Estate_Sales

=Estate Sales as Cultural Practice=

Let's use this space to explore the meanings of estate sales, and to share resources about this social and economic practice.

Questions to be discussed might include:
 * Under what circumstances do people hold estate sales on their own, and when do they contract them out to third parties?
 * To what extent are buyers at estate sales conscious of engaging with traces of the dead and with the dividing up, as it were, of a dead person's biography? How do sellers allude to, or deflect attention from, the facts of a recent death?
 * To what extent, as Ruby et al argue in their 1984 film, "//A Country Auction: The Paul V. Lettzel Estate Sale"//, may estate sales be understood as symbolic arenas through which the living say goodbye to the dead?

Resources

 * Stacy Rowe's review of the ethnographic documentary "A County Auction: //A Country Auction: The Paul V. Lettzel Estate Sale"// (1984) [|Download PDF]
 * [|Bibliography on Auctions and Estate Sales (A Country Auction Revisited)]
 * [|A Country Auction Revisited: An Ethnographic Documentary] (website)
 * Dona Schwartz, Visual Ethnography: Using photography in qualitiative research. //Qualitiative Sociology.// 12(2 June 1989. ( contains reference to a rural estate sale)
 * Cherry K. Emerson website (an applied cultural anthropologist who, among other things, organizes estate sales)