Exploring space and place in marketing research: Excavating the garage

Based on an ethnographic study of American garages, we develop a model of the roles that liminal spaces perform in the management of possessions and their meanings. We find that the garage serves as a transitional space that links the useful and useless, female and male, clean and dirty, sacred and profane, and past, present, and future. We also propose that the garage can be a de facto museum and prosthetic memory device, as well as a link across generations of the family. Based on these findings, we offer a model of liminal household spaces and their dynamic role in making and managing meanings of everyday life.