Consuming the abandoned past: discovering, imagining and documenting traces

Consumer researchers have explored cherished, ancestral and mythologized pasts. We focus on the abandoned past and develop our insights from an ethnography of the urban exploration subculture. Enabled by Ingoldian thinking, we illustrate how consumers assemble a multi-temporal meshwork that involves knotting traces of an abandoned past with traces of the present. We theorize that this knotting involves three consumer interventions; discovering, imagining and documenting traces. This creates re-eruptions from the past that enable consumers to find that which has been forgotten, to make present that which is absent and to make visible that which is invisible.