Object Re-use (Other Keyword)

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Making Do Outside a Consumer Culture: Pragmatics and Creativity in a Great Depression-era Gold Mining Camp in Northern Nevada, USA (2013)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin T Barna.

This paper takes re-used mundane objects from a gold mining camp occupied in the 1930s as an entry point for commentary on the so-called "creativity crisis" in contemporary American (and Western) society. Since the late nineteenth century, marketing and social conditioning have been used to teach people that particular consumer goods are intended for specific uses, and these mental categories structure people’s interactions with them. The ability to conceive of unfamiliar uses for...