This thesis examines how value is produced, negotiated, and experienced among buyers, sellers, and objects within secondhand economies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across flea markets, antique warehouses, thrift stores, and digital resale platforms, it argues that value in secondhand economies is not an intrinsic property of objects but a relational component, produced through the interplay of affect, narration, perceived effort, labor, and social relations. Standard economic frameworks, including Marx's labor theory of value, cannot account for what happens in the charged moment of encounter between a person and a thing, an experience that is social, affective, and structured by histories the object itself cannot speak. By attending to vendors and buyers, as well as the biographies of objects that are given or withheld, I argue that these informal economies of already-used items constitute intricate social worlds. They are governed by overlapping logics of affect, fetishization, culture, and racial capitalism. Positioned as both participant and analyst, I treat my own history in these spaces as affective training, a slow accumulation of embodied knowledge that is itself ethnographic data.
Ultimately, the thesis demonstrates that value in these economies emerges not from price or production alone, but from the social and affective encounters through which objects acquire meaning in motion.