Sharing suits and letters
Redressing late-capitalist precarity in South Korea
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2254448 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olga Fedorenko (0000-0002-1789-187X, Seoul National University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 436-456 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1359-0987 • E-ISSN: 1467-9655 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9655.14061 |
| OpenAlex | W4388869499 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 35 |
The contemporary sharing economy comprises a variety of technology-mediated user-to-user transactions and reveals both the extremes of the late-capitalist regime of accumulation and possible paths to supersede it. To critically explore the idea of the sharing economy, this article examines how it has been mobilized by a non-profit startup in neoliberalized South Korea. Open Closet cheaply rents donated suits to precarious job-seekers for interviews, while requesting that donors and renters write each other letters with their 'suit stories'. The article tracks how sharing at Open Closet is realized via circulations of suits, letters, and 'warm hearts', and how its meanings and obligations are interpreted via the historical relations of mutual responsibility within local collectivities of belonging. The article thus illuminates new imaginaries for livelihoods, subjecthoods, and solidarities that emerge when the contemporary sharing economy ambiguates capitalist and non-capitalist relations, becoming a site for experimentation with affectivity and mutuality among strangers
Closet · Cyberspace · Economic rent · Economics · Economy · Livelihood · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Precarity · Sharing economy · Sociology · The Internet · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · History · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Sharing Economy and Platforms
Cloth and Clothing
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
True Traces
The Social Life of Things
Introduction
Global Futures in East Asia
Literacy, Emotion and Authority
Precarious Japan
Do They Mean What They Act? Surveillance, Theatricality, and Mind-Heart among North Koreans
The Spec Generation Who Can't Say “No”
Precarious Seoul
Songs of Seoul
Inalienable Possessions
Sharing Nicely
Social Media Ethnography
Life encapsulated
Cruel Optimism
What Matters
The Mushroom at the End of the World
Love's Labor Paid for
Ambiguating Agency
It is value that brings universes into being
Sorting out commodities
The Cool Brand, Affective Activism and Japanese Youth
On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy
Economies of affect
Affective spaces, melancholic objects
When gifts become commodities
A groundwork for West Indian cultural openness
The alienating inalienable
The digitalia of everyday life
Gifting, Dam(n)ing and the Ambiguation of Development in Malaysian Borneo
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |