Affiliation:
1. Queen’s University at Kingston
Abstract
Focusing on the phenomenon of the garage sale and the
cultural meaning of this type of consumer behaviour, the
argument is made in a semiotic framework that the meaning
of an object, what it ’signs’, is conditioned by the mode
of organization in which it is located. The garage sale itself
represents part of the System of redistribution of consumer
goods within the hidden economy, but more importantly,
like the items themselves, the sales represent a new way of
constituting meaning and identity which differe considerably
from the usual patterns of consumerism found in
modem capitalism.
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