Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how urban middle class dwellers, through practices of ”care”, negotiate their own implication in processes of value creation occurring when domestic objects and furniture are shifted from rural areas to become attractive retro or vintage items in the city.

Paper long abstract:

That things may increase in value simply by being shifted between social domains has long been known to social scientists (e.g. Appadurai 1986, Kopytoff 1986, Gregson & Crewe 2003). With the sharp rise in popularity of retro and vintage, this dynamics is increasingly tapped into by a growing range of Swedish small-scale retailers as well as ordinary city dwellers. Objects are obtained at low prices in the countryside, at rural flea markets and auctions, then sold as valuable commodities in urban vintage and retro shops, or displayed as collectables and status symbols in urban middle class homes. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with consumers of secondhand material culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, this paper explores how they negotiate their own implication in such processes. While expressing disdain at the exploitative practices of retailers, they negotiate feelings of desire and guilt as they, too, take advantage of the economic gain made possible by differences in knowledge and cultural capital associated with place, class and geographical mobility. The paper suggests that expressing care and love for objects, and to shop "with feeling", in contrast to "soulless" transactions of a merely economic nature, becomes a strategy to handle such dilemmas, and to navigate through the affective and moral force field in which old things become valuable assets.