and using second-hand items are worthwhile activities; however, it is paramount to ask questions about their sourcing, production, circulation, materials, toxicity, and end-of-life scenarios to understand their position in global networks and impact on people, animals, and the environment.

In addition to questions about sourcing, manufacturing, and end-of-life, it is vital to analyze how effective individualized practices can be in the

face of a planetary crisis. Can individual actions and small-scale projects contribute to robust economic, social, and ecological change, and challenge capitalist hyper-consumption and ecological destruction? Can reusable coffee cups, repaired TVs, and thrifted jeans really make a difference?