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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research in low-end antique markets, this paper examines how objects are reconfigured through material, narrative, and infrastructural care, showing how ethics of circularity emerge in practice through everyday care relationships.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how ethics of circularity are enacted and negotiated within low-end antique markets, drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and 19 interviews with dealers in Brussels, Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, and London. Focusing on objects deemed broken, obsolete, or of marginal value, the paper conceptualises abandonment as an in-between condition through which materials reconfigure. Rather than approaching circularity as a techno-economic solution to waste, I discuss how the market assemblage of human and non-human actors generates three distinct regimes of care through which objects’ temporal lives are reshaped and extended: material, narrative, and infrastructural care. Material care consists of selective repair that secures ongoing viability. Narrative care preserves and reinterprets fragmentary biographies, enabling micro-histories to circulate and fostering new imaginative futures. Infrastructural care involves maintaining the relational and organisational systems—routines, display arrangements, and expert networks—that render objects legible and mobile. Together, these practices reveal an ambivalent ethics of circularity, where care emerges not as a stable moral orientation but as a negotiated process shaped by interactions of a heterogeneous constellation of actants. In this sense, low-end antiques function as what DeSilvey (2017) terms “material provocations,” exposing how circularity is locally reworked through contingent relations between humans and nonhumans. By foregrounding the processes of reconstitution after abandonment in the second-hand market for low-end antiques, the paper shows how ethics of circularity are produced in practice through everyday care relationships.