Material Culture Today

Cultural Commodities

A material culture approach can focus, for example, on what Will Straw calls the “spectacles of waste” of secondhand culture, which allows a view of the commodity cycle beyond the traditional two-step definition of purchase and disposal. Cultural commodities, in particular, tend to move toward sites of accumulation, whether in private collections, auctions, or secondhand stores, and they are thus exemplary illustrations of the possibility of recursive stages of possession, discard, and reuse. The circulation of secondhand culture—hand-me-downs, vintage clothing, used books and compact discs, antiques and ephemera at auction—encapsulates how meaning and value are negotiated and redefined through practices beyond acts of simple possession. Consider a brief, idealized history of one such specific but mundane object, a T-shirt.

It is 1982, and a teenage boy is attending his first heavy metal rock concert with friends. His parents do not approve, but he has just begun his first summer job and can purchase the ticket himself. At the merchandize display, he buys one of the band's souvenir T-shirts showing the most recent album cover on its front, listing all the stops on the tour on its back. Pleased and proud with this memento, the teenager thinks little of how this T-shirt was produced, the labor that went into it, the journey it had to take from factory to wholesaler to concert venue. Over the next months, he wears the shirt often and gladly tells about attending the concert when strangers start conversations by asking about the T-shirt. The next year he gives the T-shirt to his first girlfriend as a sign of his undying love for her. Although she appreciates the symbolism, by the time she goes to college they have split up and the defunct band is now considered juvenile among her college friends. She still wants the keepsake, but puts it at the back of her closet. Years pass before her parents decide to give all her remaining youthful things to the local charity shop, where the T-shirt ends up in a bulk-purchase bin amid a pile of similarly storied clothes. Enough years have passed that nostalgia for the music of the rock band has emerged. A young entrepreneur buys the T-shirt and a dozen others to sell at a premium at a vintage clothing shop, where the entrepreneur promotes used clothing in relation to environmentalism and awareness of overseas sweatshop labor. The T-shirt is washed and put out for sale, catching the attention of a young skateboarder, who wears it with hipster irony for a few months. The skateboarder is surprised to have more than one ageing metal fan point to the T-shirt and express continued fandom. He auctions the T-shirt online and mails it to the highest bidder in another county. The online buyer is so much an enthusiast of the band and values the rare collectible item so much that the buyer puts the T-shirt in a frame and mounts it on a wall as part of a display of the history of the band.

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