Tales of the Unexpected: Exploring Car Boot Sales as Marginal Spaces of Contemporary Consumption

Marginal and/or resistant consumption practices have been neglected in current geographical debates on consumption and retailing. This has resulted in partial and skewed theorizations of exchange within contemporary consumption. Consumption spaces such as car boot sales represent sites in which the conventions of the marketplace are suspended or abandoned, and replaced by forms of sourcing, commodity circulation, transaction codes, pricing mechanisms and value quite different from those which typify more conventional retail malls and department stores. Drawing on the anthropological literature on traditional and peasant markets, we argue that exchange within the car boot sale is socially, culturally and geographically embedded and we emphasize the intrinsic importance of fun and sociality to such activities. Marginal spaces such as the car boot sale offer both some important clues into the potential for rethinking marketplace dynamics, notably with respect to our understandings of value, and some intriguing possibilities for consumer politics.     

Morality and the Concept of the Market Seller among Gehamo

This paper examines the negative moral evaluations of people who buy and resell fresh food by Gahuku and Gehamo people in and around Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. During my fieldwork from 2010 to 2015, vendors in the Goroka fresh food market argued that the value of fresh food should be based on the work that people did to produce it rather than on price competition, or on supply and demand. An examination of market vendors’ practice of ‘giving extra’ to customers, and the responses of vendors who resold food to negative moral evaluations of their activities, led me to an examination of the morality of production in relation to land, ancestors, and social relations; the morality of the marketplace; as well as ideas about what makes someone a good social person. Drawing on Erik Schwimmer's (1979) discussion of the concept of work in Melanesian societies, I argue that vendors in the Goroka market continue to emphasize use value and their own identification with the food that they are selling rather than the exchange value of alienated produce. While marketplaces are the apparent locus par excellence of capitalist economic activity, a consideration of the morality of Goroka market vendors leads to the caution that just because one sees something that looks like a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions does not necessarily mean that it is a marketplace in which people are engaging in commodity transactions. Similarly, just because something looks like a price does not necessarily mean that it is a price. Those considerations, in turn, lead to a re‐examination of Kenneth Read's (1955) characterization of morality and personhood among Gahuku in light of contemporary market exchange.     

The Subsumption of Space and the Spatiality of Subsumption: Primitive Accumulation and the Transition to Capitalism in Shanghai,China

Abstract: Based on extensive interviews, this study is the first systematic attempt to map the spatio‐temporal evolution of production networks linking urban, state‐owned enterprises and rural, township and village‐owned enterprises in reform‐era China. It identifies two distinct regimes of urban‐to‐rural subcontracting patterns and conventions. The first, which developed and prospered from the mid‐1980s until the mid‐1990s, brought rural workers and the countryside into a relatively extensive relationship with urban capital, and thus represented a partial transition to capitalism. Its violent reconfiguration in the wake of a series of sectoral crises in the late 1990s led to the widespread privatisation of rural enterprises, and the emergence and consolidation of a second regime that simultaneously constituted a significant intensification of relations, the capture of the rural by the urban, and a new stage in this region's transition. This paper argues that these regimes are analogous to the formal and real subsumption of labor to capital, respectively, and that subsumption may be a more useful analytic for understanding the process of capture and transition than primitive accumulation: the latter concept alone, without reference to the dynamics of the social/spatial division of labor, risks missing other ways that exploitive connections can be constructed between places. This paper thus seeks to recast the relationship between these two concepts, and to develop a larger vocabulary in which subsumption, like primitive accumulation, is both spatial and ongoing and internal to capitalist accumulation.     

Packaging of Identity and Identifiable Packages: A study of women–commodity negotiation through product packaging

In the age of post-Fordist flexible production, a consumer realizes her/his identity in part through the act of consumption. The visual aspect of commodity–consumer negotiation acquires importance, as commodities must be visually differentiated to attract the gaze of a particular consuming group. The act of visual differentiation is achieved through symbolic packaging, which creates a cognitive link between commodity and consumer. I draw from Baudrillard, who states that in postmodern consumption the sign value of products becomes more important than their actual usefulness (use value). Baudrillard, however, overlooks the importance of gender, race and space in this visual mediation. Through an empirical study of the packaging of women's skin and hair products in two different stores catering to two different income groups in Worcester, Massachusetts, I indicate how gendered identities that are created are complex, porous and materially rooted in space. The geographic situatedness of the exercise checks overgeneralizations allowing it to be studied as an object–subject mediation in a particular spatial context.     

试述汉代官营手工业中的商品生产

汉代官营手工业主要是统治为满足自身需要而组织的生产形式,由于商品经济的影响,官营手工业也部分从事商品性生产。两汉官营手工业中的商品性生产,是商品生产的一种畸形化,严重阻碍了商品经济的发展。     

农村土地流转的空间差异及成因分析——以陕西关中三县为例

以西安市长安区、渭南市澄城县、宝鸡市岐山县为考察点,采用问卷调查法和SPSS软件对三县土地流转现状进行实证分析,以查明不同区域土地流转差异情况和造成土地流转差异的影响因素。结果表明,由于经济发展水平不同,三县区土地流转达成比例相差较大,流转规模、流转方式有很大不同,流转价格更是有较大差别,经济发达地区有较强的土地"非粮化"现象,土地流转更接近市场行为。非农收入水平、农户的受教育程度、各类土地流转中介和管理机构的完善程度、农户的社会保障程度等对土地流转有显著影响,且影响方式均为正向,并且对流出率的影响超过对流入率的影响。     

What Objects Know: Circulation,Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives

Modern self-possessing subjects must learn how to alienate parts of themselves economically – their labour, ideas, recorded voices, photographed faces – without alienating themselves psychologically. Victorian it-narratives provide object lessons for such subjects: they tell the stories of their owners, suggesting that inalienability need only be imagined – in the shape of talking umbrellas, feathers, and needles – to be effective. Object narrators also enact a form of omniscience unavailable to human narrators. Rather than traversing the consciousness of characters, they more ‘realistically’ simply over-hear the innermost thoughts of their owners. They circulate among a much wider range of subjects than do the narrators of mainstream fiction. Royals, gypsies, aristocrats, thieves, actors, and shopkeepers are witnessed intimately and accurately by their possessions. Their circulation is comic: they knit the social world together in collecting the stories of their disparate owners. They suggest that the subjects who are most like objects in Victorian Britain and its empire (women, the colonized, slaves, children, the poor) have a specific power: a certain omniscience, and therefore the power to confer, contain and preserve inalienability. Silas Wegg, of Our Mutual Friend, has suffered radical dispossession – his leg belongs to someone else. He is the modern subject par excellence, resolutely optimistic about the inalienability of his leg, which he refers to as ‘I’. Wegg, like the object narrators this essay discusses, suggests to us the necessary porousness of the subject–object boundary given the self-possession of liberal individuals. That boundary has become more porous since the Victorian period: we now alienate our DNA, organs and infants. It is the disavowal of this permeability that marks the great divide between then and now.     

‘What remains? An empty doll-case’: Deconstruction and Imagination in Victorian Narratives of Doll Production

Increasing interest in the Victorians' relationships with the material world has led many critics to turn to periodical publications and, in particular, to process articles and other forms of industrial writing as sources for new insight. This article contributes to this growing body of scholarship by examining narratives of doll production. Because dolls are objects that Victorians celebrated for their imaginative potential and that were often not intended to be treated as ordinary commodities, such narratives can shed light on the intricate relationships between materiality and the imagination. In revealing the process of production, these narratives deconstruct dolls, reducing them to a collection of material parts. By some accounts, these parts are brought to life through a specialized process of manufacture that dehumanizes the workers who make them and robs them of their imaginative agency. While this deconstructive exploration can be seen as an extension of the ‘melancholy and gloom’ that Baudelaire describes as the result of children's destructive compulsion to see the insides of their toys, it could also generate new imaginative possibilities. By inviting readers to behold commodities in a state of transformation, I argue, narratives of doll production demand a more imaginative attitude towards commodities as objects shaped by their material histories.