Reflections on the Cultures of the New and the Second Hand in Italy

This paper focuses on material culture in its twofold role as a synthesis of the relationship between the individual and the market and as a space of social mediation, thus suggesting that we could consider the ‘culture of the new’ and the ‘culture of the used’ as two different ways of interpreting the symbolic meaning of material culture. The use of ‘spheres of consumption’ and ‘spheres of social communication’ (Secondulfo, 2002) will enable us to analyse the relationship with “the world of things”, considering the different value goods and objects acquire when circulating inside relational structures. The concept of New, like the concept of Used, is a form of consumption that goes beyond the material value of the goods, analysing their symbolic dimension. The dichotomy between New/Used is investigated in order to highlight the different cultural characteristics of the two forms of consumption, even though it is clear that in consumer society the cultural line that separates new goods from used goods is blurred. As every object tells the story of its production and of the consumers who have used it over time, the purpose of this essay is to offer a basic analysis of the fragments of material culture that, like remnants of past civilizations, paint a picture of daily life in our time.