Abstract
My dissertation research investigates how the re-commoditization of second-hand everyday objects at Viennese pawn and auction houses has affected the local reproduction of social, political and economic power relations since 1945. In Austria, pawnbroking and auctioning are uniquely tied together because Austrian legislation stipulates the public sale of unredeemed pledges, such as computer game consoles, gold jewelry and small pieces of furniture. This legal condition highlights the need to understand the social uses of ‘credit’ and ‘things’ in connected terms. Informed by recent advances in historical and anthropological scholarship of design, I have conducted an empirically-grounded theoretical inquiry into ‘(un)doing value’ around auctions of second-hand objects — ranging from ‘modern design’ offered at specialist art auctions to the ‘ordinary provisions’ encountered at foreclosure sales. This geographically situated, micrological approach seeks to enhance our understanding of the social politics of taste that connect these spheres of exchange yet lead to strikingly different fates in particular urban marketplaces.1
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References
My research is carried out in accordance with British design historian Judy Attfield’s viewpoint of ‘design’ as a’ social practice of modernity’ that may be investigated through a set of micrological research methodologies exemplified in her pioneering book Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000).
To a certain degree my use of a slash to divide and at the same time connect the terms ‘aesthetics’ and ‘functionality,’’ style’ and ‘technology’ or ‘utility’ conflates two distinct modes of object valuation. However, in actuality informants tend to address both the aesthetic merit of an object and its functionality, whereby both must be evaluated together and at times weighed against each other to arrive at a sound appraisal. I use ‘aesthetics’ and’ style’ as well as ‘functionality,’ ‘technology’ and ‘utility’ interchangeably. See Daniel Miller, “The Uses of Value,” in Geoforum 39 (2008): 1122–1132.
The Dorotheum’s Founding Charter specifies regulations that are designed to offer a “fair” alternative to the usurious interests of private pawnbrokers and auctioneers. See also Beverly Lemire, “Peddling Fashion: Salesmen, Pawnbrokers, Taylors, Thieves and the Second-hand Clothes Trade in England, c. 1700–1800,” in Textile History 22,1 (1991): 67–82.
For literature on the history of auctions see Jack Hinton, “By Sale, By Gift: Aspects of the Resale and Bequest of Goods in Late-Sixteenth-Century Venice”, in: Journal of Design History 15,4 (2002): 245–263; Haidy Geismar, “What’s in a Price?: An Ethnography of Tribal Art at Auction,” in Journal of Material Culture 6, 1 (2003): 25–47. For literature on the history of pawnbroking see Karl Christian Führer, “Pawning in German Working-Class Life before the First World War,” in International Review of Social History 29 (2001): 29; John P. Caskey, “Pawnbroking in America: The Economics of a Forgotten Credit Market,” in Journal of Money, Credit & Banking 1 (1991): 85; Simon M. Fass, and Janice Francis, “Where Have all the Hot Goods Gone? The Role of Pawnshops,” in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 41, 156 (2004): 156–179.
Stefan August Lütgenau, Alexander Schröck and Sonja Niederacher, Zwischen Staat und Wirtschaft: Das Dorotheum im Nationalsozialismus (Wien: Oldenbourg, 2006).
Oberösterreichische Akademie für Umwelt und Natur beim Amt der Oberösterreichischen Landesregierung, „Von den Dingen die wir brauchen-Konsumieren mit Zukunft. Heft 2: Projektideen, Diskussionsbeiträge und Tipps für den Unterricht,“ 3rd edition 2006 (Linz: Oö. Akademie für Umwelt und Natur, 2004), 1.
As opposed to another multi-branch pawn house that was taken over by the Dorotheum, Wagner & Berger was considered too insignificant and remained an independent enterprise. See Lütgenau et al., Zwischen Staat und Wirtschaft. In 2008, approximately fifteen other pawnbrokers were active in Vienna. Most of these private businesses dealt in gold and jewelry, cars, antiques or a combination of these product categories.
Many women collected sartorial pledges as an additional source of income. A widow might use her financial resources and her mending skills to run a business from home. Madeleine Ginsburg, “Rags to Riches: The Second-Hand Clothing Trade 1700–1978,” in Costume (1987): 121–135; Marie Francois, “Cloth and Silver: Pawning and Material Life in Mexico City at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century,” The Americas 3 (2004): 325–362; Elizabeth Sanderson, “Nearly New: The Second-hand Clothing Trade in 18th Century Edinburgh,” in Costume (1997): 38–48; Beverly Lemire,” Peddling Fashion: Salesmen, Pawnbrokers, Taylors, Thieves and the Second-hand Clothes Trade in England, c. 1700–1800,” in Textile History 1 (1991): 67–82; Miles Lambert, “‘Cast-off Wearing Appareil:’ The Consumption and Distribution of Second-hand Clothing in Northern England during the Long 18th Century,” in Textile History 35 (2004): 1–26. See also Peter Stallybrass, “Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, edited by Patricia Spyer (New York: Routledge, 1998), 183–208.
See Karen Tranberg Hansen, “Other People’s Clothes? The International Second-hand Clothing Trade and Dress Practices in Zambia,” in Fashion Theory 3 (2000): 245–274; Niko Besnier, “Consumption and Cosmopolitanism: Practicing Modernity at the Second-Hand Marketplace in Nuku’alofa, Tonga,” in Anthropological Quarterly 1 (2004): 7–45; Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, ed., Second-Hand Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Nicky Gregson, Kate Brooks and Louise Crewe, “Narratives of Consumption and the Body in the Space of the Charity/Shop,” in Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces, edited by Peter Jackson (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 101–121; Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, “Performance and Possession: Rethinking the Act of Purchase in the Light of the Car Boot Sale,” in Journal of Material Culture 2, 7 (1997): 241–263.
Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–64; Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process”, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See also Miller, “The Uses of Value:” 1122–1132.
Lucy Norris, “Shedding Skins: The Materiality of Divestment in India,” in Journal of Material Culture 9, 1 (2004): 59–72; Gavin Lucas, “Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century,” in Journal of Material Culture 7, 1 (2002): 5–22; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Owl Books, 2000)
Annette B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xi. Weiner re-examines Marcel Mauss’ The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by Ian Cunnison, with an introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Glencoe: Free Press, 1954), based on his fieldwork in Samoa, and Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnographic studies on the Polynesian Trobriand Islanders in Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1961).
Weiner recognizes a close connection between the degree of power shared by women in a society through the ritual production and exchange of cloth wealth and the level of this society’s formulation of political structures, i.e. the formation of hereditary rule. See also Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, ed., Cloth and Human Experience (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).
Daniel Miller, A Theory of Shopping (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 132; Alison Clarke, “Mother Swapping: The Trafficking of Nearly New Children’s Wear,” in Peter Jackson, ed., Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices, Spaces, (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 85–100.
See for example Jonathan M Woodham, Twentieth-Century Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); Bernhard E. Bürdek, Design: Geschichte, Theorie und Praxis der Produktgestaltung (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2005).
Lynn Frances Schibeci, The London Auction Market and the Commodification of English Taste, 1766–1823 (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1999).
Christopher Mason, The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004); Brian Learmont, A History of the Auction (London: Butler & Tanner Ltd, 1985); Frank Hermann, Sotheby’s: Portrait of an Auction House (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981); Charles Hamilton, Auction Madness: An Uncensored Look Behind the Velvet Drapes of the Great Auction Houses (New York: Everest House, 1981); James Brough, Auction! (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1963).
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Grünewald, M. (2010). Inalienable Possessions of a Different Sort. In: Bast, G., Bettel, F., Hollendonner, B. (eds) UNI*VERS. Edition Angewandte. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99285-2_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-99285-2_10
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