(What’s) Left of the Commodity: Archaeology and the Creative Resuscitation of Spent Goods
Author(s): Justin E. Uehlein
Year: 2018
Summary
Hobo jungles and other transient laborer and homelessness related sites present a sustained material critique of Capitalism. These kinds of sites provide insight into the creative strategies people employ to circumvent commodity markets when capital is not available. Whether residual evidence of an intentional statement against an oppressive system, or of a means to persist in the most desperate of situations, the assemblages left behind by people who reside on the fringes of capital display both the inherent abuses of that system, as well as the imaginative ways that people navigate, resist, and circumvent it. This paper draws on archival and archaeological data from a former hobo jungles site near Delta, Pennsylvania and asks two questions: how, if at all, did hobos manipulate junked commodities to better suit their needs? And, if they did, do these materials present a new productive schematic or are they simply an extension of capitalism?
Cite this Record
(What’s) Left of the Commodity: Archaeology and the Creative Resuscitation of Spent Goods. Justin E. Uehlein. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441359)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
commodities
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Labor
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transience
Geographic Keywords
North America
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United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1880-1950
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 469